Just a short stroll from Byward Market is Sussex Street to its north, a street replete with one storefront after another boasting designer and formal haute couture representing the elite offerings of retail studios of some of the capital's well-known and extremely costly apparel designers. For the area's hoi-poloi, a glimpse at what the social and financial elite shop for. A leisurely stroll from there takes one in about ten minutes to the environs of Parliament Hill.

And there's a venue that's generally surfeit with tourists, with tourism buses crowding the sides of the street, a colourfully energetic landscape. There, in prime real estate, is located as well some architecturally-striking embassies. They provide quite the contrast to the neo-Gothic appearance of Canada's majestic parliament buildings.

At the Market itself, throngs gather to walk and to gawk, to park themselves at various venues like coffee houses, restaurants, and drinking establishments. There are shops selling everything from fresh sausages to work and leisure clothing, to organically-produced cosmetics. There, people push their infants in strollers, walk their dogs, ambulate in wheelchairs and come across the occasional panhandler, and a whole whack of buskers in performance mode.

The cafe patios that extend onto sidewalks clearly unable to cater to the numbers that congregate at their popular sites on spring and summer evenings and far more so on live-easy summer week-ends, have taken to developing their flat roofs to offer additional seating, dining and gawking space.

A domestic horse breeder that once had stables in the Byward Market has never left the area, but presents now in a different guise, taking advantage of the tourist- and local-popularity-venue, to offer horse-drawn cart perambulations through the Market, along Sussex Drive and elsewhere, along the Rideau Canal to entertain those interested in taking advantage of their services.

It is quite the place to come across, dazzling in its social-gathering opportunities, offering a bit of respite from the ordinary world we live in, of sameness and comfortable habit.