Montreal Trip: Day 2

First off, a Happy New Year to everyone!

Day 2 of our Montreal trip began with breakfast at Ben and Florentine.  It's like a Cora's (which was in our hotel) but I would say slightly better.  M1 got the eggs benedict with avocado, M2 got a chocolate banana crepe, and M3 got a smoothie bowl with poached eggs, guacamole, and cheese.  I pretended to be M3 and ordered a standard sausage and egg meal off the kids' menu.

After breakfast, we bought a 3-day transit pass and took the subway (or Metro as they call it in Montreal) to see the Van Gogh exhibit, which was booked by M1.  We stayed in downtown Montreal, just off of Rue Sainte-Catherine, so I felt it was better to take the transit rather than drive.  The roads were slushy and there were a lot of pedestrians walking around.  Also, I'm terrible with directions, even with Google Maps.

I don't know the first thing about art but again, as YC said - no pre-conceived notions.  I thought the Van Gogh exhibits had very pleasing colour co-ordination, which apparently is one of the characteristics of Van Gogh's work that he did very well.  The highlight for the girls was a kid spinning on a revolving chair, despite his mother telling him to stop.  When he fell off the chair, the girls had a good laugh.

After the exhibit, we walked around a nearby mall.  There were some puzzles I liked but I didn't buy them because I didn't want to carry them around.  We took the Metro again to Eaton Centre and walked around there.  All this was to kill some time before our 5:00 dinner reservation at a fine dining Italian restaurant.  This was going to be our nice fancy meal.  M1 got mushroom gnocchi, M2 got smoked meat risotto, M3 got a mortadella pizza, and I got a 5-meat pasta.  The portions were small but everything tasted delicious.  M1 had given several restaurant choices to us and I chose this one because I wanted to try their fried calamari, shrimp, and scallop appetizer.  It was also amazing!  (Reminded me of Basket B - subject of a future blog.)

Strangely there was no dessert menu, so we went back to the Eaton Centre for some gelato.  Then we took the Metro again to our marquee event - Cirque du Soleil: Corteo.  This was an awesome show with amazing acrobatic feats.  The only drawback was that most of the story was in French and we had trouble understanding some of the dialogue, but we got the gist of it.  I first watched a Cirque du Soleil show in Las Vegas with YC over 20 years ago.  I really liked it and now M2 is a big fan too (Also the subject of a future blog).  We watched the Kurios show in Toronto earlier in the year.

The Corteo show was at the Bell Centre, which was just a 5 minute walk back to our hotel.  Day 2 of our trip was a great day!

Big Oh