Lost At Lunch Hour

What do you do on your lunch hour when you work downtown?

Well, there are so many possibilities.

There are stores, many, many stores. So sometimes I will walk around and look at stores. The problem, though, is this. Many of these stores are small boutiques. And they don’t get too many shoppers. So the salespeople, they hover. They sit there, or stand around, and when you walk in the assault you. “can I help you?” they so unhelpfully ask. Or, this being Quebec, “Recherchez-vous quelque chose particulier ?” Oui, I say, watching them get excited. Je cherche ma femme, mais elle n’est pas ici. I am looking for my wife, but she is not here.

Prices tend to be very high in these boutiques. I could buy a new shirt for $175.00. Well, it’s a nice shirt.

When I’m not in the mood for salespeople, then I can pick a particular store, usually a big one, and spend my entire lunch hour there. The Bay is good. I look at men’s wear, but I don’t buy anything. I like looking at hats. Sometimes I try some on. Or else I look at jewellery. Jewellery? Yes. I’ve bought one or two pieces there, so I’ve delevoped a sort of weird familiarity with the jewellery department. Or I go up and look at electronics, but I don’t understand much of what they sell anymore.

If not the Bay I go to HMV superstore. I was much more interested in going there a few years ago, when I first came to this city. It’s not the best music store I’ve ever been to, but it’s one of the better ones, with not just the most obvious titles, and upstairs they have a jazz department, and a classical department, and they are across a narrow corridor from each other, and each one plays its own music, and they are completely soundproofed, so you can’t hear jazz from the classical section, or classical from the jazz section, and I guess everyone is happy. I like to go up there and walk back and forth from one to the other; it’s better than drugs.

Not that I would know…

They have museums, the Redpath Museum has rocks and minerals, and there is the Fine Arts Museum, and there are others if I want to spend money. But you can only go to the museums so many times before it gets kind of stale.

Not too many parks downtown, though there are few small squares, and they are not particularly quiet, and not too much quiet altogether, though for someone who has music on whenever I’m awake, I suppose I could be accused of disingenuousness for speaking of quiet. But back in Boucherville, I liked the quiet, I would go out at lunch time and walk along the St. Lawrence River, and enjoy the peace.

So I go out, and I explore: McGill, Cresent Avenue with its small galleries, The Concordia Bookstore. And not that it’s winter I explore the Underground City, the Cours de Mont Royal, the underground shopping malls. I walk from the Peel Metro station to the McGill Metro station, but when I walk back, I always end up at McGill again. This is a weird kind of maze they’ve concocted. So my challenge is to do the round trip without resorting the to actual Metro to get back.

And once I figure it out I will go into the breadcrumb business…