Girl Gone Globetrotting
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Speaking of different body shapes. These are all basically peak human bodies.
How come 99% of them don’t conform to what the...
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If grandmothers around the world...
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Near the Ngorongoro crater there is a Masaai village about 30 minutes away. One morning on our way to the serengeti we stopped to visit. They showed...
An empty road, corn silo and wildflowers stand ready for the impending storm in the Canadian countryside.
Photography by me. July 2012.
Scavenging bands of raccoons aren’t what you’d expect to find at a romantic spot overlooking Montreal. But that’s what we found, in addition to couples making out, teens bumping rap music and the smell of funny cigarettes. Though, to be fair, the sign does make it very clear that the varmints are regulars at the Parc du Mont-Royal overlook.
There must have been at least a dozen of the masked bandits roaming around, not giving a single care to people. I’ve always thought raccoons were mean creatures, but nature’s homeless (as my sister calls raccoons) were focused on swarming the trashcans. Though my sister swears she heard one growl or hiss at someone.
Either way, I’d say the city of Montreal’s got a bit of a raccoon problem, but they don’t really seem to care. Nor do the carloads of people that filled the overlook’s parking lot that night.
Though, I bet if the raccoons knew what the sign said (It reads “Don’t touch me, Don’t feed me, I am a carrier of illness.”), they’d be offended and not so apathetic to humans.
Photography by me. July 2012.
Street art in the form of posters, chalk, and paint were all over Montreal.
Photography by me. July 2012.
French Canadian signs from around Quebec province.
Photography by me. July 2012.
Main image is the atrium with tourists and picnic tables. Below are the exquisitely deep-colored black-, rasp-, blue- and lychee berries, cherries and other unfamiliar (but delicious-looking) Canadian fruit for sale in the market.
Photography by me. July 2012.
Three signs proclaiming “We are open.” If they needed three, you think one would be in English at Marche Jean-Talon in Montreal.
Photograph by me. July 2012.
Opened to the public in 1933 on a former lacrosse field, Marche Jean-Talon is home to about 300 vendors selling everything from wine and cheese to corn right out of the truck to canned maple syrup.
My family and I walked around for a few hours, buying maple syrup and treats and scoping out all of the deliciously fresh fruit. We ate a French-style meal of bread, cheese, wine and chocolate. My four favorite things in the world. I have to say the goat cheese (in the picture with the dark rind) was one of the best cheeses I’ve had in my life. It was soft and creamy but the taste was strong and acidic. We ate in the atrium with everyone else who was hungry that day. We happily sipped our rose wine in public. Got to love Canada.
Photography by me. July 2012.
Flags waving on a windy morning in Montreal. Photo by me.
I’ve never known a family vacation that one would call relaxing. Maybe I’m just too young to remember those times, but ever since I can recall my family and I have always taken intense vacations. The kind where you wake up at 8 am every morning (I’m not a morning person, so this is early for me.) to make the tours and trips we have planned. They involve lots of car rentals and reservations. The kind where you better bring walking shoes because if you don’t your whining won’t influence the decision to walk 10 miles a day over cobblestones. The kind where you feel more exhausted when you get back than when you left.
We’ve never slept in and moseyed to the beach whenever we felt like it. That’s not our kind of vacation.
My parents, both from small towns in Montana, apparently got it into their minds that they’ve got a lot of traveling to do and they’re bringing us along.
As a kid, I was always grateful to see new places. But as an adult—with a bit of a shopping addiction—I’m even more grateful.
I guess this is a long way of telling you that when my family visited me in July, there’s no way we’d all be satisfied with just Boston. We took our talents to the Great White North, the French-speaking province to be exact.
We’d heard that Montreal was like Europe, especially Paris. Being Francophiles, we couldn’t wait to check it out.
One Parisian-feeling building near the Vieux Port. Photo by me.
In some ways it was like Paris: I was eager to go to Big in Japan, a bar/gastropub recently profiled in Conde Nast Traveler. So much so that I made my entire family get dressed up after a day of traveling and stress. However, when we arrived the place was dark and a note on the window informed us that the bar was on vacation until the very day we were scheduled to leave. (That was not our first encounter with the European-style vacation notice.)
In some ways it wasn’t: The area we called home felt more like Seattle with the amount of dreadlocks, street art and trash.
Nevertheless, it was a new place for us to explore. We took to Montreal by sea, by foot and by table.
