A ‘work’ day –  getting up and going into the office.  Never much fun to begin with, but with some known drama at the office, no one was all that eager to make it in on time.   Pretty much hoping it would blow over before we made it there.   We carpooled in, and made a pit stop at they Timmy’s.

As usual, the Europeans complained about the bad coffee.  I don’t think I complain that much anymore, I’ve just come to terms that the coffee isn’t going to be great, but that a double-double is acceptable.   More of a coffee-flavoured candy drink than real coffee.  But I think their conclusion was to just order the Iced Cap.  Definitely a good go-to drink in the summer.

Not much to speak of happened at the office.  Drama didn’t exactly sort itself out  according to plan.  Avoidance of teamwork, and thereby avoiding conflict, was rather high.  I don’t think very much got done that day.  Kind of nice to be an observer in that situation rather than having to do something about it.

We headed out for lunch at the nearby casino.  I had the pizza – decent thin crust. But the order that sticks out was the ‘lost in translation’ situation.  My friend was having difficulty deciding what to eat and settled on the ‘Grilled Cheese’ at the last minute.   Something registered about his order but I got distracted with having to make my order.   By the time I had time to think about it, the conversation at the table had moved on and I didn’t say anything.

My pizza:

The exclamation and shock at what arrived brought it all back.  Back in Barcelona, I dragged some Canadian friends to Can Cargol – a place that specializes in snails, but has good grilled food as well.  A friend doesn’t have the most adventurous palate, and combined with the jet lag, she looked for some comfort food on the menu.   It might be a sandwich here, but in Barcelona, it’s actually just a chunk/wheel of cheese.  Grilled until melty and topped with some dressing.  Entirely not what she was expecting.

Back in Montreal, expecting a wheel of melted provolone and getting a mediocre sandwich instead, my friend was not impressed.  A good reminder that even the little things can be very jarring when crossing cultural boundaries.  I recall that being one of the growth plans for large chains – in an unfamiliar place, consistency and reminders of home can get you a foothold in a new market.  Stick a Starbucks at the airport for travel weary customers and they’ll pay for it, just because they want to know what they’re getting while they get adjusted to everything else new.

After our recent meal experiences, the only requirement was ‘something good’.  I was banned from looking for ‘cheap eats’ on the internet and we went downstairs to ask the concierge about where to go.  Got a good list, but we decided to stay away from the fine dining options.  And because we were heading out rather late in the evening, we stuck with something close by on Crescent – Dundees.

We grabbed a seat next to a window to do some people watching and talked about food and expense accounts.  We decided to splurge a little bit and order something decent.  Given the restaurant and compared to my meal at Uchi, I wasn’t too worried about doing too much damage to the wallet.  I knew I wanted something meaty, so Steak Frites:

Nice crust, but overdone.  I had asked for medium-rare and gotten medium well.  Service wasn’t the greatest, so by the time I had the chance to mention that my steak was overdone and we still hadn’t gotten our shrimp yet, I had finished half my steak already.  They still took it away and brought me a fresh one.  Very nice of them… And this was actually the first time I had a steak with montreal steak spice and enjoyed it.  Maybe I was just hungry.

After the grilled cheese incident, my friend one upped me and added the two lobster tails to his steak:

And to top it all off the other dev ordered a dessert with his bad espresso:

We had watched an animated GIF about jumping up onto a stack of tires.  The athlete was able to jump vertically almost 7′ and debate about whether or not it was faked.  Some googling determined that Olympic jumpers easily cleared 2m, we determined that it wasn’t fake.  Not something I could do, but there was some talk from me about being able to jump at least the height of a desk.  We wandered around the city, mildly tipsy from the wine, there was some good natured ribbing about finding something I could jump onto.  Fortunately, nothing that didn’t look like an instant disaster showed up.  Between the alcohol and jeans, it could have been a rough tumble.

Random pictures in the city:

Called it a night fairly early – I did have an 8am bus the next day to Toronto!