A Surprise Closing and a Surprise Show

Unfortunately this has been sitting as a draft for about a month due to some laptop troubles with the laptop I took with me to Montreal. This day, I had a singular purpose. It was to visit a well-known and highly recommended fur store called Dubarry Furriers. The shop has a great story of being a passion shared by father and son and being a family-owned furrier for two generations. While that is relatively short span for a city celebrating its 300 year anniversary this year, two generations of performing a highly specialized and slowly dying business that competes against dozens of other boutique stores thousands of mass produced fake furs is still an accomplishment. Even better, their prices are superb according to everyone who has every recorded a customer review on the internet, and their quality is supposedly equally unmatched. With the great reputation, prices, and after checking their hours twice, I set out for Viex Montreal to visit their store. 

Along the way, I passed the Notre-Dame Basilica and stood in awe of its grandeur...and also had to constantly stop as dozens of horse-drawn carriages clogged the road shuttling tourists. I took advantage to take a few photos of the basilica's facade and the courtyard while I was there, and made my way to the shop. Only, when I got there, it was closed with no signs of life in the building. I had checked the hours twice! My first thought was "how unprofessional, a store in the US actually keeps their posted hours!" After my couple moments of anger-laced disappointment, I decided to try again another day, and after I talked to my host, I learned the trick is to always call the store to make sure since Montreal stores' posted hours are not as sacrosanct as they are here. 

Since my main objective had been thwarted, I decided to take the opportunity to walk around the harbor area and among the more touristy shops in Old Montreal and happened to notice a large group of people gathering in front of a huge tent with smaller white tents in front of them. Curiously, I approached the large grouping of people and found out that I had happened across a performance of Cirque du Soleil that was about to start in about thirty minutes. Considering how thrifty I had been thus far, I thought I would take advantage to see a show that I would never see in the United States. So a trip to the fur store to interview a second-generation furrier turned into a day of Cique du Soleil, after three years, I suppose I have become a full-fledged Magellanite by seizing an unplanned opportunity. The show was named Volta, and despite the whole performance being in French (sans subtitles of any sort), I managed to understand a great deal of what was going on in the show. Of course, I was not so confident in my interpretation until I wasted spent $30 on the program that was in both English and French. 

You never know what you're going to run into, and even if you leave with a plan, I have learned to be flexible to enjoy the things I happen to find. Today was one of those days were "nothing went right" but the day went better than expected.

Here are a few photos of the facade of the Notre-Dame Basilica and the square.

The grand majority of the remaining picture are of the Cirque du Soleil show. Unsurprisingly, it is pretty difficult to get good still images of constantly moving acrobats. Even still, since video was adamantly banned, I tried my best...

These photos were taken along the harbor. You can see the dome of the Marche Bonsecours that I am enamored with in the background.

This is the back of the Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel which I have earlier photos of.
(It looks much more impressive from the back facing the harbor)

I actually don't know what this is, but it's a nice looking clock tower.