If I could be allowed to live today over again, but with the benefit of hindsight, I'd probably spend it more profitably; but then, if I just lived here, I wouldn't need to be repeating days because there would still be tomorrow waiting to be used. As it is, I have to get on a train out of here at 9:30 tomorrow morning.

I went to the Musée de Château Ramezay in Old Montreal in the morning, one of the few places that was going to be open today (I was happy to find that Canadians too have Boxing Day. There's no such thing in the United States). It was a little disappointing - some historical objects and a lot of pictures, but the labelling wasn't so great, and as someone who knows almost nothing about Quebecois or Canadian history I was really struggling to put the information there was into a comprehensible framework. It's interesting to find that having a bilingual country doesn't guarantee that translations will be of a good standard - the information in this case was evidently written in French and translated into English, as you'd expect in Quebec, but the English was full of oddities. I particularly liked the suit of clothing labelled in French "Costume d'homme" and translated into English as "Man suit."


Afterwards I walked around for a bit and then had lunch at a Taiwanese vegetarian restaurant, Yuan. Their hot & sour soup was great, and the spring roll was good, but the main part of the lunch set (crunchy fillet of fake fish, vegetables, and black rice) was just passable. It was OK, it just didn't have much flavour.

I then made the mistake of venturing underground. It was nasty down there. You should never shop on Boxing Day - it's worth paying full price just to avoid it. I needed some clothes, a bag, and some things to take to people - but I failed to get anything except a basic sweater before the frenzy and my inability to navigate underground drove me back to the surface.

This evening I took the metro up to Petite Italie to discover that the pizza restaurant I wanted to eat in was closed. I started walking back down Blvd. St. Denis as a last wild trek before leaving, but then I came across the entrance to a metro station and decided to call it a day.