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tarigwaemirBlair Hall Apts., on the Feast of Ste. Rosalia
Last week, my parents and I went on a road trip to Montreal. I think it's the first time we've all been out of the country together, as well as one of the very few times where we actually spend money on a motel. Naturally, my mother proceeded to prove exactly why we are bad at vacationing almost as soon as we arrived. My parents had asked me to plan the itinerary (Parents: "Because we have trouble remembering the French names! They're so different." Me: "Ninety percent of the streets are named after saints. What's so hard about that? Just pretend you're reciting the Litany of the Saints."), and so I thought we could explore the underground city on the day of our arrival, then go do all the proper sightseeing the next day. You know, below-ground Montreal on the first day, then above-ground Montreal on the second. (I am of the firm belief that travel itineraries ought to be thematic.)
So we checked in at our hotel, a Days' Inn that was nicely located near the downtown area and Chinatown, and proceeded to walk over to the Complexe Desjardins. According to the tourist guide I had carefully memorized before coming on the trip, the whole concept behind the underground city is that there are shopping centres around the downtown area, usually located at or near the subway stations, and they are all connected by a subterranean "pedestrian network" so that one could conceivably walk around the entire place without ever having to go outside. Or at least that's the way it looked on the maps. What I didn't realize was that it was a lot less intuitive than the guide made it out to be, and we went up and down a lot of escalators before I finally got the hang of where to look for the signs. My mother, however, soon began to complain (and complain) that she thought we were in the wrong place ("Surely there would be more people if it's such a famous attraction!"), that her eyes hurt due to allergies, that the underground corridors between the shopping centres were boring (my mother has no sense of adventure), and finally that we were lost. By the time we made it to Square-Victoria, I gave up and led them outside. We walked up Rue University to the Promenades Cathédrale, where the shopping centres are larger and more densely clustered.
Mother's immediate reaction: See, I knew you were leading us the wrong way all along! This place must be what they were talking about in the guide, not that place you led us into before.
Me, suppressing internal howl of rage: EXCUSE ME, WHO IS THE ONE WITH THE MAP THAT ACTUALLY KNOWS HOW TO READ FRENCH?!
Anyway, I hunted up a pharmacy and found my mother some Visine for her eyes, and after that, the trip proceeded to improve massively. Mother may have no sense of adventure and be afraid of germs, cars and about a thousand other things, but let it not be said that she has no sense of romance! ^_^ We walked down Rue de Sainte-Catherine, on the recommendation of my roommate Nan, who used to live there, and had dinner on a terrasse at a Chinese/Southeast Asian restaurant on the Place Phillips. My mother had wanted, more than anything, to eat outdoors in European style on a warm summer evening, as she reminded me more than once while I was planning the trip. Montreal won her (and by default, my father's) approval for being the cleanest city they'd ever seen, not to mention the most aesthetic. Even the modern buildings looked nice, which coming from our preferences for old-fashioned architecture is saying a lot.
To our surprise, we had arrived in the city in the middle of the World Film Festival, and they had free open-air screenings on Rue de Sainte-Catherine, between the Place-des-Arts and Complexe Desjardins. We stumbled across it while walking back to the motel and stayed for the first forty minutes of Les Invasions Barbares. I wish we could have watched the rest of the film, but Mother was getting cold, so we headed back to the motel. My mother, in addition to having no sense of direction, a bad digestion, a pack-rat instinct, and an obsession with cleanliness, is also very, very prone to cold. (People wonder why we don't travel more often; my father and I wonder how we ever get any traveling done. If I hadn't insisted that I wanted to try Montreal cuisine, my mother would have cooked and packed at least three or four meals in an icebox for the trip. -_-)
The next day, we took the subway to the Oratoire Saint-Joseph. (My parents: "The subway here is more expensive than New York?!") We found the métro small but very clean...I found it very organized and easy to navigate. ^_^ My father declared that he wouldn't mind living in Montreal if it had a Korean community and if he didn't need to learn French. My mother agreed. That, coming from my parents, is the highest praise. I was too astonished to speak. The Oratoire Saint-Joseph is practically built on a mountainside, and we had to climb up about three stories to reach the lower-level church. There's a special wooden stairway for pilgrims who wished to climb à genoux, i.e. on their knees. O_O We heard Mass in French, which was an interesting experience because there were no missals to refer to, and whatever sad attempts I made at translating the English responses in my head did not correspond to what everyone else was saying. I also had trouble following the homily (I'm pretty fluent at reading French but not so good at listening comprehension, and I suspect that's because I unconsciously read French words and phrases out of order), although I could more or less recognize the readings. We then realized that there was yet another level above with a much grander space for services, not to mention all sorts of chapels, including the original one belonging to the beatified Frère André, with crutches of all the pilgrims who came to be pray for a cure.
I tried to find the pâtisserie that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
serendip recommended, but we were so tired from climbing all those steps that we just stopped at the first boulangerie we saw to eat a late brunch. Several delicious pastries, including a piece of mille-feuille cake with real cream, which I'd been dying to try after reading about it.
Anyway, after that we proceeded to Basilique Notre-Dame-de-Montréal (do you notice the theme here?), where we paid an admission fee (for a church!--isn't that vaguely sacrilegious?) to go inside. I don't know how they hold Mass there; there are dozens of votary shrines all around the cathedral, and every inch of the place is covered in decorations (even the pillars are painted with various designs). The effect is baroque to the extreme. I felt dizzy just walking around in the place. My mother said that it was an art exhibit rather than a church, and I'd have to agree. We then walked around in Old Montreal, which strangely enough won my mother's approval yet again for having so many sturdy-looking stone houses. (Her dream is to live in a stone house one day, although you don't see too many of them being built these days.) We also walked back up to the downtown area so we could tour the McGill campus and wore ourselves out by walking up all those steep slopes. I twisted my ankle on the way down (the same one I sprained before) so we eventually headed back towards the motel so I could ice my foot just to be safe. My mother took a nap because she was exhausted, and my father and I ended up dozing off as well (please note that it was only three in the afternoon when we came back and we had set out at nine--shameful, isn't it?).
My mother was insisting that my father and I go out to eat dinner by ourselves ("Just pick up something for me on your way home."), which aggravated me yet again because who the heck eats dinner in their hotel room when they've driven for eight hours to travel to a foreign city? Anyway, I returned to my obsessive perusal of travel guides and then wheedled Mother out of bed by promising that the restaurant was very close. We walked to Place Jacques-Cartier, about four blocks directly south of our hotel, and true enough, Mother complained every step of the way. But she was thrilled when we arrived: Place Jacques-Cartier is lined with restaurants with terrasses open in the summer season, with sidewalk artists and performers in the center of the square. We went to the Restaurant L'aventure because it seemed decently priced and proceeded to order the most expensive meals that we've ever consumed at a restaurant. (We don't really make a habit of going to Western restaurants, other than, say, Boston Market.) Father tried a lamb steak, while I ordered veal (my first time eating veal!), and Mother, on my insistence, got the red snapper filet. My father is not a picky eater and I've become much better myself, but I was shocked to see my mother actually finishing her meal (that never happens when we eat out at restaurants). We then walked around the square a little, and one of the street performers asked us (in English) where we were from and struck up a conversation. He asked how long my parents had been married, and when I told him thirty-two years, he said he'd sing a love song for them. John Lennon's "Imagine" which coincidentally is one of my mother's favorite pop songs. My mother was so delighted that she had me give five dollars to the singer (no doubt the point of the whole tactic).
We then went back to the Montreal World Film Festival and saw Le Gendarme à Saint-Tropez, which had no subtitles but was still easy enough for my parents to follow. Then back to the hotel, where we promptly went to sleep after an exhausting day. The next morning, we had an unsuccessful breakfast of instant ramen (with hot water from the coffeemaker) before checking out and drove to the Parc Olympique, which was incredibly boring because the admission fees to the cable cars were too atrocious for us to actually do anything there. I proceeded to be obnoxious and say "I told you so" repeatedly because I had originally planned for us to go to a café near the hotel for brunch before checking out and heading back home before my parents insisted that the Parc Olympique was a must-see tourist attraction. Insert my eyeroll here. My philosophy of family travel: spend money only on food and transportation, avoid tourist traps, and spend as much time outside on foot as possible in places that will cater to my mother's sense of romance and my father's interests.
Anyway, we came back on Friday, just in time for me to finish the course atwaldzell and catch up on my friends list. I'm still flabbergasted at how successful the trip was, despite its inauspicious beginnings, and I liked Montreal as much as I expected. This trip has been much delayed (we initially planned to go four years ago, but we got into a car accident...which I think is actually described in an entry somewhere because it was right after I got this LJ).
In other news, I've spent the Labor Day weekend marathoning My Girl with my mother (who claims to not like it very much despite the fact that she insists on watching until two in the morning) and attempting to write![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
blind_go fic. Unfortunately, now I have the overwhelming urge to write a Five Things That Never Happened for My Girl (maybe I'll do it for Tin's drama challenge?). I've also had a dream about--of all things--coding a website and finishing a wallpaper. I think that's a good sign I've been spending too much time on the Internet.
Anyway, I think I've figured out what to write forblind_go, but I'm not sure of the details. I intended to finish the alphabet drabbles and An Exorcism this month, but now I'm not so sure. -_- (In the case where I can only do one or the other, which would you prefer to see first?)
I also need to, argh, continue researching grad schools and start writing the dratted statement of purpose.
Yours &c.
Last week, my parents and I went on a road trip to Montreal. I think it's the first time we've all been out of the country together, as well as one of the very few times where we actually spend money on a motel. Naturally, my mother proceeded to prove exactly why we are bad at vacationing almost as soon as we arrived. My parents had asked me to plan the itinerary (Parents: "Because we have trouble remembering the French names! They're so different." Me: "Ninety percent of the streets are named after saints. What's so hard about that? Just pretend you're reciting the Litany of the Saints."), and so I thought we could explore the underground city on the day of our arrival, then go do all the proper sightseeing the next day. You know, below-ground Montreal on the first day, then above-ground Montreal on the second. (I am of the firm belief that travel itineraries ought to be thematic.)
So we checked in at our hotel, a Days' Inn that was nicely located near the downtown area and Chinatown, and proceeded to walk over to the Complexe Desjardins. According to the tourist guide I had carefully memorized before coming on the trip, the whole concept behind the underground city is that there are shopping centres around the downtown area, usually located at or near the subway stations, and they are all connected by a subterranean "pedestrian network" so that one could conceivably walk around the entire place without ever having to go outside. Or at least that's the way it looked on the maps. What I didn't realize was that it was a lot less intuitive than the guide made it out to be, and we went up and down a lot of escalators before I finally got the hang of where to look for the signs. My mother, however, soon began to complain (and complain) that she thought we were in the wrong place ("Surely there would be more people if it's such a famous attraction!"), that her eyes hurt due to allergies, that the underground corridors between the shopping centres were boring (my mother has no sense of adventure), and finally that we were lost. By the time we made it to Square-Victoria, I gave up and led them outside. We walked up Rue University to the Promenades Cathédrale, where the shopping centres are larger and more densely clustered.
Mother's immediate reaction: See, I knew you were leading us the wrong way all along! This place must be what they were talking about in the guide, not that place you led us into before.
Me, suppressing internal howl of rage: EXCUSE ME, WHO IS THE ONE WITH THE MAP THAT ACTUALLY KNOWS HOW TO READ FRENCH?!
Anyway, I hunted up a pharmacy and found my mother some Visine for her eyes, and after that, the trip proceeded to improve massively. Mother may have no sense of adventure and be afraid of germs, cars and about a thousand other things, but let it not be said that she has no sense of romance! ^_^ We walked down Rue de Sainte-Catherine, on the recommendation of my roommate Nan, who used to live there, and had dinner on a terrasse at a Chinese/Southeast Asian restaurant on the Place Phillips. My mother had wanted, more than anything, to eat outdoors in European style on a warm summer evening, as she reminded me more than once while I was planning the trip. Montreal won her (and by default, my father's) approval for being the cleanest city they'd ever seen, not to mention the most aesthetic. Even the modern buildings looked nice, which coming from our preferences for old-fashioned architecture is saying a lot.
To our surprise, we had arrived in the city in the middle of the World Film Festival, and they had free open-air screenings on Rue de Sainte-Catherine, between the Place-des-Arts and Complexe Desjardins. We stumbled across it while walking back to the motel and stayed for the first forty minutes of Les Invasions Barbares. I wish we could have watched the rest of the film, but Mother was getting cold, so we headed back to the motel. My mother, in addition to having no sense of direction, a bad digestion, a pack-rat instinct, and an obsession with cleanliness, is also very, very prone to cold. (People wonder why we don't travel more often; my father and I wonder how we ever get any traveling done. If I hadn't insisted that I wanted to try Montreal cuisine, my mother would have cooked and packed at least three or four meals in an icebox for the trip. -_-)
The next day, we took the subway to the Oratoire Saint-Joseph. (My parents: "The subway here is more expensive than New York?!") We found the métro small but very clean...I found it very organized and easy to navigate. ^_^ My father declared that he wouldn't mind living in Montreal if it had a Korean community and if he didn't need to learn French. My mother agreed. That, coming from my parents, is the highest praise. I was too astonished to speak. The Oratoire Saint-Joseph is practically built on a mountainside, and we had to climb up about three stories to reach the lower-level church. There's a special wooden stairway for pilgrims who wished to climb à genoux, i.e. on their knees. O_O We heard Mass in French, which was an interesting experience because there were no missals to refer to, and whatever sad attempts I made at translating the English responses in my head did not correspond to what everyone else was saying. I also had trouble following the homily (I'm pretty fluent at reading French but not so good at listening comprehension, and I suspect that's because I unconsciously read French words and phrases out of order), although I could more or less recognize the readings. We then realized that there was yet another level above with a much grander space for services, not to mention all sorts of chapels, including the original one belonging to the beatified Frère André, with crutches of all the pilgrims who came to be pray for a cure.
I tried to find the pâtisserie that
serendip recommended, but we were so tired from climbing all those steps that we just stopped at the first boulangerie we saw to eat a late brunch. Several delicious pastries, including a piece of mille-feuille cake with real cream, which I'd been dying to try after reading about it.Anyway, after that we proceeded to Basilique Notre-Dame-de-Montréal (do you notice the theme here?), where we paid an admission fee (for a church!--isn't that vaguely sacrilegious?) to go inside. I don't know how they hold Mass there; there are dozens of votary shrines all around the cathedral, and every inch of the place is covered in decorations (even the pillars are painted with various designs). The effect is baroque to the extreme. I felt dizzy just walking around in the place. My mother said that it was an art exhibit rather than a church, and I'd have to agree. We then walked around in Old Montreal, which strangely enough won my mother's approval yet again for having so many sturdy-looking stone houses. (Her dream is to live in a stone house one day, although you don't see too many of them being built these days.) We also walked back up to the downtown area so we could tour the McGill campus and wore ourselves out by walking up all those steep slopes. I twisted my ankle on the way down (the same one I sprained before) so we eventually headed back towards the motel so I could ice my foot just to be safe. My mother took a nap because she was exhausted, and my father and I ended up dozing off as well (please note that it was only three in the afternoon when we came back and we had set out at nine--shameful, isn't it?).
My mother was insisting that my father and I go out to eat dinner by ourselves ("Just pick up something for me on your way home."), which aggravated me yet again because who the heck eats dinner in their hotel room when they've driven for eight hours to travel to a foreign city? Anyway, I returned to my obsessive perusal of travel guides and then wheedled Mother out of bed by promising that the restaurant was very close. We walked to Place Jacques-Cartier, about four blocks directly south of our hotel, and true enough, Mother complained every step of the way. But she was thrilled when we arrived: Place Jacques-Cartier is lined with restaurants with terrasses open in the summer season, with sidewalk artists and performers in the center of the square. We went to the Restaurant L'aventure because it seemed decently priced and proceeded to order the most expensive meals that we've ever consumed at a restaurant. (We don't really make a habit of going to Western restaurants, other than, say, Boston Market.) Father tried a lamb steak, while I ordered veal (my first time eating veal!), and Mother, on my insistence, got the red snapper filet. My father is not a picky eater and I've become much better myself, but I was shocked to see my mother actually finishing her meal (that never happens when we eat out at restaurants). We then walked around the square a little, and one of the street performers asked us (in English) where we were from and struck up a conversation. He asked how long my parents had been married, and when I told him thirty-two years, he said he'd sing a love song for them. John Lennon's "Imagine" which coincidentally is one of my mother's favorite pop songs. My mother was so delighted that she had me give five dollars to the singer (no doubt the point of the whole tactic).
We then went back to the Montreal World Film Festival and saw Le Gendarme à Saint-Tropez, which had no subtitles but was still easy enough for my parents to follow. Then back to the hotel, where we promptly went to sleep after an exhausting day. The next morning, we had an unsuccessful breakfast of instant ramen (with hot water from the coffeemaker) before checking out and drove to the Parc Olympique, which was incredibly boring because the admission fees to the cable cars were too atrocious for us to actually do anything there. I proceeded to be obnoxious and say "I told you so" repeatedly because I had originally planned for us to go to a café near the hotel for brunch before checking out and heading back home before my parents insisted that the Parc Olympique was a must-see tourist attraction. Insert my eyeroll here. My philosophy of family travel: spend money only on food and transportation, avoid tourist traps, and spend as much time outside on foot as possible in places that will cater to my mother's sense of romance and my father's interests.
Anyway, we came back on Friday, just in time for me to finish the course at
waldzell and catch up on my friends list. I'm still flabbergasted at how successful the trip was, despite its inauspicious beginnings, and I liked Montreal as much as I expected. This trip has been much delayed (we initially planned to go four years ago, but we got into a car accident...which I think is actually described in an entry somewhere because it was right after I got this LJ).In other news, I've spent the Labor Day weekend marathoning My Girl with my mother (who claims to not like it very much despite the fact that she insists on watching until two in the morning) and attempting to write
blind_go fic. Unfortunately, now I have the overwhelming urge to write a Five Things That Never Happened for My Girl (maybe I'll do it for Tin's drama challenge?). I've also had a dream about--of all things--coding a website and finishing a wallpaper. I think that's a good sign I've been spending too much time on the Internet.Anyway, I think I've figured out what to write for
blind_go, but I'm not sure of the details. I intended to finish the alphabet drabbles and An Exorcism this month, but now I'm not so sure. -_- (In the case where I can only do one or the other, which would you prefer to see first?)I also need to, argh, continue researching grad schools and start writing the dratted statement of purpose.
Yours &c.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-04 09:11 pm (UTC)Glad you had an interesting trip!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-04 11:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-04 11:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-04 11:35 pm (UTC)See, I can only travel with one parent at a time because they have completely different styles. My mom likes to plan everything out well in advance, whereas my father is more of an adventurous type who leaves everything but the hotel (and sometimes even that!) to chance and likes exploring better.
Guess who's not being productive? IT'S ME.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-05 04:45 am (UTC)(I will admit to being vaguely horrified in Vancouver that they a) check your tickets by hand on the train and b) that tickets are invalid after a certain time. And we're not talking about midnight, we're talking about past 10pm. Hong Kong and most of Asia you pay per stop, train-wise. I spend several hundred CAD on public transport in just two months in HK, and I live fairly close to the central part of the city. It's rilly atrocious. XDXDXD)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-08 01:18 am (UTC)