Will & Kristine's Travel Adventures: Much to see at the Museums!

Today was tourist day! We woke up early to get a head start to the museums right when they opened. We want to the which is where the old Olympic stadiums are housed and where a bunch of the museums are.

First, we went to the Botanical Gardens. It was super pretty and was huge.

However, the main draw for us were this ginormous sculptures made out of plants and trees. There were tons of pictures of it on the Botanical Gardens website but we couldn't find them once we got there. After asking an employee, we found out it was a temporary exhibit from three years ago and was no longer there. Someone needs to change their website! Oh well! It worked out because included in the Botanical Gardens is admission to the Insectarium which was awesome. They had all kinds of displays of insects from around the world but the coolest was this any colony!!! You could watch all of the ants in the colony working and it was awesome! I learned some interesting things about the queen:

1. The queen first finds 7-8 men that she mates with and they all die soon after.

2. She finds a place to lay her first batch of eggs and from there, the colony is created. From then on, she does nothing. She doesn't even walk on her own. Other ants will carry her.

3. From her one night stand with those 7-8 ants, she will have stored enough to fertilize over 150 million eggs, never needing to mate again!!!

4. If she dies or gets killed, the colony will completely go to shit within 5-6 days!! Her pheromones tell the other ants what to do!

After being thoroughly engaged with the ants, we headed to the other museum next door, the Biosphere! Here there are four biospheres created to house all kinds of living animals and plants. There was a rainforest, the Gulf Coast, the Northern woodlands, and the Arctic. It was super cool! We saw all kinds of animals but the only one I wish we got to see was the sloth. It is nocturnal though so the ranger said they were probably sleeping deep in the canopy away from the light.

The Biosphere was really cool though because it basically created a zoo out of environmental conditions you wouldn't find otherwise. I was so glad we went!

After the museums, we headed to lunch at a ramen place. Montreal in general is known for having awesome food and this place did not disappoint! It was tiny and super hot inside but the ramen was delicious!!

After ramen, we walked around different neighborhoods and popped into different shops. We also got a few treats:

Ice cream from Bilboquet

A maple flavored pastel de nata from Patisserie Notre Dame du Rosaire

Then we were pooped so we took a break to recharge and get a second wind before dinner! For dinner Will had reservations for a place called Food Lab. When we got there though, we weren't super impressed by the menu so we decided not to eat there. After walking around a bit we ran into a Food Truck festival. What luck! There were tons of food trucks and restaurants that set up shop so we had a gourmet smorgasbord for dinner!