Montreal Day 8

Cloudy and humid; CNN reported a hurricane warning for Maine, and the weather report forecasted rain for the weekend. While the mall was beckoning me to return (at this point I think I’ve seen about half of the shops in that area), there was an outdoor photo exhibit and some sights that I didn’t want to miss.

After only a banana and a cup of tea in the hotel room, I took the subway out to the Olympic park that was built for the 1976 Olympic Games. The Stadium was famous for having the world’s highest non-vertical tower. It certainly was distinctive looking, but it really didn’t do much for me. One could pay to ride up to the top of the tower, but since I’d already seen the view from the top of Mount Royal on a much prettier day, I abstained. Instead I walked over to the botanical gardens where they had a photo exhibit called “Alive” put on by Yann Arthus-Bertrand (the same person who did the exhibit “The Earth from Above” that I had the good fortune of seeing in Copenhagen several years ago). Alive was a collection of pictures by the world’s leading nature photographers (including Frans Lanting, Thomas Mangelson, and Mitsuaki Iwago) and a bunch of factoids about how we’ve screwed up the planet. I found the text a bit irritating, but there was one quote that I really liked: “The Condors must be saved, not so much because we need them, but because we need the human resources that can save them. Those are the same resources we will need when we shall save ourselves…” by Ian McMillan in 1870. As expected, the photographs were magnificent and inspiring, but I got the impression that I’d seen many of the pictures before. I think I liked Earth from Above better.

I decided not to pay the $16 to go into the rest of the botanical gardens since the café was closed and I was getting hungry. I considered going to see an exhibit on Madagascar (featuring lemurs) at a place called Biodome (part of the Olympic area), and while I’m quite fond of lemurs, I decided to save this indoor exhibit for the weekend in case the weather was bad. Instead I hopped the subway back to the Latin Quarter for a pastry for lunch. This time I chose a baseball sized sphere which turned out to be a crispy dark chocolate coating over a ball of rum flavored dough. It was so rich I could only eat half of it.

From there I took the subway out to see the Biosphere. This is a giant geodesic dome built for the World’s fair 1967 to demonstrate Buckminster Fuller’s dream of having entire cities contained inside such domes. While undergoing some maintenance welding in 1976, the acrylic panels on the outside of the dome caught fire, and the entire shell burned off in just 15 minutes. Since it burned so quickly, the metal framework was not damaged, and it is that which remains today. Inside the dome is a museum dedicated to the environment. Outside the museum I was pleased to discover a photo exhibit called “Walking on Thin Ice” about the arctic. While I didn’t recognize the names of the photographers, I found it more interesting than the exhibit I’d seen earlier in the day.

My husband had asked me to try to find him new shoelaces, so I took the subway an extra stop beyond the hotel to a “normal” neighborhood. Here I was pleased to find a drugstore almost immediately where I could complete my mission. I also found a lively street with interesting shops and houses as I walked back to the hotel.

For dinner I was with an even larger group of guys from two leading companies in the cell phone industry. While much of the conversation was over my head, I am learning a lot about what my husband does. We ate dinner at a tapas restaurant. I’d never had tapas before, at least not by that name. It was a meal of ten different appetizers, some rather ordinary like guacamole and tortilla chips, others more interesting like fried Greek cheese. I was too stuffed for dessert, so I went back to the hotel when most of the guys went out for drinks to celebrate the end of a rather productive conference. We still had another day and a half in town, but I wanted to pack as much as possible so that I knew how much space was left in the suitcases.