This weekend Montreal is finally shaking of the last vestiges of a cold-rainy spring - except that it’s almost raining now. But realistically the weather doesn’t matter because Montreal has entered summer fun phase.

The dog and I walked up St. Laurent yesterday. They’ve closed the street to traffic so everything’s spilling into the streets.

The restaurants have constructed terraces and now, for a short time, one can go to a fine dining restaurant and slip bread to ones dog under the table.

The stores have jam-packed racks with arbitrary prices slapped on with cardboard and string. At any point in time ten women are trying on the exact same skirt over their pants in the middle of the road.

Poker Party and Play Station have set up exhibition stands to keep the men occupied while the women peruse the shops. They don’t have a license to sell though so there’s a constant stream of dissappointed men leaving the tents empty-handed.

There’s a Formula-1 car too (it’s the Montreal race this weekend) and it was tiny. I mean how-can-a-man-fit-in-that tiny. Can someone who’s been to a race tell me whether the cars really are that small or was I seeing a mock-up?

There was also a stand for signing up for credit cards (those places go everywhere) and the young guys doing the sign up decided to try to suck me in by being nice to Meeka. Except they did it all wrong.

At the exact same time two of them jumped in front of us and shouted a disjointed chorus of ‘hey dog / what a cute dog’. Meeka lept six feet in the air and five feet horizontally across the road.

Which was full of people.

She landed next to the sunglass guy who just at that moment was trying to run down a lost sale offering, ‘ok, ok 50% off’. That sent her dashing forward dividing two teenagers holding hands very sweetly. The girl squeeled and curled into a one-legged standing fetal position of horor.

Meeka and I quickly slipped down then street leaving everyone to sort themselves out. But I heard the young guy saying, and we dissappeared into the crowd, ‘woah, wait a sec, you mean you don’t like dogs?!?’

Great work credit card guys, you’ve destroyed another budding young love.