Montre-awesome!

(two days late, sorry)

As expected, Montreal was filled with enough wonderful times to keep me going for quite a while :) My favourite part was how even though we did a lot, we were still able to make it feel, in part, that we were just doing some low-key hanging out chez Megan.

Thanks to weather and traffic, we made it to Megan's place just after 2am. Now, normally for Mark and I, this would mean that the fun would start whenever we woke up the next day. NOT THIS WEEKEND. Thankfully, Megan had started the party by herself (with some help from Tycho and some vodka and some mudshakes), and it was in full force when we got there. We then dug into Megan's bucket-o-kahlua and joined the fun, managing to stay up till after 4, when the sugar wore off and the alcohol wieghed down our eyelids.

Saturday, we woke (quite late) to downpour and decided (to Mark's dismay) to head to the underground malls for some shopping. I'm jealous of Megan's awesome new boots and coat - but am pleased that someone else is reinventing themselves via higher heels. We can compare our back pain and terrible knee joints in solidarity when we're 50. Around three, we caught a bit of Mark's underground mall hate - but thankfully stumbled into the movie theatre just in time. It was then, officially, that Saturday became all about the dark - we had a perfect amount of time to see "The Nightmare Before Christmas(IMAX!!)" before our dark dinner. The best part was when we all put on the glasses JUST TO LOOK COOL:





(yes, I lifted those directly from Megan's blog, which also has an entertaining description of the weekend's events)

On to the exciting part: I scored some BLOW! And by Blow, I mean this, not drugs...

On to the really exciting part: We ate in the dark!

I'm not talking moonlit night dark here, I'm not even talking moonless night - I'm talking can't see your hand in front of your face dark. It was absolutely pitch black, and gave a sense of what it might be like to be absolutely 100% blind. Unbeknownst to us, we were sat at a table with two other people, which was a little bit disconcerting at first. It ended up being a non-issue as the place got really loud really quickly, and we ended up only being able to talk to each other over the din. One thing that I noticed is that it's really hard to eat a meal without eyes - I had no idea how I was cutting my food, and as a result, frequently had forkfuls of nothing, or forkfuls of way too much.

It was interesting hearing how normal social attitudes fell away - the place was filled with obnoxious laughter and yelling - not normal restaurant behaviour. We had some fun imagining what they could be doing in the dark to provoke such laughter (some people must take advantage of the complete anonymity). It was fun though - I'd like to try it again, but maybe as a small party with friends rather than a whole bunch of strangers. Blackout night anyone?

We left the restaurant (with me making Megs and Mark carry out a recovery from dark adaptation experiment, massive failure) and headed down to Brutopia, where Mgan was convinced that she would get me to like beer (no dice), and from there we headed back to her apartment to curl up watching Donnie Darko. Sunday we shopped some more and had a fantastic Montreal breakfast of REAL hotchocolate and lovely flaky pastries, and then headed up to the marche Jean-Talon for some fresh veggies and final good times. We dropped M off, Mark got his poutine fix, and we hit the highway at around 3, with me falling asleep around 3:30. A successful, relaxing, and exhausting weekend :)