I almost decided to go out to a bar last night, but after dinner at a restaurant in the gay village, where the waiter was rude and unfriendly, my spirits drooped a little, the gay village started to look even more seedy in my eyes, and I headed home, feeling, for the first time in the entire trip, a little lonely.

To capture the mood I felt, I wanted to take a night-time picture of me with a the local strip club as the back drop, but the door guard saw me lining up the practice shot with my tripod and ran across the street towards me. I'd thought this might happen, and, as he looked dangerous, by the time he reached me I had the camera pointing in a different diretion, and I pretended that I didn't know what he was talking about. So all I got was the practice shot.

Night time on rue St Catharine

This mornin was very hot and humid, and it was difficult to maintain the sweat-free composure of a traveling gentleman as I took the subway to the Museum of Fine Arts :) It's always difficult to figure out a new subway system, and this was one was particularly strange. You buy the ticket from a man in a little ticket office, then give it right back to him to get through the turnstile. Oh well. It wasn't quite as strange as Toronto where the tickets are little non-descript pieces of paper that you could easily knock up at home.

They had an exhibition at the museum called "Cosmos", which attempted to trace artistic conceptions about man's surroundings and environment through the ages. There were some beautiful individual pieces, and the show was interesting in that it's scope included works of all different medias, and even included scientific instruments, but I felt that the curators were overly ambitious in tying together so many diverse ideas into some kind of movement. But what do I know.

Next door, I enjoyed the small "Museum of Decorative Arts", which focuses on design of the twentieth century. They had lots of nice things - you know ... nice, expensive little Italian things.

Outside again, it was sweltering, and I sought the air-conditioned escape of the big mall, Le Centre Eaton. One of the hardest things about travelling is coping with differences, especially when the language is not your own. My french isn't bad, but there's no way I could find and order the customized chicken caesar salad I'm used to eating for lunch here. (The caesar salad I managed to order yesterday had olives in it!)

The same with coffee. You'd think that here in a French-speaking city, you'd easily get coffee. But they don't have Peets or Starbucks here, and the places that do sell coffee to go give it to you in tiny little paper cups. Oh well. I guess these are the downsides to travel.

In Le Centre Eaton shopping mall

I couldn't face going out into the humidity so soon after combatting my lunch and coffee, so I decided I'd go see "Eyes Wide Shut", which has just opened, at the fabulous Paramount multiplex on St Catherine.

I have to say that I thought it was just a brilliant movie, with beautiful, luminscent camerawork and lighting. But for the first hour I'd originally thought that there wasn't too much to separate it from a standard Woody Allen movie. It was as if too very different conductors had conducted the same symphony - Kubrick's rendering seemed much graver and weightier in tone than Woody's, and displayed a much greater humanity, but the subject matter was very similar to Woody's domestic Manhattan comedies of manner.

But have you ever had a day where something goes subtly wrong? It seems like nothing just at that moment, but by slow degrees, things build on each other, and then you begin to realize that this is a day you're going to remember for the rest of your life - a day where you really confront who you are. This is what begins to happen to Tom Cruise in the movie. In fact, the movie transforms itself midway through into something most audience members are not going to expect, and is actually quite scary on a psychological level.

The movie works despite the jarringly miscast Tom Cruise. Although, I don't think he's a very good actor, he is convincing at times during the movie. But Kubrick apparently couldn't get him to supress his sickeningly inappropriate, Porkys grin. I thought it was only Jim Carey that had that problem.

It was a long movie, and by the time I came out, the sun was fairly low on the horizon. In search of some cooler air, I drove up to the "Observatoire" on Mont Royale, the big hill just to the north of downtown, and took photos while the sun went down. As the sun hid itself behind a reddish haze, it was so murky that you'd have sworn you were looking out over Istanbul. Not that I've ever been there, but Cecilia, my trainer, whose mother is Turkish, is fond of making mystical statements that start with "When the wind blows off the Bosphorous..." :)