On Tuesday morning, I awoke early. As soon as Nick was awake, I suggested that we go out and find a bagel shop and bring back bagels for breakfast. The bagel shop was located in an indoor mall that  offered a variety of things including a display of a piece of the Berlin Wall that went down in 1989.

New York bagels and Montreal bagels have some similarities but many differences. Montreal bagels are sweeter, because they are boiled in water that contains  honey. The hole is bigger, and the crust is crunchier. My family enjoyed the Montreal bagels very much. Nick and I bought a dozen, a combination of sesame, poppy, pumpkin, and plain.

When Nicholas awoke, he said he thought he was coming down with a cold. Nicholas and I both travel with a variety meds, so between us, he chose the ones he wanted.  Then he went out to the  post office, and we tried to get tickets to the show at the Basilica called The Aura Experience, an  immersive multimedia presentation that includes lasers and orchestral music. Unfortunately, there were no tickets available for any of the performances for the remaining evenings of our stay. Just as in Europe, the travel companies buy the tickets for their patrons, so it’s best to buy tickets for  anything that requires them before you leave home. Nick then worked on getting train tickets for our trip to Quebec City. There were only six left, so we  quickly booked the four that we needed.

Carla wanted to try the restaurant downstairs from our suite called Dandy. Nicholas ordered deep fried potatoes, while the rest of us choose to get ricotta pancakes topped with strawberries and maple syrup. Maple syrup is  the sweetener of choice in Canada, because it produces 70% of the world’s supply.

After eating, we walked to the central square so that Nicholas could catch up on the things the three of us had seen the day before. Then we walked down to the waterfront. We decided to go to the Montreal Museum of Archaeology and History that is located there. It’s built over the site where Montreal was founded, and it features  an underground labyrinth of of tunnels and excavations. The Museum now has an exhibit called Heroes of Greece, The Age of Troy. The exhibit aims to show both Greece’s historical reality as well as its mythology. Nearly 400 pieces from Greek museums  and archaeological sites  are on display, some of which had never left Greece before. All of us felt that it was extremely well done and worthwhile.

Nicholas had eaten  a light lunch and wanted a snack.  He made the local birds very happy when he accidentally spilled some of the popcorn he  bought. People were making use of  the zip line behind us, but we didn’t feel the need to try it.

We decided to walk in  a different direction, so we headed down Rue St. Paul.  Our suite was in a neighborhood that had few pedestrians,  but Rue St. Paul was filled with people. In fact, much of the road was closed to vehicles. There were many kinds of shops intermingled with many kinds of restaurants. We chose a Greek restaurant for dinner called Pangea, but our dinner selections were not particularly Greek. Carla ordered fish and chips, and Nick, grilled octopus. Nicholas chose truffle mac and cheese. As for me, I ordered lamb lollipops.  Our waiter told us that the chef preferred to cook the lamb to  well done. I was glad he said that, because I prefer my lamb to be medium rare. The chef prepared them as I had requested. All of our meals were absolutely delicious. I know, because I sampled each of them.

When we were last in Paris, our friend Jose-Maria told us about the large stuffed bears we spotted all around his neighborhood. He explained that a bookshop owner put them out just to make people smile. We smiled too, when we saw them in Pangea and at the Quebec City train station.

We began walking slowly back to our suite. When we were in Milan, my distant relative, Umberto, told Nick and me that people generally look at the ground floor of the buildings, so they miss the interesting architecture of the upper levels. I made a point of checking out the variety of types of construction that we saw on the upper levels. As we were walking,   we treated ourselves to pistachio gelato. Our walk along the cobblestone streets was a treat to all of our senses.

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