After waking up from an ill-advised 3 hours of sleep because of Montreal’s irresistible nightlife, I decided to spend the morning running around the city to better catch my bearings. I’d often run at home, so it was an familiar activity that gave me a certain comfort and helped to curtail the slight culture shock I’m sure we all were experiencing. Anyway, around 7:00 or so, the city is very quiet, and it is a lot easier to notice certain things. For one, because the streets were relatively sparse, you could actually hear individual conversations. I won’t lie; it was still french, and therefore mostly babble-talk to me, but I was beginning to pick up on some of the words and simple sentences. It was like clutching onto driftwood in a sea of “Where’s the English? What are these people saying?! Hnnggggghhh.”. So that was nice.

Another simple thing I caught onto was how pedestrian-friendly this city was. From observing the stoplight time, It seemed that both vehicles and pedestrians were given equal consideration, with neither having to ever wait much more than 30 seconds. This made getting myself lost a very easy and zero-frustration experience. Speaking of getting lost, to a newcomer like myself this was a very easy city to get lost in; and even though I was lost nearly all the time, I never panicked, even though I am very prone to sweaty hypertension. Want to know why? Even though it was easy to get lost in this city, it was nearly impossible to STAY lost thanks to the friendly neighborhood metro. I will dive into further detail on the metro in another post, but it will suffice to say that the metro had only two directions on one line, one of which headed straight back to the hotel where we were staying. This allowed me to explore the city with reckless abandon. I know this post is getting a little too long for those who like blogs for being bite-sized pieces of juicy information, So I’ll cut it short for now. I’ll post some more of my piercing and earth-shaking revelations once my memory gets up to speed and I find where I put the rest of my pictures. Have a great morning, everyone.