On the offensive

Did I ever tell you about the time I made a French Canadian kid cry?

Montreal is a beautiful city with so much to do that you’d be hard pressed to experience it all in a brief tag-along visit with Achebeyo while she attends a conference. That is, if you were the one dating her and not me. But that would probably negate all of my other Achebeyo stories, so let’s just move on.

With so much to see and do, and with Achebeyo stuck in meetings for days on end, her sister and I ventured out into the city to explore. We expected to have more to do than time to do it all in, but we neglected to factor in my lack of desire to linger in any one place for more time than it takes to snap a few photos and make the appropriate appreciation noises and motions with my face. Once upon a time, I would spend hours watching a capybara drop deuces in an indoor canal system, but not these days. With the sole exception of The Underground, which I could spend days in just pretending to live in a post-apocalyptic mole-town, Achebeyo’s sister and I managed to see most everything there was to see for tourists, including someone expelling processed fluids against a building, and an insane woman who chased us toward the expensive restaurant district before deciding bald, crazy-eyed tourists might not like being pursued longer than a block or two.

We visited a gorgeous botanical garden with both Chinese and Japanese gardens; we rode to the top of a massive Olympic monolith and ordered $15 bottles of water before descending again; we explored a wonderful indoor multi-ecosystem zoo with Golden Tamarinds and deucing capybaras; and we visited an amusement park where we watched a 3-D Bob l’Eponge video adventure. It was a perfect day, but we reduced the amount of things we could do in that city as tourists significantly in just six hours. That doesn’t mean we lacked for amusement.

Once we had explored most of Montreal within a 2-mile radius of our hotel, Achebeyo’s sister and I decided we would venture down the docks and see what there was to entertain us there. We had previously had lunch in The Underground, so we were entering the gastrocolic reflex zone by then. Let me deviate for a moment to gross you out a bit. When I’m on trips like this, I tend to get what I refer to as “travel bowels”, meaning if you were waiting on the McDuck intestinal train during those times, you’d better reschedule for a few days after the trip. For some reason, my body chose the docks as the time to let me know what was in store for me once the train finally left the station.

There were many stores and outdoor vendors along the docks, thankfully, and we casually perused a few as we made our way down the walk. At some point, I indicated to Achebeyo’s sister that she might want to take up a position a few yards ahead of me so as to avoid the tooth-blackening, eye-gouging invisible pain that was about to be unleashed. She happily complied, and I relieved some (thankfully) non-material pressure building in my innards. We continued on as if nobody had just rendered a portion of the docks unnavigable. As we passed a family of three, nodding politely to the parents and their son, we smirked at the thought that they might have a moment of stinky confusion as they entered the hazard zone. We weren’t emotionally prepared for the actual results.

As the family was enveloped by the invisible cloud of foul, the son, leading the way with his youthful mouth wide open in wonder at the spectacle unfolding before him on the docks, inhaled a lungful of good old American stink, and promptly (and quite loudly, I might add) gag-gasped his dismay. This was our cue to either collapse in helpless laughter, or dart ninja-like into a nearby vendor’s store. We opted for a combination of the two, peeking out only to ensure the way was “clear” before trying to hide our tear-stained, beet-red faces from anyone who might have encountered the cloud of doom. We escaped without retribution, but I feared that at any moment we might be stopped as malodorous miscreants on our way off the docks. Thankfully, nobody but the family of (weeping) three had been unfortunate enough to endure the attack of my intestines.

While I’m not proud of what happened that day, I still think back to that incident during times of emotional distress, and manage to turn most of my frowns into shameful smiles. Oh, and I’d gladly go back to Montreal to see more of that beautiful city…if they’ll let me back in.

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Tags: adventure, Canada, humor, kids, Montreal, people, silly, tourism, Travel

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