Montreal encore and Home again

Hello all,

The adventure is over but what an excellent ending.

In what can only be described as seamless, Kat, Ryan, and I departed Trois-Rivieres and got to our Montreal hotel by 3:30 pm on Friday. After a quick fresh up, we hit the downtown to meet up with Ryan's cousin, Sam, who is living in Montreal for the next couple months. Considering they're only cousins, the family resemblance was really strong - both tall, blonde, blue-eyed, boys with ridiculous stories and a skill for telling them. Sam took us on a quick tour of his neighborhood and to this mobster owned restaurant where we had a great time trading stories and eating good food. Afterwards, we spent a big chunk of the evening wandering the Fringe Festival which consists of live music and Ste. Catherine Street is turned into a big pedestrian walk with all sorts of stalls set up of all sorts of jewelry, clothes, etc. We ended up turning in early (on a relative student scale) since Kat had a 3:30 am wake up time and last metro was at 12:30 am anyway.

Yay! We figured out the metro!

Kat made it off just fine and Ryan and I crashed pretty hard, not getting up until around noon. By the time we got up, wandered back downtown, ate breakfast/lunch, and met up with Sam and his friend from New Zealand, it was solidly the afternoon. We climbed Mont Royal which is a huge hill (the locals call it a mountain...) in the middle of the city with awesome views and hung out until we got hungry. After some good Thai food we went our separate ways so that Ryan and I could wander more of the festival while the other boys prepared for some anticipated nightlife.

View from the top of Mont Royal with the boys

Ryan and I wandered until we got peopled out, returned home, repacked our bags, and hit the hay in anticipation of the early morning flight. Although we underestimated our flight time by 30 minutes, we still made it with 15 minutes to spare prior to boarding (still cutting it too close for comfort) and had a good flight back to Calgary where Meghan and Ry's mom were waiting for us.

And just like that, 5 weeks completely completed.

What an amazing program and experience. I would absolutely recommend it to anyone and will apply to do it again next year if at all possible - especially since I've possibly convinced Meghan to give it a shot :)

Thank you all for following along. Knowing I have friends and family reading my blog keeps the lonelies away.

Love & Light,

Jacqueline