canada 2024 trip
aren't weddings a waste of PTO?
because my work schedule is thursday-saturday and every other wednesday basically every wedding i have i need to take a day off work. and thats fine, whatever. its life. but having to go to toronto for a wedding, and also needing to be there for rehearsal because it's nicks brothers wedding, taking these 3 or 4 days off means i end up having 10 days off. and if i have 10 days off, i'm going to make the most of it. so i decided to go to montreal. and nathan, sean and connor met us in montreal. its only a 4? hr drive from boston. they stayed at a hotel and i found some airbnb in mont royal. great location. and we were only like a 6 minute walk from the mont-royal metro station.
i realized i barely took photos this trip, most of which i hate but i'm just going to ignore that. a lot at a wedding and with nicks family, but thats kind of weird to post a pic of someones grandma on the internet you know??
all i wanted from montreal is to see my friends and to eat poutine. i will never understand why poutine is not popular in america?? americans would love it. i make it at home, but i have a hard time finding curds. but i also want to eat the fucked up poutine and not just the classic of fries, gravy and curds.
we went the first week of june. when talking with basically everyone i know in toronto that nick and i were going to montreal before toronto the attitude was like "lol, good luck". they made it seem like they would just beat us with a big stick. although nick did have to bust out his canadian school mandated french and started almost every interaction with "je ne parle pas francais" (?) which i think influenced most of the conversations to be positive.
we did go this cafe, and because she spoke japanese i just replied in japanese when she spoke french, because that seemed like the easier option. not to be a dumb american, but i'm still surprised at the amount of french in quebec. shhh. i know. don't say anything.
i looked and this cafe location is permanently closed. i wanted to go here because they have hojicha. i have been a hojicha lover for years and once paid like $18 for 2 oz of houjicha powder instead of just tea leaves... crazy work
philippines erasure. i thought this only happened to new zealand
but i surprisingly loved montreal. we were there for 4? days.
however montreal food rating was all over the place, everything is a 4/5 stars and while the food is good, i think we think of stars differently. i do think theres a difference of a city being fun when you're with friends vs fun alone. i think i could have fun in montreal alone.
we were obsessed with whatever critter this was.
first off, i need to preface this by saying i am not used to humidity. i love californias dry ass summer. i love immediately cooling off because i'm covered by shade. i am weak and fragile in humidity and i think it was visible to nick how much i felt like i was dying. i did not want to be outside. i'm really stopping myself from posting just cafe pics because i needed air conditioning.
and second, the metro in montreal is great. the train was hella big and stupidly air conditioned, and fast fast.
what did we even do besides hang out? i don't think we had a single plan. i remember we hung out at my airbnb and watched some streamer.
lows of montreal: worst part of montreal was our self inflicted choice to walk to tate + yoko in the heat... we did an uber on the way back though. also my fault, but we went to drawn & quarterly. nathan suggested something, and i just bought it without looking because we have similar taste and he would not mislead me!! but it was in french, oops. didn't realize until the night before we were leaving and packing up all our stuff and he went back to drawn & quarterly the next day (because its near fairmount bagels and he brought bagel back, not a total fetch quest) and just got me store credit that i still need to use...
btw my bagel choice will be fairmount, but if i needed to eat one asap and not bring it back to eat later i will say st viateur. thats such a cop out answer. but if i go to montreal and i bring back a bag of all dressed bagels they will be from fairmount for sure
leaving montreal i thought to take viarail back to toronto. i think it was because of the time the cheapest flights left? and to get from toronto to mississauga was gonna be a task either early or late in the day. i don't know, there was a reason aside from just my love for trains. i assume the reason was money. viarail is just like amtrak. amtrak seems easier to navigate and the one time i did ride amtrak was right after the rail workers strike and i thought i'd get stuck in denver lol. viarail seemed kind of chaotic before boarding.
and by toronto i really mean mississauga. kyle and nicole picked us up from the station, we crammed into her jeep and we got doubles. this was just a snack until we we're meeting up with nicks parents for dinner. sucks i cant get doubles in california. or any carribean food, really. we didn't really have plans since we had no idea what was needed for the wedding. a lot of time doing errands. i now i have a super vivid memory of driving around rainy mississauga listening to 'too sweet' by hozier, a song which i hear often because it's one of my coworkers favorites.
its interesting to see nicks life before me. and two of three times he has gone back since moving to america have been with me i have started to understand why. hanging out with his cousins and listening to them reminisce makes me somehow feel bad that regardless of where we live one of us will be away from family.
nick got a haircut the next day. which surprised everyone. we also brought back a bag of human hair into america which i was nervous about explaining if we had to. wedding, rehearsal, dinners, family. all of that stuff. a lot of that stuff because family loves to talk when you haven't been home in 5 years. i feel like the toronto portion of my trip is harder to talk about because its family time and we made no real plans because every day we had at least one family/wedding related task.
anyways, the day after the wedding i went alone and saw julieta and michael, nick was hungover. he even missed his family brunch before everyone went their separate ways. we went to a cafe that shawn mendes goes to (i say this as a joke and not because i am a shawn mendes fan), and walked around. in a vacation all i want to do is go to cafes, eat, walk around and maybe find a cute lil place to hang out in.
on our last day we did go to st. catharines/niagara with nicks mom. but theres enough pics of niagara falls on the internet so here are some birds instead.
you know, i see some other people talk about their travels and i realize i don't really do much. maybe i need to stop going to places where i know people so hanging out isn't my priority.
i'm really just forcing myself to post about this because i might go to vancouver in 3 weeks. the person who i was going with bailed, so i might just go alone... i don't even know anyone in BC so it might be a good chance to solo travel again.