Sunday, December 15th started with a visit to the National Gallery of Canada. I should go more often, especially as I live barely four kilometres away — and anyhow, the times are such that reminders are sometimes needed that Canada is worthy of preserving. The gallery’s ghostly Rideau Chapel, where disembodied voices sing and whisper, never falls out of vogue. And the permanent displays of Canadian art captures landscapes and faces, and how each leaves a mark on the other.
Christmas shopping at the gallery’s gift shop completed, I thought of having lunch across the street at the Notre-Dame Cathedral’s café. The lady behind the counter in a very floral dress and carefully braided hair told me I could get a hot drink for take-away, but otherwise they were closed for a post-Mass function. So, I drove a little further down the street to the Irish. St. Brigid’s is a tough, shuttered church on an even tougher corner in Ottawa’s Lowertown. There’s nothing to signal that a pub called St. Brigid’s Well exists in the old church basement, except for a little blue light bulb that shines when they’re open. I asked the bartender — who was more Canadian than Irish, but tried — why there wasn’t a sign on the door. “We like to keep it kinda private,” he said. “Those who need to know, know.”
The Continental deli was a short walk from there. I’ve gone irregularly for the past twenty years and the Polish owner knows me, and what to sell me. I had in mind Hungarian Christmas candy (Szaloncukor), but she quickly convinced me about a block of chestnut puree and smoked sausage, both Hungarian. Bagged biscuits from the town of Gyõr were next on her list, but I resisted and called it a day.
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