Guilt Buy

I have never told you this before. Montréal has a vast underground shopping mall. The loud click you just heard was three out of my four sisters closing this web site and signing on to Travelocity (or whatever their favorite travel site is.) They are checking when the next flight is to Montréal. They don’t care about cost or other such mundane miscellanea. One of my sisters was slow on the draw. I just heard the faint click of her signing off.

Richard and I are horrible souvenir shoppers. Other than the beloved coffee cup, our souvenirs are limited to train ticket stubs, free brochures and an occasional tee shirt. But we had a purpose in Montréal. We wanted to buy napkins: the cloth variety. A queer choice for souvenirs, I admit, but we couldn’t find what we were looking for in Hood River, The Dalles or Portland, so we decided to make them our souvenir of Canada. So, we visited the Mall Below the Floor. (My name, not theirs.)

We descended into the bowels of underground Montréal. For the first three or four minutes it was kind of fun. Then it became creepy. There was no way to orient yourself to the real world. It was just shopping, unabridged shopping. There were people who looked like they had been shopping since the last decade. (Hell, since the last millennium.)

Richard claims I panicked. But I want to emphatically deny his contention that I ran around the mall screaming, “Oh my fucking god… is there a way out of this hell hole!” I’m pretty sure I said it in French, which mean, with my incredible French Canadian accent, no one understood me.

They had these wonderful floor plans all over the place. You will notice one thing. There is no “Sortie”. That is French for “Exit”.


We found our napkins. It was a successful shopping trip.

Have fun, my dear sisters!