Montreal

All week long I have been meaning to finish this post. Geez. Anyway, Eric and I went on a vacation to Montreal last week for a few days. We had a lot of fun even though it was a little bit more stressful than we had hoped. It was FREEZING in Montreal! It snowed some while we were there. Not much, but enough to make the walking a little slippery at times. Although we did try driving a little bit, took a taxi once, and figured out the Metro one day, most of our travels were walked ones. We tried out a few different streets and areas this time and found some cool things.
So now it is time for show and tell. A bunch of this stuff pictured here came from a dollar store that was in the shopping complex that was connected to our hotel. If you are familiar with the city, you know that there are several shopping centers, office buildings, and hotels that are connected underground along with the subway. It is pretty cool that you can leave your room and walk all over without even going outside. The dollar store was more like the 80 cent store once you figured out the exchange rate. They had cards in French and lots of neat stickers. One day we took the Metro to Saint Hubert street where there is a fabric district consisting of stores selling fabric and sewing notions, as well as a couple bead stores. There was also a store selling Latino grocery items and a Balkan store with candy that our friends Indira and Ivo often have in their home. I found an old Dunkin Donut mug at the Salvation Army there that cost practically nothing as they were having a half price sale. We went to a health food store where I found some awesome kids shampoo that smells like pears. Also, the Claratin there was a little cheaper and you didn't need to start a file in the pharmacy to buy psudophederine like you do here.
The things here are some goodies that you can't find here in the states. Yum, delicious! They have curry Lays. I had to try them, although I'm not a huge curry fan so I didn't think they were that good. In one news stand I found cinnamon KitKat bars which are pretty darn good. And of course, I made sure to bring home tons of KINDER!
The third picture down is my Kinder Maxi egg sailboat toy. It was fun to put together and the egg was a massive shell of chocolate and white chocolate goodness! I am going to try to make something with the glitzy wrapper the whole thing came in.
The last picture is of Yop yogurt drink and Mini-go kids yogurt. The Yop is so good. It seems like they use far less chemicals in food in Canada. This drink is made with real sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup like the yogurt drinks in this country. It makes a huge difference. I brought home 6 bottles and they are gone now. Bummer.
Montreal has a huge selection of restaurants with every kind of food imaginable in a huge range of prices. We found a huge variety of awesome food just in the food court of the shopping center near us alone.
Besides shopping and eating, the very best thing that we did was to see the Gipsy Kings in concert. It was held at the Bell Center and the place was packed. It was awesome!