You are a splendid butterfly

...it is your wings that make you beautiful. And I could make you fly away, but I could never make you stay."


So in my renewed new plan to Enjoy Montreal, Tom and I went to see the butterflies be free at the Botanical Gardens. First we walked to the Beijing in Chinatown for some lunch and then we took the metro to Pie-IX. At the ticket booth they told us the wait for the butterflies was an hour and a half. It was 3pm and the exhibit closes at 5pm. We bought tickets anyway and went it to see what could be done. Maybe we could see something else worth our $10 and the metro trip there. The gatekeeper told us to visit the Insectarium first and come back later. He said the wait was worthwhile and that we would be let in until 5pm anyway.

So we went to look at the bugs, living and dead. My first impression upon entering the Insectarium building (all of the different buildings are spread out on the Botanical Gardens' grounds) was: kids, noise. Elementary-school-aged children were running around, using all the interactive displays (I want to play too!) and just being themselves. But once I got into it, they didn't seem to be too much trouble. I was able to press a button and try to identify the smells that came out of a nose-sized hole (flowers, honey and a banana-scented alarm odour bees give off), weigh myself in ants (2,500,000) and match pictures of insects to their homes.

The ick-factor was quite low. I managed to watch a hive at work through glass planels without getting too grossed out at the swarm and the dead bees lying below. Also was able to peacefully observe another swarm: ants. But the one creature that I cannot, could not, look at without my entire stomach flipping over and wriggling, is the cockroach and all of its relatives. Soooo gross. I once ran in the street to get away from a roach. My first boyfriend, Alfredo, said my fear of cockroaches represented my atavical fear of poverty. Whatever, they disgust me. Tom, on the other hand, had no issues with the roach but couldn't look for one second at a big fat centipede that was lying under a rock. Whereas for me, I could have looked at it for days. I felt nothing. It just looked like a flat out snake, no biggie. He was grossed out there. As far as the kids were concerned, I only heard one little girl -who was probably too close to adolescence- saying "ooooh, gross" (in French). There was small boy, probably 4 or 5, who was crawling all over the tarantula's terrarium. He just couldn't get close enough.

Done with the Insectarium, we walked back to the Main Exhibition Greenhouse, where the butterfly display is going on until April 30. The line was nowhere near as long as we'd been led to believe. We detoured to look at Napoleon's long-lost relatives (orchids) and we amazed at how vibrant and healthy these cousins of our dead Napoleon were. Too sad. We need to buy a new one, but maybe we should start off with something simpler, like a cactus. And no pets until we're able to keep a plant alive.

There is something of a wait, but it's all in the greenhouse, so you can look at bonsais and such while-u-wait. And then it's the butterflies!

It's amazing. You walk into a room and a butterfly zooms past your face. They're on the ceiling (mesh), hanging in the trees in front of you, zipping past your knees, eating a plate of fruit among the plants, hanging in cocoons (those are moths), flitting about a waterfall's mist... So beautiful, so many of them, and so free -within the confines of this room, of course. It's a big room, and I definitely recommend the spectacle. It's fun to watch the kids knowing more than the adults, and behaving very seriously (one little girl told Tom to shush as she kneeled in observation of a feeding b-fly).

If you have ideas of more enjoyable things we can entertain ourselves with this spring, please comment. I have accomplished mission one of my return to Montreal and this is mission two, for the long haul.