curiousers under way

Part 5 - Oppy

After breakfast the next day, Licia, Miguel and I walked over to Denny's apartment building to collect Sam.

'I got another e-mail last night,' Licia told us. '"dear empress licia hu help us find our mother."' She looked at Miguel suspiciously.

Miguel laughed. 'Don't look at me. I didn't send it.'

'Not me, either,' I said. 'Somebody is playing tricks.'

Denny buzzed us through the front door and we took the elevator to his apartment on the top floor.

Sam was overjoyed to see us. He was practically hopping up and down with excitement. He was wearing clothes, two sizes too big for him, that Denny must have bought decades ago, including bell bottom jeans.

Denny gave us a bunch of bus tickets and handed Licia his debit card and we set off on the great Canadian shopping expedition. It really was an adventure for Sam but it was fun for the rest of us too. I had no idea where anything was in Ottawa, having arrived from Toronto only a few months earlier, and only Licia knew anything about the bus service, O-C Transpo.

We found seats at the front of a double-decker bus. Sam was amazed by the absence of horses, the wide straight roads and the volume and speed of the traffic.

'Cor, dat lorry's huge!' he exclaimed as a 16 wheel tractor trailer overtook the bus on the 417 highway. We told him it was called a truck. 'And why are we driving on d' wrong side of d' road?'

We first went to Bayshore shopping centre where the stores were all inside a huge building that Sam said was bigger than a cathedral. It was full of people shopping for stuff at the holidays sales. And it was hot. We had to carry our parkas. Sam was enchanted by the three shopping levels with escalators and elevators going in all directions. It was so much fun we almost forgot why we were there but by then we were hungry so we found the food court and ordered ice cream cones. We let Sam pay for his own cone so that he could get familiar with the coins that Denny had given him.

'So four quarters is one loonie an' d' big un is a toonie. An' dis little one is a dime. It looks like a tanner. Dat's sixpence.'

'You got it, Sam,' Miguel said. 'You can forget all those British coins. They don't even have them in Britain now.'

'D'yuh mean dey don't 'av farvings or pennies or shillings?'

'Not since Britain changed to the decimal system. But, they still use pounds instead of Euros.'

'What's a Euro?'

'Most of Europe, like Germany, France, Italy and Spain use a common currency called the Euro. So Pesos, Francs and Deutchmarks are obsolete,' Miguel told him.

Meanwhile, Licia had been checking some sale flyers and decided we would get better deals at another shopping centre.

So we took a bus to College Square where the stores were spread out around a vast parking lot and we had to walk outside to get from store to store. (Sam called them shops).

By late afternoon, we had bought Sam a parka and shirts, socks, cargo pants (Sam didn't want to wear trousers with a girl's name, jeans, and he thought the extra pockets would be useful for holding his spanners, which we figured meant wrenches), winter boots and splash pants, two pair of running shoes and a variety of underwear. We had to explain that we didn't say 'trousers,' and 'pants' were not underwear. When he tried on a pair of cargo pants, he was totally bemused by Velcro and the absence of buttons. We had to stop him from pulling the zipper up and down just to see how it worked.