Montreal and more Ottawa!

After getting a taste for busking in Ottawa, Josh and I met with my friend Sarah for a visit, and explored some better locations. We also played a show last night and it was pretty okay! We played to a crowd of about 10 people (many more showed up later, but we were the first band) and we sold two CDs, which is a not bad ratio considering. We felt pretty good about our performance. Ghostkeeper were really awesome, and I'm glad we had an opportunity to play with them.

So after the show, we retired to the hotel room my Mom was nice enough to book for us and we slept soundly. The next morning, we went to the Byward Market to go busking. We scoped the joint, and found what we thought would be the most ideal location in which to busk: a corner, where two adjacent parts of the farmers market meet, in front of a large storefront window. We set up shop, and played for no more than 2 minutes before another busker appeared, with what looked to be a permit. He informed us that only permit holders are allowed to busk, but kindly suggested some other places we could go instead. In that two minutes, we made $4...we were obviously a little sad to hear this, especially considering how successful we were obviously going to be. Keeping our chins up, we set up infront of a Lush, on a sidewalk that we figured wasn't lorded over by the market people. We were doing pretty good, and money was slowly but surely pouring into our cases. Then the rain started pouring down. We ran quickly into an overhang, when a girl who worked at Lush sheepishly asked us if we wanted to come inside and play. At first, we were pretty hesitant, but after only 15 minutes, two $5 bills were dropped into our cases. We realized we'd made the right choice. After that, the rain died down, and we went across the street back into market territory, but where there was a large overhang to protect from the rain. We made another $10 before we saw a suspicious man who scowled at us. We figured he was with the market. We looked in the direction he was walking and a sad looking mine frowned harder at us, so we left.

Then we got sandwiches with Sarah, enjoyed them very much, and headed to Montreal. When we were driving to the hostel we're at, we were using the On Star navigation function that our car has. We got to talking with one of the advisors, and turns out he's from Peterborough, and when he realized we're a band, he said he was going to come to our show there on July 8th. It was pretty random, but we hope to see him there! Driving in Montreal was, in one word, ridiculous. I've never seen so many cars come so close to colliding with each other merging. It was neat. Now we're going to get breakfast and go busk more!