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Apotheosis of The Machine Brain

Saturday, August 10th, 2013

It’s 8 pm and I’m sitting on the promenade outside the ~~castle~~ hotel overlooking the Saint Lawrence river. There will be fireworks later; people are everywhere! It will be a fun end to a busy day!

Here’s the very start:

We’d return to this bakery later for bread and pastries for our dinner!

In the morning we caught a bus upriver to the famous Montmorency Falls.

Beautiful! See the bridge over the top? We walked that. The photo above is taken from a steep staircase that leads from the top to the bottom:

Here’s a shot from the lookout to the south side of the falls, visible on the left in the first photo:

We started at the top, took the stairs down, then got to the top again via a rope way!

Here’s me hamming it up in the car:

Growing up in Australia waterfalls are not exactly common and it’s always a treat to visit one. It was a sight definitely worth seeing 🙂

Afterwards, we returned to the city and headed down to old town, at the base of the cliffs on which stands the hotel. Here I met a lovely bird:

Whose hand is that? ONLY MINE!

I petted him and he leaned into my hand. So cute!

We wandered on, and ignorantly walked right past the Canadian Museum of Civilization! Booooooring, we all might think. But stop the presses since a certain poster caught my eye…

What’s this? A froggy museum exhibit on the history of video games in Quebec, Canada? Could it be good? Was it worth $15?!?!?

Yes, my friends, it absolutely was!

The exhibit, which was divided into various eras (Origin, Arcades, 3D etc.) contained over 500 items including a staggering 88 playable consoles and arcade games!

And believe me, whoever curated this exhibit was no slouch to game history and the landmark games from each era.

The above snap shows Barbarian playable on an Amstrad!?! I was in hog heaven as I effortlessly demoed the 1-hit kill move to Jim almost 30 years since I had last played.

I would go on to play PC-Engine, MSX (!!), C-64 and countless other gems, including…

Tempest 2000 on a Jaguar! Jim got in on the action as well:

That’s him playing an Amiga for the first time. The game? Turrican!

Here’s a cute display:

That’s Bubble Bobble demonstrated on 4 different machines. A fifth was playable adjacent to this display.

I also went a bit menerk when I found Thunderforce III playable for Mega Drive. It was as if this exhibit was custom designed for me!

Oh and the relics! They ranged from breathtaking original working Space Invaders Deluxe cocktail cabinets:

To displays of rare game merchandise:

To awesomely nostalgic game packaging:

And to stuff bizarre beyond words:

There was so much to see and play, from Odyssey to iOS and Wii U. Superb beyond my mere words, this exhibit was one memory after another. As I got to this screen on my first man:

In this game:

I knew my visit to the ~~boooooring~~ Museum of Civilization was one I’d probably remember forever 🙂

Oh yes, and later in the day we saw this:

Gotta run! Fireworks 🙂

Posted in Animals, Art, Food, Games, Otaku, Tech, Time, Toys, Trip | Comments Closed

In The Fight Between 2 Geezers And Montreal… The Sun Wins!

Thursday, August 8th, 2013

Today, after a very early start, we took the subway to the 1976 Olympics location. Although the stadium and other venues are still there, our destination was the Biodome, which is a sort of indoor zoo.

That’s Jim with one of the locals.

The Biodome contains 4 ‘biomes’, which are separate habitats that represent three parts of Canada and… well the fourth is tropical rainforest! Each is very large and has controlled temperature and a variety of animals and plants to see. It’s very impressive.

Here are shots from the rainforest section:

And the Canadian wilderness section (can you see the beaver swimming?):

And the Canadian Atlantic coast:

That’s a sturgeon Jim is admiring. The massive tank (which has surface viewing as well) is full of them. Me; I’m pointing to an evil fish. Don’t believe me…?

Maybe he has a good heart?

The final section was arctic, which meant the animals (birds) were behind glass in their cooled enclosures. The penguins were particularly popular with the visitors:

All in all, the Biodome is a very impressive place to spend a couple of hours, and you should visit if you’re in town.

The ~~lovely filly~~ concierge at our hotel had recommended the botanical gardens to me yesterday, and since it was a hop and a skip from the Biidome we hopped (and skipped) over.

The entry cost included the intriguing ‘Insectarium’ and it was this that we visited first.

What a surprise! This was an amazing collection of insects (most dead, but many alive) from all over the world sorted by family of colour or habitat or diet etc., etc. There were thousands to admire, and the presentation was as good as any I have seen.

(Yes, that’s my hand!)

Perhaps the highlight was an ingenious display of leaf cutter ants, crafted in such a way as to give guests the chance to watch them harvest and then carry leave pieces to their nests:

Awesome stuff! In my opinion, the insectarium alone made the ticket worthwhile, and we hasn’t even really entered the gardens themselves…

Anyway the Gardens are where it’s at here in Montreal right now, because of a topiary art installation. You know what that is: sculpture from plants. They can draw big crowds for this stuff?

I’m going to cut right to the chase:

The ‘Tree of Birds’! 16 feet high, 18 feet wide, dozens of tonnes and 56 birds all made with plants (over an aluminium frame, of course).

It was – and I’m not a big fan of this word – amazing!

But wait…..

Look at her! Gaia, The Earth Mother, rising 5 meters tall, deer in one hand and a waterfall in the other, all made of plants. It was awesome.

All told there were over 50 of these sculptures, ranging from ‘better than anything I could ever do’ to ‘difficult to believe it’s even possible’. Here’s a few more examples:

I was a particular fan of the orangutan, which very effectively used a type of brown grass for the fur. Needless to say, this exhibit (and the gardens overall) was absolutely worth seeing.

Did you see the bright sun in those photos? Well it saw us, especially the fact we had no sunscreen on since when we left the hotel rain was forecast.

My plan to stave off the inevitable sunburn by applying sunscreen after hours in the hot sun seems to have failed. In the afternoon we went for a walk around Old Montreal, but clearly by that point we had been ruined by a mixture of sunstroke and dehydration, and if it wasn’t for the (no joke!) over 2 hours of post carding and blogging I may have fallen asleep at 8:30 like Jim did 🙂

Posted in Animals, Family, Food, Garden, Miscellaneous, Nature, Pets, Trip | 2 Comments »

Sweet & Petite

Sunday, July 7th, 2013

Remember how we sponsored a duck at a nearby animal sanctuary? Yesterday, for the first time, we went to visit her!

Patito is a mallard, and she’s tiny. She lives in a lovely enclosure with her friend Pip and two other ducks. Here’s Patito and Pip:

Look how mini she is! We were taken to see her by one of the volunteers who told us how feisty and noisy Patito was. She didn’t disappoint, quacking endlessly as we held and patted her:

Here she is undoing KLS’s shoelaces with her beak:

It was great to finally meet ‘our’ little duck, and we feel even better about the work being done by the sanctuary. It’s good to know little Patito is healthy and happy and in good hands 🙂

Posted in Animals, Miscellaneous, Nature, Pets | 1 Comment »

Deer

Thursday, June 13th, 2013

We fled the Tokyo rain and headed west to Kyoto, 500 km distant or 2.5 hours on the bullet train. The trip looked like this:

As soon as we arrived we 2-hit-combo’d onto a second (and very nice!) express train for the scenic city of Nara.

Here’s what we found in Nara:

They are everywhere! In front of you, behind you, even above you (if for some reason you are in a dungeon under Nara). They are Japanese Sika deer, and they have lived free in Nara for over 1000 years. Intensely fearless and curious, they swarm tourists hoping to get ‘deer biscuits’ sold by vendors:

I had just finished handing out biscuits to some deer before taking the above shot. Look closely to see the deer trying to eat the tourist guide in my pocket! I even had deer nibble on my shirt and shoelaces!

Of course Nara isn’t just about Deer… It’s also about school children on school trips:

I jest (although school kids outnumber even the deer). Nara is about sights like Todaiji temple:

Which contained this gargantuan statue:

Or the nearby shrine with 1000 stone lanterns:

Oh, a deer photobombed me.

The heat was intense today; a maximum of 95 degrees. We spent about 6 hours outdoors, and unsurprisingly this was tiring to this group of nonstop tourists. Upon eventually arriving back to our (western!) hotel in Kyoto, the sleep was bliss 🙂

Posted in Animals, Trip | 1 Comment »

Here Comes The Rain…

Tuesday, June 11th, 2013

The destination for the day was Enoshima Island via the Great Buddha statue in Kamakura. After training it (~70 minutes) to the area, we hiked up and down a mountain for a bit:

This was part of the ‘Daibutsu hiking course’ and eventually led us to a wonderful little shrine and rest stop..,

At which KLS cooled herself…

And we met a cat!

As you can see, the grizzled beast was quite popular 🙂

A bit further on we reached Zentairi (sp?), a famous shrine said to increase the fortunes of anyone who washes money in its spring waters. The place was full of school children.

Eventually, after some Kamakura ‘boulevarding’, we reached the famous great Daibutsu statue:

It’s almost 800 years old, was cast in 30 pieces and is hollow (we went inside). A light rain had started to fall by now, and we were resting whenever it was convenient:

Oh, we saw squirrels yesterday!! I saw the first climbing bamboo but the second was on the street in Kamakura. He was very curious and came right up to a small crowd of people:

Look how brown and wooly he is! How cute!

After the train, at Enoshima station, we found too women posing a Woody revoltech figurine in a manner indicative of the ‘Hentai Woody’ meme! (Google search at your own risk, btw):

I trust Bernard will post a good close up photo of Woody 🙂

That’s Enoshima island, which is as beautiful as we remembered. We slowly made our way up the island, and Bernard and I went to the top of the Sea Candle tower for a panoramic view:

And then… the rains came! Finally, the two (B was paying me to carry his…) umbrellas I had carried for 5 hours came in useful! On the top of the island, without climbing down the other side to see the dragon cave, we started the long, wet trek back:

Posted in Animals, Nature, Trip | Comments Closed

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