So, this is actually the second time I've been to Canada. The first time I went to Toronto, late last year. I never wrote about it though... well.. because we didn't exactly do much. Montreal on the other hand- this might possibly have been the best meetup I've been to yet, and that counts mod meets. (Sorry mods :()

The Montreal folk have had a few meets already, but this is the first one I made it to. It was also the biggest, as many people from around the US and Canada made their way up for it. Once again I made all my flights on time. I think I'm starting to get the hang of this airport stuff. I arrived in Montreal on Thursday, where I met up with Moses and soon a group of others. Only a few people were coming the first night, but we still went out to eat and found some entertainment. We ended up a pretty cool place called Sharx, which was a combination bar, pool hall, and bowling alley. Ok so most bowling alleys have beer and pool anyway, but whatever. This place was still cool. I'm terrible at pool in case anyone was unaware, but I actually managed to get lucky in bowling and beat everyone. That never happens.

Friday was the 'real' meetup night. During the day we hung out at Michelle's house and watched Pulp Fiction, as we tried to get a hold of everyone and get them all directed into the city. Also, I'm not including my accounts of meeting everyone individually cause.. that would take up about half the article. Plus I already knew half the people there anyway, so writing about meeting them (again) isn't that exciting. MOVING ON. That night we had reservations at 'Les 3 Brasseurs,' or in English, 'The 3 Brewers.' That's a funny thing to note about Montreal- here in America everything is English, subtitled in Spanish. In Montreal it's French, subtitled in English. The difference being of course that we actually refuse to learn any language but our own. So you can still make your way around pretty easy in Montreal if you're a hopeless American. Dinner was good, minus the part where I had to eat poutine. In case you don't know, it's basically fries with gravy and cheese. But I don't like gravy, so I don't really like poutine. It could have been worse. We also felt the need to hurl peanuts at each other from various locations at the table. I'm pretty sure I accidently threw one at the waitress, but cmon, you have to expect that when you serve peanuts. Sorry.

After dinner we went to brutopia, a nice bar down the street. Here we engaged in the usual bar activities- drinking and talking a lot. It was nicer to hang out with everyone here, since we weren't restrained to sitting at a table. After a while some people left, and we got the whole corner of the bar to ourselves.

The events that happened next may henceforth only be referred to as epic. In short, we stole a traffic cone. Yes, I know, stereotypical drunken prank. But it was so much more. It started out as just sprint down the street with the cone. But as we approached the metro, we knew we had to try taking it with us. So we stormed down through the turn-style gates and as luck had it, our car arrived just on time. As we passed the gates the attendant was furiously tapping on the window at us. I actually don't remember this happening, but I have to take everyone's word for it. Ignoring the taps, we hopped in the car and headed off toward the hotel. Which presented the next problem- do we try and take it into the hotel? YES. We walked it in right through the front door, past the front desk, straight to the elevator. The front desk workers just watched us, and didn't say a word. Secretly, they wished it was their cone.

Our group made it into the elevator and up to the room with no problem. The other group got stuck though, for about fifteen minutes. They were afraid that the hotel had called the cops and stopped the wrong elevator. Turns out there were just too many of them in the elevator. Which makes me wonder why the elevator even moved in the first place, but whatever. Back at the room, we plastered the cone with stickers, and reminisced about our brave feat. Then, we dumped the cone in the second floor stairway so room service wouldn't get nosy.

And of course, this is Newgrounds, lets not forget our tendency to want to draw crude pictures of body parts on each other. Fun fact: permenant marker isn't really permenant, but it's pretty damn hard to wash out. At some point while doing this Luis kicked us out of his room to go on a 'bar crawl.' I think he was just jealous at the lack of permenant-marker phalluses on his face. Needless to say we went back to my room and continued the festivities.

Saturday was pretty eventful too, but I didn't get a chance to take many pictures. We started off by going to the Biodome. I didn't know the Biodome was real, or that it was even in Canada, but hey. It's a pretty neat idea, housing several different climates under one roof. Although I was kind of tired from the night before, so I almost fell asleep watching the penguins stare at the wall. I think some of them had actually went insane.

After the Biodome we were set to play laser tag, but we had some time to kill. We stopped off at a mall for a while, to shop around and get some food. Only problem was that everything was closing when we got there (don't worry, I made it to the candy shop in time) so we kind of split up and wandered off looking for things to do. My group went outside and found our way down to a tourist shop. We had a surprising amount of fun here, if not for just making fun of all the silly items to buy. Most notably, pig hats and eskimo porn. After the fashion show we stopped and got maple syrup suckers from a street vendor. They were made 'fresh' though, so the lady poured out some syrup on a bed of ice and you rolled up the sucker yourself. I apparently wasn't able to catch on to this though, after watching everyone else do it. So after I stared at the woman for a couple minutes wondering how long it took to make a sucker, I was prompted by the others to do it myself.

After all that, we met up for laser tag, which was really neat. Way better than anything I've seen around here. It was a three-story maze housing a tricky obstacle course of sorts. We were split into two teams, running around frantically trying to shoot each other. You could actually see the lasers too (well, they were just laser pointers) so it made it easier to snipe people- assuming you weren't getting blasted in the back yourself. At the end it tracked your points and gave you a breakdown of who shot who, and where. It was mostly all of us together in the game, but we also had a few little kids and some guy in a kilt called Corporal Jones. He played this game a little too much, as evidenced by his war-like tactics. Needless to say he won, and I was one of his many poor victims. Whatever Corporal Jones, nobody liked your kilt anyway. Before the game Luis decided to invest several dollars worth of Canadian quarters into bouncy balls, which we used to throw at the kids during laser tag. Moses tagged one kid in the eye- and while he wasted time trying to spew french insults, he just got shot more. Poor bastard.

We ended the night by drinking cider, which was pretty good. Some complained that it wasn't strong enough.. but cmon, what's not to like about alcoholic apple juice?

We saw the last of our Montreal friends as they headed back home Saturday night. Then, the rest of us said our goodbyes to each other in the morning after we went out for lunch. At the beginning of the article I mentioned my continued good luck with airports. This still held true, but it didn't stop Sunday from being my worst day of travel, ever. At some point Saturday night I caught the dreaded Canadian death flu, at least that's what I'm calling it. I staggered around all day Sunday, travelling between the Metro, on foot, cabs, airplanes, and car. The highlight of this day was while I was sitting at the airport foodcourt with Moses, passing in and out of consciousness. Turns out that Etienne left himself logged into Moses' laptop. So as punishment, we left him a special note on his userpage. See Moses' post below for the result. By the time I got home that night I slumped into bed for 16 hours, woke up for a bit with a minimal attempt to eat, and slept through to the next day. Turns out I lost my cellphone somewhere in the process too. So, it kind of sucked but the whole trip made up for it, no doubt. Montreal is the most fun I've had at a meetup to-date!

Posted to: Adventures