The weather improved today, which is to say it cooled down from record-breaking levels to a normal 22°, so when we took the kids to the children’s area at the Montreal Jazz Festival, we didn’t think we would collapse from heatstroke.
The children’s area is quite big: there’s a climbing frame shaped like a saxophone smashed into a piano, a bouncy castle, a sandpit, a musical instrument powered by small children pedalling bicycles, a giant piano keyboard a la Tom Hanks’ arena to show off in Big, and free face painting.
That last was obviously the main drawer for La Serpiente (rainbow unicorn) and Destroyer (jellyfish, improbably enough) but the rest was lots of fun too. It was especially great to see La Serpiente grinning like a maniac on the bicycle.
There is a modern art museum in the middle of the festival, so we went there too. There was a wonderful exhibition with lots of odd stuff, from a lighting display that synchronised with your heartbeat, to a glass room where you can breath the farts of other people ("Aggressive Circular Breathing") and other installations playing with sound and vision. Some of these the kids liked, some terrified them, some they kept trying to touch. In general, loud noises in dark rooms are not agreeable to La Serpiente or Destroyer.
After that, I got us all gin and tonics (sadly, the Hendricks concession uses Schweppes tonic, but you can’t have it all) and then we walked back around the outskirts of the festival, meeting a man on stilts dressed at the Mad Hatter, and two women in purple jumpsuits doing head stands that my eldest fell in love with.
And then we went to the supermarket and bought too much strong gin (everyone is hungover from last night) and went home for fondue, the children reaching their limit and crashing and burning by 9pm.
Is it odd that I went to the jazz festival, and the only music I heard was a funked up version of the Game of Thrones theme music? Like I told the kids again and again, "it’s not your fault, it’s just jazz"