I know I keep talking about the weather - but it isn't half cold here. Today had a high of -12˚C, which is without doubt as cold as I've ever been. You need to bundle up and walk hunched over, especially if the wind is blowing. We set off from Craig and Anna's mid-morning and visited the Olympic Stadium, built for the 1976 Summer Games - which concluded two days before I was born. Apparently still the most expensive ever staged (presumably with inflation taken into account) it had a terrible financial impact on the city, and left them with the huge empty stadium. The Olympic flame was extinguished by a rainstorm and relit by an official with a cigarette lighter, before being hurriedly put out and reilt properly with the portable flame. Also it was the only summer games ever when the home nation failed to win a single gold medal. Something for the Great Britain to aim at in London 2012.
The Stadium has a mock victor's plinth outside, which I'm always happy to stand on - the top step, naturally. This is me doing just that - and to prove how much I enjoy it, this is me doing it four years ago when I was last here - and in somewhat better weather. The stadium is currently closed, as is the slanting tower - which was only added after the games had finished - so we walked past and went to one of Montreal's most popular attractions - the Biodome. Built inside the Velodrome from the 1976 games, in 1992 it was re-invented as a kind of walk-through zoo, although as Wikipedia rather tetchily says, it's 'neither spherical nor a geodesic dome'.
Whatever the outside shape, indoors it's divided into four zones based on an ecosystem from the Americas - kind of like The Crystal Maze only with penguins instead of Richard O'Brien. I was slightly sceptical at first, but it was really good. A continuous marked path leads through the four areas, starting with the Tropical Forest, then the Laurentian Forest, St Lawrence Seaway, and finally the Arctic/Antarctic polar regions. Each part had a number of larger creatures behind unobtrusive fences (a Lynx, Capybara, Beaver), with other smaller things able to roam around (Parrots, Monkeys, Lizards). There was a great gloomy cave full of flitting bats, and underwater glass to watch diving seabirds propel themselves around. We spent an enjoyable couple of hours wandering about looking at Crocodiles and Poison Arrow Frogs and soforth, before leaving and wincing in turn as we went back out into the freezing wind outside.
After a warming curry buffet downtown, we walked around looking at some of the buildings - although rather quickly, and after it had got dark went to the waterfront to go skating. Not that I took part, of course. Several years ago - in fact, the same trip I last came to Montreal - I tried ice skating for the first time on the picturesque Frog Pond in the middle of Boston Common. I'm really not good with balancing/co-ordination activities - witness my efforts to ride a bike on my Crinan Canal post last July, so after a series of mild tumbles I had an almighty fall and cracked the back of my head off the ice, almost seriously injuring myself. Anyway, I learned enough that day to realise skating and me don't mix - it's like glueing a 30cm ruler to the bottom of your shoe and sliding across oily lino.
So I watched, and took a few blurry photos, the floodlit buildings of the Old Town being a great backdrop. The river between the warehouses and the rink had frozen, and it looked as if people had been out skating on it - but the place we visited was a proper rink, with one of those juddering ice hoovers to clean up and everything. The only bad thing was - quelle suprise - the cold. In fact it was so cold I lost all feeling in my fingers taking the pictures and my hands started burning. It had gone past the numb stage, so I quickly legged it into the toilets and held my hands under the hot air dryer until I got the feeling back. On the way home, a series of icy blasts tore between the tall buildings - it must have been at least -20˚C - causing us to yelp and walk all the quicker. We could hear other groups of people swearing and crying out at the same time because of the cold. I can only imagine the people that founded Montreal first came here in the summer...
Montreal Biodome
