After rain stopped play in Fundy National Park, we made a decision to do a big drive and try and make for Montreal.

As it turned out, it proved to be just a little too far, but no worries because we ended up in a quaint seaside Quebecois town called Riviere du Loup (pronounced Riveria de Loo). This was a nice little town, and Karen and I ended up having a nice stroll down the beach at sunset which was very nice, but what is worth noting is that out of everywhere we have been on this trip, this town had the lowest level of English, so I had to rely on my decidedly dodgy french more than ever.

It was refreshing though, because when you pose the question "Parle vous Anglias?" (do you speak english?) in France, you are usually greeted with rolled back eyeballs. Here , even though the answer was often "Non", or "a little", the people are generally pleased that you made an effort, and are often excited to be meeting a real life Australian. In Montreal, the answer is often a very North American sounding "yeah", but that's another story.

Anyway, like I said, the dodgy french got a work out. We had a good old fashioned take away Pizza for tea, and watched the American v. Canada world cup Ice hockey game (which Canada incidently won). So feeling confident after sucessfully boooking in to a hotel and getting a pizza, I took on the big task...

Ring up the Sorfadet.

Doesn't sound that hard, since our mate Sorfo has a pretty good command of English. He does however live with his parents, and neither of them speak english. It turned out when I rang, he had already gone to work, so I rate it as one of my great achievements that he actually got the message from his mum to ring me back (even though she knew numbers in english, but not much else, and my command of French doesn't go past 6 or 7 words).

So with that feather in my cap, we left the motél le shonké and headed for Montreal. OK, so I made that hotel name up for comedy reasons, but you get the idea of the sort of place it was.

I might just say from the outset that Montreal is a great city. It is also unique in that due to it's notoriously shit weather, way below zero in winter and hot and humid in summer, there is an airconditioned network of tunnels below the city. A city below the city if you like. It contains connections between all of the major buildings as well as several shopping malls and food courts. The whole network runs to some 33km apparently.

The shopping areas are just like any Westfield you might have been into, but the tunnels under the business areas of town were quite bizzare. There is no advertising in them! They are all very white and very sort of, oh I don't know, Matrixy perhaps.

So what did we do in Montreal? Strolled around the old town, visited the sports store "Roots" (tee hee) and its kidswear bretheren (wait for it) "Roots Kids". We also checked out the Science museum, the olympic park and wandered the tunnels.

There were two major highlights though.

The first was catching up with our X-FM brother in arms the Sorfadet for a few of Montreal's finest brews, which is Maudite, weighing in at a hefty 9% alcohol. It was great to sit around and chew the fat and share gossip for a while. Sorfo is working at resort quite a way out of town and drove some 200km after work to catch up with us, which was great.

The second highlight was the Montreal biodome, which is sort of like our Bicentennial conservatory but with animals in there. It is an enormous dome which has 4 seperate climates, in which the plants and animals are housed. Those of you who have browsed the photos I posted the other day will have a pretty good idea of what was in there, since I took a stack of pics, so I won't crap on too much about it except to say that I was pretty stoked to see a real life beaver!