“I know every mile, will be worth my while…”

Bienvenue à Montreal!

Today I left American soil for a good while, but the trip up to Canada was a bit stressful and full of delays. We decided a while ago to bus from Manchester to Montreal with Greyhound which meant that our tickets were supposed to have arrived early the week before we left from NH. Naturally, my mom and brother’s arrived on time and mine never made it to our house before we left. Which meant that we had to spend hours on the phone this week talking to the incompetent Greyhound people (who had such heavy accents I couldn’t understand what they were saying) to finally get it straightened out. The fun wasn’t over because the bus was late and took extra time at customs (although I must say I was surprised that all they wanted to see from us was our passports – I guess it’s because we’re only spending a week in Canada but they didn’t check our bags). The Canadian countryside is quite pretty and filled with lots of quaint houses. I thought it was interesting that there were many water towers for the farmers and that they each had to have their own special name (one of which was Westphalia). Finally, we arrived in Montreal 2 hours later than expected, but easily found our hotel.

After we found our room, we decided to go eat and went to the restaurant right next to our hotel (very convenient). It was kind of expensive and ironically Italian, but very delicious. Its trademark was an all-you-can-eat bread bar! So there were five different kinds of bread with five different specialty butters (i.e. pesto, tomato and basil, garlic, etc) and a large grill to toast your bread once you’d put butter on it. The restaurant was nice and half way through our meal, they started blasting really loud Italian music (the bouncy kind that you clap your hands to) because it was someone’s birthday. The waiters and waitresses went over to embarrass that person and that made me glad that we don’t completely change the music in America, even though some places do sing very loudly. They also gave us a cherry completely covered in chocolate (i.e. even the stem had chocolate). Overall, it was cool, except that I wanted to practice my French but the waitress spoke so fast I couldn’t understand her. Then she switched to English and that was that. Hopefully I will get to practice some more, otherwise I’ll be pretty bummed. So I travelled quite a ways today, had some snags, and am still not sure what I think of Canada yet, but I think our stay in Montreal will be very exciting. Once we find a Church for tomorrow that is….