9 December. Day libero Montreal City.

December 10, 2018

This day would become our Christmas Shopping Day pur sang. We started the day with our usual breakfast in Olive + Gormando at Rue St Paul. We consider this as the best breakfast place in the world, in spite of the overkill in tatoes of the serving personal.

Then we headed to the Hudson Bay Shop in order to buy any and all Christmas presents for this year. Montreal QU and Vancouver BC have been in my working life my favourite shopping cities. It happened very often that I paid a working visit to these cities in December (Gerard Bos has a different story about the timing of these visits).

This time no business, except perhaps a little but for a discussion with Suzanne Paquin in the evening.

We visited Suzanne and Peter indeed and started to admire their new house, practically of the same age as the house in Amsterdam i.e. nearly 100 years. Our houses are therefore as old, or if you wish as young, as Spliethoff’s Bevrachtingskantoor, turning 100 years in 2021.

I believe we had a nice but also useful dinner. Thank you Suzanne and Peter. All going well we hope to see her again in Amsterdam in January 2019. All what we discussed will stay p&c, except for the fact that if NEAS would buy EGMONDGRACHT, I will be present for the delivery. After all my mother baptized the vessel some 25 years ago on the Merwede Yard. The first smash of the bottle of Champagne was a failure so she had to try it a second time.

Lucas, 9 years old, a son a my mother’s good friend Cary, asked her if she would not be invited anymore to baptize another vessel, after her failure to do it right the first time. She said, no of course not Lucas. Lucas started to cry. (Later I asked my mother to baptize SHAKA which made Lucas very happy, a couple of years later).

This photo I found at home showing my sister Marlien with her friend Maria de Haan made at the baptizing ceremony of mv EDMONDGRACHT at the Merwede Yard in 1993 (?).

Now I feel happy being able to write down myself these old stories (..).