Traveling Through the Biodome and Traveling with New Friends

Today included a journey through three different ecosystems, a four-hour wait in line to see said ecosystems, and a trip through the dark past of my Jewish heritage. All in all, it was an exciting and expansive day. To the great relief of my mental state while waiting in that line (it was Montreal Museum Day and free museums equates to disturbingly long lines) I was joined by a fellow Magellanite, Jess, who just happened to have picked the same dates and city as me. After a sweltering wait in the heat and beaming sun, we were welcomed into the ecosystem of the tropics. Almost a cruel joke to leave the heat of outside, enter the air-conditioned lobby, and return to an even more hot and humid area, Jess joked that making the tropical ecosystem the first upon entry a design flaw.

After journeying through the humid heat of the tropics, the next ecosystem of the Biodome was a Laurentian Maple Forest that was thankfully cooler. In each of the ecosystems, we were surprised to see as many animals as we did. We had both thought the Biodome was part arboretum and part greenhouse, we had no idea that actual animals were present and we were happy to find out that we had stepped into a miniature zoo as well.

After our minor bout of dehydration and sunburn (some people suffered more than I did), we ate at a diner, realized our trip to the Biodome had hemorrhaged our time more than expected for the day and decided we could only make one of the two museums we had wanted to go to for the rest of the day. To put the time spend waiting for and wandering through the Biodome into perspective, we started out at a little earlier than 10:00 AM, and by the time we had sat down to hydrate and eat lunch (the first time either of us had eaten anything all day up until that point) it was past 3:00 PM.

The Biodome from a distance

After drinking about a gallon of water between us, we ventured off to the Montreal Holocaust Museum. Unbeknownst to me, my new travel companion for the day turned out to be as Jewish as I am, again a pleasant surprise. While we were there, the combination of photo taking, age, and outwardly showing interest of us attracted each of the museum's docents as we passed through their territory. We engaged in a long conversation with a wonderful Jewish man whose Jewish name was Moshe. From him we learned that Montreal was the third-largest community of Holocaust survivors in the world, and that the majority of the museum's exhibits owed its physical objects from the city's own survivors. Over 20,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors live in the city to this day, and he also insisted that we learn more about the Einsatzgruppen - the roaming Nazi death squads that rendered the Baltic states "Judenfrei." The museum was very comprehensive and was very familiar to the setup of the Resistance Museums found in the Netherlands that I had visited a year prior. Coincidentally, last year I paired the Royal Zoo with the Nazi Resistance Museum, which is a little too similar to pairing the Biodome to the Montreal Holocaust Museum. I suppose I like my sordid crimes against humanity to juxtapose the company of adorable animals,

Here are the photos from the Biodome and the order of the ecosystems are from the Tropics, Laurenetian Maple Forest, Gulf of St. Lawrence, the Labrador Coast, and the Sub-Antarctic Island. I will try to identify them with their ecosystem.

Waiting in this massive line for the Biodome on its free day. (I don't know if you can tell, but that line is about seven lines deep and stretches well beyond the picture on both sides.)

The tropical ecosystem pictures:

This is just a stream

The "Ugly Fish"

Here are the photos from the Laurentian Maple Forest ecosystem:

Beaver Dam

Raccoons

Better picture of the same beaver dam

Sleeping Beavers

I think these are Lynxes

Jellyfish (they were in an annex connecting from the Maple forest to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, so I do not know where these are placed ecosystem wise.)

Gulf of St. Lawrence Photos:

Sub-Antarctic Islands Photos: 

 

 These are some random photos between the journey from the Biodome to the Montreal Holocaust Museum.

Interesting sculptures opposite of the Biodome exit

Statue honoring Jose P. Rizal in a park on the way to the Montreal Holocaust Museum on Cote-Sainte-Catherine

English inscription of the Rizal statue.

Here are the photos from the Montreal Holocaust Museum:

  

  

Map of German territorial expansion they accomplished without going to war.

Bull Sculpture in front of the Segal Theater

Segal Theater that performs plays in Hebrew and Yiddish and is located right across from the Montreal Holocaust Museum and Jewish Library (the oldest Jewish library in North America).

My new friend of the day Jess and I take a selfie before we part ways on the metro.