C' est La Vie

Sorry for the bad blogging folks. I've been a tad busy since I last posted. You see, I got MARRIED! Then we went to Montreal for our honeymoon.

I planned on coming home and blogging about the old buildings, churches, cobbled streets, open markets where you can buy roasted sausage on a STICK! But today I want to talk about cheese. Not just any cheese, but the wide array of cheese our charming hotel Le Place D'Armes put out every night at cocktail hour.

So the first night we're toasting ourselves, drinking our wine, eating our cheese, and feeling very grown up, when we see this family standing at the counter in front of the tray of cheese and its accompanying bowl of freshly sliced baguettes. ( Don't even get me started on the bread in Montreal. I still can't get the memory of focaccia bread with cheddar cheese baked into it and caramelized onions slathered on top out of my mind.) Then the young boy picks up an entire BLOCK of cheese and sets it on his plate. Husband and I fully expect the parents to give a firm correction. But the mother reaches over and starts piling slices of baguettes on top of the block of cheese. Now we're staring transfixed. Then the family actually takes the plate and LEAVES and go up to their room!



We were still talking about it when a few minutes later they come back and take more, this time sitting down to eat it. For the rest of the night we speculated. Did they eat all the cheese? Take it to another family hiding up in the hotel room? Save it for later?



The next night we perched at our table and engaged in our new favourite form of entertainment--watching the cheese tray. We elbowed each other over people who gripped the cheese with their fingers, the ones who mulled over their choices while people lined up behind them, the ones who piled their plates up then ate two bites, but our favourite was the cocktail-hour-crasher.



One side of the lounge was blocked off for a wedding and plates of yummy looking appetizers were being carried by. I drooled as they went past, but comforted myself with my brie ( so creamy, God was it good) and my red wine. Then this woman and her two friends enter the lounge and head towards the party at the back of the room, clearly guests of the wedding. One of the women pauses in front of the cheese tray and grabs a GIANT wedge, in her bare hands, and carries it over to the wedding group while she and her friends giggle.Then she sat there and proceeded to break it off into chunks and eat it. The thing that shocked us the most was that this was an older woman who looked like a university professor or something. And there she was giggling because she pilfered a free chunk of cheese on her way to a wedding reception.



We noticed this phenomena again when we we visited a bakery at the market. There were little samples of some yummy desert on the counter. We each took one, enjoyed it, but that was that. Then this woman goes up and gets one and hands each of her young daughters one, which they finish in record time. So she gives them each another one, then ANOTHER ONE!


The cheese and desert samples were there for the taking. Sure. But where do you draw the line? What do you think? Does " free" mean help yourself to as much as you want?