Friday September 4 and 5, 2015

Two great rest days in Montreal. We are sharing a room with two young women Veronique and Bianca. Veronique is from Quebec and Bianca is from Ontario. Veronique’s family moved to Ontario so that Veronique would be bilingual. Veronique and Bianca went to school together and kept in touch after Veronique and family moved back to Quebec.

One of the things we like about hostels is the interesting people we meet. We met two Australian women at breakfast (Alison and Sue). They were using their “extended vacation leave” to visit England, Europe and Canada. In Australia after you have worked with the same company for 10 years you are eligible for a three month paid vacation! Sue told us this policy originated to allow the time for English immigrants to sail back to England to visit family, prior to the advent of 24 hours flights. I knew Australians had this great extended vacation but I didn’t know why.

Sue kindly invited us to stay with her in Perth if we ever make it back to Australia.

After breakfast on Friday we took the time to window shop, Ste Catherines Street.

I replaced my Icebreaker t.shirt (thanks MHBC), they were on sale and I used the gift card that MHBC gave me.

We were back at the hostel by about 4:00 pm and I updated the blog and Ralf got the washing done. It was a very productive and fun day.

There is an area that has been developed for the music and arts and entertainment.  We watched a Japanese dancer.

Today we left the hostel at 10:00 and headed on the Metro (underground) to a bike shop.

We were hoping to replace the bike covers, but they didn’t have any. We did have a nice wander down a different shopping area, which had a multitude of wedding dress shops.

We got back on the metro and headed for Old Montreal and the Old Port area.

We spent hours wandering around, watching people, looking at the old buildings and enjoying being tourists.

We came back to the hostel exhausted. It was a really hot day but lots of fun.