McGill University is the premier English-speaking university in Montreal, and has the most Ivy-ish architecture of any Canadian university I've seen: Photo. The main professor I know there is now Vice-Provost and already told me he'll be frightfully busy, but there's another faculty member there whom I've met before and can visit.

Looking the other way, the street goes into the downtown business section, with modern architecture like ScotiaBank here. The McGill bookstore is on the right in that photo. At the front entrance before the stairs to the main part is a big Obama display. The signs for each section and shelf of the bookstore have French above English, per custom if not law, but all the books here are in English. My photo of the front entrance to McGill shows Mont-Royal in the background. The famous cross is out of the photo to the right, but does the aerial here look like a pitchfork to give the devil equal time? A Princeton friend of mine named Narendra Subramanian is an Assoc. Prof. of Politics at McGill and works in the building with the green roof---I left him a note and he called me just now. He and I met up in England in 1980 when I saw Oxford for the first time---he's giving a talk Thursday at UCLA on race and the election, and was glad to learn about this graph which I saw via FiveThirtyEight.com.

Montreal has a lot of modern art on the street, more than Buffalo or even NYC. The Laurentian Bank Plaza already has a Monument a` la crise e'conomique de 2008--09. Non!! You can read more about it here or here.

Then I went into La Ville Souterraine---think Minneapolis skyways but connected underground and with more levels, as in this photo of the Eaton Centre. At the bottom is the eatin' centre---the biggest food court I've ever seen: 20-30 eateries and choc-a-bloc with people at 12:30pm! This one grabbed me: Au Vieux Duluth. I asked why a Greek place in a French-speaking city was named after a city in Minnesota, but they said it's named after Rue Duluth, "the oldest street in the city"! Many pictures of it and the area south of my apt. are here. I had chicken souvlaki with frites and salad.

Then I took the metro to go to Montreal's school board, which is right near the Olympic Complex and Biodome. My photo. Besides the Biodome I inquired about swimming at the Olympic pool complex, which is open to the public weekends 1-4pm. Only adults may use the Olympic pool, but there is a recreational pool not seen in my photo which is allowed for all. The diving boards are subscription/lessons-only. I took a video and posted it using the new free Google Videos service, which is intended to compete with YouTube and allows more flexibility in setting frame-size and other parameters for direct links. The graininess is due to my camera (steam/focus?), not to the compression used by Google. Finally, near the CSDM school office building (yellow-brick behind the Esso sign) was Moe's Steakhouse advertising a Super Bowl party!