Okay. After a goods night rest and dreams about shooting people with guns, it's time to make our next move.
And since you keep asking for it, the next stop on our North American journey will be Montreal!
Just another 37 odd-ish hours from the Canyon. Easy.
[img]https://lpix.org/4918169/hiro.png[img]: Phew, we finally arrived.
Well. This is a nice looking place. It appears we are in the middle of the Montreal Botanic Gardens, or, ‘Jardin Botanique’ - which sounds much fancier because it’s French.
[img]https://lpix.org/4918169/hiro.png[img]: Hmm, I can really feel the history. It's no wonder it's called the Bali of North America. There is a case.
I had to take pause at this. Bali of North America?
What an odd thing to say. Bali is a tropical island in Indonesia, a popular tourist destination in the Southern Hemisphere.
I'm Australian, so I associate Bali with beautiful landscapes ruined by bogan drunk aussies there for the cheap piss and massages, but the main vibe it has going about it is ‘Tropical Paradise’
Now I've been to Montreal, and it was an amazing place, full of beautiful colonial history, french European influence and very romantic. But it was far from ‘Tropical Paradise’
I would have thought the North American Bali would have been the Caribbean islands or something. Maybe this was a mistranslation?
Anyway, we are once again blessed with some new banging soothing synth music we haven't heard until now. They really went all out on this. I swear this could be straight out of a 90’s family sitcom.
Montreal seems like a cool place. Perhaps we can find a part time job here?
: I wonder if they'll use it at that Japanese restaurant over there. Let's go.
A Japanese restaurant you say? Why, Hiro's Japanese. This is a match made in heaven...
Ooh a teppanyaki restaurant. This looks authentically Japanese. There’s even a Japanese Chef here!
:
Welcome!
[img]https://lpix.org/4918169/hiro.png[img]: Well, I'm Japanese. Can I get a part-time job here?
:
What? It's a part-time job.
:
Where do you think you are?
:
It's a top-class Japanese restaurant called "Katsura."
:
You can only work here after 10 years of training
.
:
If you're just a chef, then hurry up!
:
Please don't say that and just use it.
:
No, no, I'll tell you!
Oh, we're back at the Botanic Gardens. Did we get kicked out of the Restaurant?
I guess just ‘being Japanese’ isn't enough to get us hired. Hiro actually needs to, you know, understand how to cook and stuff.
But what does that guy know anyway? We know that Hiro almost decided to drop this whole car racing thing and become Food Champ in the last game!
Anyway…
That was an odd little interaction that didn't seem to go anywhere. I wonder if we'll find our way back there for some reason? We can go back now, but it repeats the same dialog.
I was intrigued by the fact the game both explicitly called out the restaurant by name and implied it was a high quality restaurant, so I got to Googling.
And though it doesn't exist anymore, there indeed was a Japanese restaurant called Katsura in Montreal in the 90’s, and I read several people on Reddit and Facebook reminiscing about it.
I wonder if this whole sequence is just a shout out to a restaurant the devs enjoyed, or if it was a family member / friends business?