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So, folks have been asking me to post some photos. I don't have enough blogging experience to do this well, and I don't carry around enough extra batteries for my camera to do this often. But I'll be working on fixing that.

This is a picture of downtown Montréal taken last summer from the top of the Mont Royal, the highest point in Montréal. I've been there in the winter too, but I'll save sharing those photos for a colder day.

The other day my beau, I'll call him "Bo," and I went to Vieux (old) Montréal as tourists. We went to the museum of archeology and history at Pointe à Callière and both of us learned a lot: me from reading every single little label of every artifact and Bo from talking at length to two different museum guides, leaving me with plenty of time to read all of the labels.

We saw ruins and artifacts dating from the 1300's (but mostly from the 1600's and 1800's) through this century. They had some cool "multimedia" displays without an excess of lights, bells and whistles, and one in particular with a "you are here" red dot that showed you what your surroundings would look like at certain points in history. It was moving to be standing in the spot where the city of Montréal was founded. I had a similar feeling to when I visited my first cathedral as a college student in Europe, the Strasbourg Cathedral. It was the feeling of being a part of the history of the future and of the weight of all the footsteps that had passed in that very place before mine.

It would be nice to feel that way more often, in my daily life, to think about the people who rented this apartment before me dating back to the 1930's, for example. Bo and I were walking on a nearby shopping street and we paused to notice the facade of a church that we can see from our apartment. We were talking about how the combining of parishes had changed the church's name over the years. Just then a woman, who told us she was 86, joined our conversation as she rested her cane against a nearby bench and sat down. She had been baptized in a church on the same site some years before the current building was built in 1931. She has lived in Rosemont, the neighborhood of Montréal where we live, her whole life. To me, after only two weeks of living here, I find my view of that church from our apartment to be something special...and it is.