Lower Town

We are staying in Lower Town, also known as Bytown (for the English soldier who invented the place). Despite it being something of a French speaking area I have yet to hear the moniker Basse-Ville but maybe that will come; a term which I seem to recall from 19th century French novels as being derogatory, with proper people living in the top town rather than the bottom town.

Bottom town rather literally in the sense that the Rideau - a substantial tributary of the Ottawa River, was running only a couple of feet below the park we visited (just off the top of the illustration to the previous post), this at a time when there is not all that much water about. Let's hope their water manager stays on the case.

Some of the residential areas - mainly rows of detached houses and semis in leafy streets - are a little run down, sitting ducks for gentrification, I would imagine, in the same way as places like Clapham North in south London. Interestingly, here as elsewhere in Ottawa, the houses are all a bit different from each other, rather than getting swathes of identical houses as we do in London.

The old market area, I think a retail market rather than a wholesale market like Covent Garden, has been prettified. There are still some market stalls, some even run by people who grow things, but there are also a lot of shops selling fancy souvenirs and pretty & expensive trinkets to put in your house or wardrobe. There were also a couple of fancy cheese shops, from one of which we got the couple of segments of Oka cheese illustrated above, originally made by Trappists in Quebec. The pale one was rather good, something like a Brie or a Camembert. We have yet to try the dark one.

Lots of bars and restaurants, with our taking quite decent pizza at a place called the Grand at some point. See http://www.thegrandpizzeria.com/.

The bread and biscuits came from the Rideau Street bakery, which also functioned as a snack bar, with us snacking off a fine apple strudel. They also knew about kosher. The bread came with carraway seeds and was made from rye, quite pale, quite like the rye I remember once getting from a bakery, long gone, in London's Brick Lane. Very good when fresh, a touch heavy when a few days old, but still quite eatable.

A lot of fruit and vegetables sold from little cubic baskets, rather in the way that we sell the same sort of stuff from bowls. The blue milk is their version of semi-skimmed, here called 2% and confusingly colour coded blue rather than green,