Another birthday


This evening, to celebrate my wife’s birthday, we got a babysitter and went out to Su, a Turkish restaurant in the southern part of Montreal. On the way there, I tried using Waze to navigate. Note to future self: don’t attempt to use Waze to navigate. Or at least not in Montreal.

That may not be Waze’s fault – could any technology cope with the post-apocalyptic wasteland that is the construction project of most of Montreal’s roads? Eventually we made it to our final destination, by which time I had more white hairs than I started with.

By 830 on a Wednesday night, a lot of the food had been eaten. The veal liver was off the menu, as were the meat options, the tasting menu and the eggplant. We made do with herb pancakes, artichokes, marinated olives and something special made of filou pastry and feta cheese, and then dined well on ravioli and mussels. There was wine and cocktails and gin and coffee, and eventually chocolate cake and Turkish delight. It took two hours to work our way through all of this, and then we had to drive back across the city (Google Maps, despite having a very questionable pronunciation of most French words, got us back much more efficiently than Waze could manage).

And thus to bed.

This afternoon we’d visited the zoo, a brutal idea during Montreal’s record breaking heatwave. My feet swelled and my head throbbed as we staggered from one animal to another. I cursed my children’s childish enthusiasm for foxes, for raccoons, for otters, for any animal you could name, for gravel, for gibbering… and on it went. When we got back from the zoo, I had to lie in the basement for half an hour with a pillow on my face to recover.

It’s quite nice the rest of the year, apparently.

,

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.