I have to start by saying that I've tried (many times) to post some pictures from Montréal, but there's something wrong with the site and the pictures never show up. That's irritating!

Apart from that our stay with Sam and Gaby, who have hosted us for the last few nights, has been excellent! We haven't had so much time together as they both work and have other things to do, but we've had some nice moments and we really like them! They've told us a lot of things we should do while in Montréal, like eat smoked meat at Schwartz, have bagels in Saint Viateur Bagels and icecream in a nice little place which name I don't remember. Besides eating like crazy we've just walked around and admired the city. Yesterday we just wandered around and went to the film festival in the evening and today we went to Mont Royal to see the Tam Tam festival and to Biodome to watch some animals.

The Tam Tam festival was awesome!! The festival has been going on in the same park on every sunday for some years now. It started when a couple of guys decided to bring their drums to the park and have a fun time playing. Now after all these years it gathers hundreds of people - some even from Finland - every week. Unbelievable. We just watched all the crazy things going around us all the time. Some people played drums, some people danced. Many just came with their drums and played for a while and then went to sit on the park watching other ones playing. Many people played also footbag and football, and we actually saw a really good, at least 60 year old footbag player. Funny things to see, yeah, and funny smells.

After visiting the park jams we took a metro to Montreal's olympic park. We didn't really have time to visit the stadium, but we had heard of a great place called Biodome we wanted to visit. Biodome is kind of a zoo, except they had created realistic environments for the animals. In the tropical rainforest room the temperature was something like 30 degrees and humidity 80-90 %. (Not much different from the weather we are having here anyways.)

After Biodome we had a nice Italian dinner in the same restaurant we had visited on our first day here. After that we came to our host's home and went for an ice cream in a local hot spot. They told us that usually line can be dozens of meters outside the ice cream bar and people are willing to wait 40 minutes to get a cup of real thing. After heavy rain showers we only had to wait for 5 minutes.

Now it's time to bed, so that we can catch an early train to New York tomorrow.