Montreal (Days 3 & 4)

Sunday morning we woke up and went to a ward in Quebec City (in French!) and then drove down to Montreal. On our drive in, we stopped at the Montreal Temple. It was closed because it was Sunday, but we at least got to see the outside.

Montreal was a little less cold (okay, a lot less cold) than Quebec, but it was still pretty windy, so every picture we have of us at the temple looks like this:

with me trying to hold my hair back. Ah, well.

We'd had a car in Quebec (that we thought we'd use, but really didn't), but Montreal has a pretty extensive public transportation system, so once we got to Montreal, we returned our Canada car. After dropping the car off, we made it to our hotel where we just relaxed the rest of the afternoon/night. (We'd structured our vacation such that we'd have time off in between the days of seeing everything.)

On Monday, we went to the Biodome in Montreal. So fun. It's basically this big indoor... zoo thing. It's not exactly a zoo because, well, it's not. But it has these four different biomes set up with their native plants and animals for people to walk through. We loved it.

This thing is a capybara. Apparently it's the world's largest rodent.

Then there were also birds, fish, more birds, more fish, some little tiny frogs (they're poisonous, so that's why they're so brightly colored), snakes, crocodiles/alligators (can't remember which they were...), monkeys, etc.

There was one bird that was very friendly.

Those were all in the tropical rainforest biome. And it was hot and humid in that biome.

Next we walked through the forest biome. We saw a bunch of birds, a porcupine, some sea otters (I think they were in this biome...), a fox, etc.

Each biome was kind of like a game of I spy because the whole time we were looking for the animals. (In the rainforest biome, there was this bright red bird that we kept losing and refinding. You wouldn't think a bright red bird could get lost, but trust me.)

The next biodome was mostly fish and birds, so we didn't really get any good pictures of them, but we did get pictures of the penguins in the last biodome.

After the Biodome, we walked over to the Olympic Tower. Basically, at the Olympic Tower, you get in this elevator that takes you all the way to the top of this:

(That's obviously not our picture; we forgot to take one of the outside.)

When you get to the top, there's an amazing panoramic view of Montreal.

After the Biodome and Olympic Tower, we took the Metro downtown to Vieux-Montreal (Old Montreal) and just walked around looking at all of the little shops.

Our favorite store was probably the maple store. They had all kinds of maple products (and samples!) and little maple donuts and stuff. So good. We brought some maple butter home with us. (Actually, we ended up mailing it home a few days after we bought it when we realized it was over three ounces and we hadn't checked any bags.) (Yes, I went on a week long vacation with JUST a carry on bag!)