A little of this, a little of that

Last weekend we flew to Montreal for my first time there; Kent's been several times but always on work trips. We flew in Friday and out again Sunday afternoon. I especially liked that English isn't the dominant language because that helped reinforce that Canada is indeed a foreign country.

Here's a picture from our hotel room:

And this picture is also from our hotel room looking down and slightly to the right. I was amused to see what appears to be pampas grass randomly growing on the roof.

It was predictably cold -- it's 3 degrees further north than Boston and Boston is never warm in March. It was also windy, which neither of us expected. We got to see a fabric store (we wisely refrained from adding to the fabric stashes we each have), a long string of bridal gown stores oddly placed near a bunch of really low end retail stores (no joke, close to a dozen), the Biodome, a friend of Kent's plus Old Montreal.

The most exciting moment came when Kent tried to check himself in at the airport on our way back to the States, only to realize he'd left his passport in the hotel safe. I had not stored mine in the safe so mine was with me. But all's well that ends well and we got home just fine.

We noticed that in general, people in Montreal wear very colorful shoes. They may be in head to toe black otherwise, but the shoes are colorful. And then we found a store that carried those colorful shoes. We each got a pair of shoes, a brand neither of us had ever heard of before called Bloom. They are carried by exactly one store in all of North America and that's a good thing. If the store were closer, I'd have a lot more shoes.

Here are the ones I got:

And in completely unrelated news, we realized that the Feliway collars, while helpful in calming the kitties down, also caused hair loss around their necks. You can see the loss most clearly on Chloe and Eddie but they all three have these kinds of balding spots. So the collars are off and we are relying on lots of petting and soothing to keep them calmer.