Quebec City!
Apr. 21st, 2014 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sinnatiousRolling right along with the travel posts, we venture into colder territory - CANADA.
More specifically, Quebec City.
I had crossed seven borders at this point and been waved through without a care (even in Japan with my extended stay) until I got to Quebec City, which decided to do the whole interrogation and rifle-through-the-suitcase thing. There was no real concern because I knew I wasn't carrying anything remotely contraband, but jeeeez did it give me a helluva lousy first impression of Quebec. Luckily I had been playing some Papers, Please on my laptop in Chicago which has given me a whole new world of empathy for immigration agents.
In any case, I was staying with a friend in Quebec, and since I got in on a Friday night, bright and early Saturday morning we went to his favourite bakery.
There are bakeries all over Quebec City. Chocaltiers too, they are ridiculously prevalent. French patisseries, guys! The food was so so good. The best one out of this set was definitely the pear-thing, I have no idea of what its actual name was. My friend speaks reasonably fluent French so for the vast majority of transactions I was content to sit back and let him speak and avoid outing us as filthy, filthy tourists.
French Canada really is Europe on training wheels. Most people, especially in the tourist areas, spoke English fluently, but much like the Parisian French preferred not to speak it and were a lot nicer to you if you at least attempted French before they took pity on you and switched to English.
The architecture was also very European, and the fresh snow everywhere gave the whole city a very fairytale look. This is the central train station.
We mostly wandered around the old city, within the walls. Quebec sprawls out into much more typical suburbs further out, but the inner city is ridiculously charming, even in sub-zero temperatures.
Feels like a movie set in some parts, really.
There's plenty of chocolatiers, and art galleries, and souvenir shops - all the usual hallmarks of a touristy area, but the best part is just waltzing along all the old narrow streets and looking at the buildings.
There were also a string of ice sculptures in the pedestrian areas! There had been a couple of days where the temperature climbed above freezing so the sculptures had begun to lose some of their definition but were still pretty cool!
That day actually wasn't too bad in terms of temperature either - only a couple of degrees below zero. Ahahaha how quickly that became tolerable. I got much much better at layering throughout Japan and Chicago, and by this point had a warm scarf and hat and gloves that weren't entirely ornamental, even if they fell short of mittens. Also when it got really cold, I was introduced to the concept of 'hot pockets', these little satchels that when exposed to air start off a chemical reaction that gives off heat for up to about seven hours? On the really cold days I stuck a pair in my shoes and some in my gloves and that made everything so much more bearable. Can't do much about the face, tragically, but bury your nose in your scarf against the wind and hope for the best.
Being a Saturday, it was pretty busy. A surprising number of other tourists and tour groups, which caught me by surprise - I'd never really considered Quebec City a tourism destination until I had a friend move there and spruik the place aggressively. Apparently their Winter Festival is quite excellent though. And I was constantly told about how amazing it is in Spring. Except this was the middle of March it was supposed to be Spring, dammit.
After wandering the old town for a while, we caught the ferry across the river to the south side.
The St Lawrence was frozen, but not so much that the ferry couldn't break through the ice to cross the river. It was definitely one of the coolest sights ever though, seeing these giant slabs of ice floating around the river and crunching up against each other to make way for the ferry.
There were some people canoeing across the river. They would pull their boat up onto the ice and run it across until they found a gap to get back into the water. Seems like a kind of extremely dangerous sport, since one wrong step and BOOM, instant hypothermia!
There wasn't a great deal of interest over on the south side beyond a neat chocolatier and a cool view of the north shore, so we headed back after a while in search of lunch.
Le Grand Château, from the shore, with the Quebec flag in the foreground. I'd thought the fleur de lis was a Louisiana thing, but given its prevalence in Quebec, to the point of being on its flag, I'm thinking that it's maybe just a French thing. The Château is where they planned D-Day apparently. Makes sense, geographical proximity to the United States, English colony, historically French area, as close as you can get to neutral ground for three major allies. Quebec is a pretty interesting place in that respect.
We finally located some lunch. Seafood chowder pie. So amazing.
They had a bunch of little electric-powered buses roaming Quebec, they made the best sounds and were cute as hell to boot. Never actually had an excuse to ride one, tragically. One interesting thing though, bus fares in Canada appear to all be flat-fee - three bucks to ride, no matter how far you're going.
We headed up to the Grand Château via a weird diagonal elevator. Up top they had a toboggan and some stalls and whatnot. They also had a sugar shack!
A sugar shack is where they lay out a string of pure maple syrup on the snow, which freezes it, then you can roll it up on a stick like taffy! Pretty tasty, more or less pure sugar really. The maple syrup we have in Australia does not even come close to comparing to the fresh stuff they have in Canada. Canada is very serious about maple syrup. Understandable, I guess, when you consider their flag is a maple leaf.
I gathered a bit of a crowd who watched and all ooohed and ahhhed when I muddled my way through rolling it up, none of them were brave enough to try it for themselves I guess.
Check it out, Quebec City is actually a walled city, here's one of the 'gates'. Surprising when you consider it's not really more than 300 years old. Walled cities were a thing even that recently?
Parliament House. Note the Quebec flag again. I don't think I saw a single Canadian flag in Quebec City, it was all the state flag.
Separation is actually totally serious in Quebec! Heh, we wound up going to a party that night at a self-professed separatist's house, she was very insistent that everyone spoke French! (I got a free pass as a tourist and for at least attempting to communicate a little bit in my very very basic French). It's a pretty interesting notion - could Quebec survive as its own independent nation? But Quebec itself is very very different from the rest of Canada.
After the party though we went back and played Rayman Legends. Has anyone else played any of the more recent Rayman games? They're amazing if you like a challenging platformer.
On the Sunday we wandered the area a bit more. This is the exterior of Quebec City's Notre Dame.
Pretty crazy and lavish inside. I think it might be one of the few actually functional churches in Quebec - the area is incredibly secular, most other churches we passed had been converted into libraries or public buildings or concert halls. I also learned a few Quebecois swear words - all derived from Christian things, such as 'chalice' and about the very worst is 'tabernac' (aka tabernacle).
We had lunch at a place called 'Le Hobbit', which did fairly amazing steaks and burgers and somehow hasn't been shut down by Tolkien's estate. Then after that, we discovered there was a 'History of video games' exhibition going on at the Art Museum!
Assassin's Creed statue by the entrance. Easy to kill an entire day in that area, it's basically a giant low-cost retro arcade. A similar thing came through Brisbane a while back, we sampled a whole bunch of games, best bits were the Bubble Bobble and Dance Dance Revolution marathons. We wound up having to race through the 'modern games' section because the museum was closing and we'd spent so long in the retro area!
For dessert that night, had this amazingly weird mix between fudge, cake, and mousse. It is probably one of the most delicious things I have ever eaten.
At this place.
The next day wound up being fairly quiet - my friend headed off to work, so I mostly just wandered the immediate area, checking out stores, and then headed back early to do some much-needed chores such as laundry and job hunting and sorting out some bookings for my next destinations since it was about this point in the trip where I started doing absolutely everything by the seat of my pants with usually nothing more than a week's notice.
The next day my friend played hooky and with another acquaintance to drive we headed to Val Cartier! It's a snow slide park in Winter, and a water slide park in Summer. It was about ten below and had been lightly snowing all morning, so everything was covered in fresh powder, which actually made the slides a little slower it turns out.
To get up the hills they had a bunch of tubes hooked up to a pulley system - you plonked your butt on one and it carried you and your own tube to the top of the hill so funtimes could ensue! You go sliding down the hill on your inner tube, usually with a group of people. They also had sort of life raft boats in some of the bigger slides which took more people and were totally awesome.
I do not own snow pants, and there was little purpose in purchasing any - I'd been making it through with jeans, heattech leggings, and tall leather boots. For the most part this was fine, but not so great when you land on your butt in the snow or have to clambering over snow drifts. Also my jacket, while pretty warm, was not remotely water-proof, so had to borrow my friend's spare jacket instead, so got to look like a five-year old wearing a jacket five times too big for me. Still, completely worth it. We got an early start so the park was quite empty, filling up later in the afternoon, which was excellent for gathering more people for the snow boats.
This was genuinely terrifying. Wind and ice stinging your face, you wind up closing your eyes so they don't freeze in their sockets!
We headed back inside to defrost for lunch. Had poutine. I LOVE POUTINE. It's basically fries with cheese curds and gravy on top, which sounds really simple but you really can't skimp on the quality of any of the ingredients. Quebec's speciality, possibly the secret national dish of Canada right after maple syrup. I am amazed it's hasn't taken off elsewhere. Massively unhealthy of course, but so delicious who cares!
We redid a couple of the runs in the afternoon around Val Cartier, also tried making some snowballs and snow angels. The amount of snow in Quebec is kind of crazy.
We eventually got tired (dragging those inner tubes around is exhausting! Not to mention walking through snow is similar to walking through sand in that it tires you out extra fast) so headed back into down and had an Italian hot chocolate from the Chocolate museum which was so thick you almost needed a spoon to drink it.
Also, a squirrel! Still love squirrels.
The next day was when things started to get crazy. The temperature plummeted to something like -24 Celsius, so I slept in, ventured outside for lunch but spent most of the afternoon inside. When my friend got out of work though we went out to dinner and then he had a dodgemball tournament. Dodgemball is totally a thing in Canada still! Crazy violent game, seems dangerous for anyone with glasses, even if the balls are soft and puffy. Some of the teams got some serious velocity on those things. Mildly interesting but not really my thing.
Of course, at this point there are warnings of a blizzard and the snow is coming down hard and fast and the wind picking up when we get outside, so one of the dodgem team members offers to drive a couple of us partway home. So far so good, anything to avoid dying in that insane weather and getting buried in a snow drift. But then we turn down this steep hill... and the car starts sliding.
The guy is slamming on the brakes but he's like, 'I don't have traction!' and the road is all ice and there are people crossing the intersection at the bottom of the hill... so he steers the car into the snowdrift at the side of the road. It worked! Bumped and scraped but ground to a halt. But brush with death, jeez. Some good defensive driving in retrospect, have no idea how people handle driving in the snow.
He let us out a bit after that and we shivered the last few blocks against the wind and snow. I was so grateful for my hot pockets given my less-than-optimum winter gear. The snow got horizontal that night.
Luckily it had all finished up by morning, though it was still a pretty damn chilly -17. It was also my last day in Quebec City.
We celebrated with cakes at Le Croquembouche.
Then it was onwards to the picturesque train station, to head to Montreal! Which was honestly not that much warmer.
A lot of people asked me 'You came to Canada in March?' And I really had no defence to offer.
More specifically, Quebec City.
I had crossed seven borders at this point and been waved through without a care (even in Japan with my extended stay) until I got to Quebec City, which decided to do the whole interrogation and rifle-through-the-suitcase thing. There was no real concern because I knew I wasn't carrying anything remotely contraband, but jeeeez did it give me a helluva lousy first impression of Quebec. Luckily I had been playing some Papers, Please on my laptop in Chicago which has given me a whole new world of empathy for immigration agents.
In any case, I was staying with a friend in Quebec, and since I got in on a Friday night, bright and early Saturday morning we went to his favourite bakery.
There are bakeries all over Quebec City. Chocaltiers too, they are ridiculously prevalent. French patisseries, guys! The food was so so good. The best one out of this set was definitely the pear-thing, I have no idea of what its actual name was. My friend speaks reasonably fluent French so for the vast majority of transactions I was content to sit back and let him speak and avoid outing us as filthy, filthy tourists.
French Canada really is Europe on training wheels. Most people, especially in the tourist areas, spoke English fluently, but much like the Parisian French preferred not to speak it and were a lot nicer to you if you at least attempted French before they took pity on you and switched to English.
The architecture was also very European, and the fresh snow everywhere gave the whole city a very fairytale look. This is the central train station.
We mostly wandered around the old city, within the walls. Quebec sprawls out into much more typical suburbs further out, but the inner city is ridiculously charming, even in sub-zero temperatures.
Feels like a movie set in some parts, really.
There's plenty of chocolatiers, and art galleries, and souvenir shops - all the usual hallmarks of a touristy area, but the best part is just waltzing along all the old narrow streets and looking at the buildings.
There were also a string of ice sculptures in the pedestrian areas! There had been a couple of days where the temperature climbed above freezing so the sculptures had begun to lose some of their definition but were still pretty cool!
That day actually wasn't too bad in terms of temperature either - only a couple of degrees below zero. Ahahaha how quickly that became tolerable. I got much much better at layering throughout Japan and Chicago, and by this point had a warm scarf and hat and gloves that weren't entirely ornamental, even if they fell short of mittens. Also when it got really cold, I was introduced to the concept of 'hot pockets', these little satchels that when exposed to air start off a chemical reaction that gives off heat for up to about seven hours? On the really cold days I stuck a pair in my shoes and some in my gloves and that made everything so much more bearable. Can't do much about the face, tragically, but bury your nose in your scarf against the wind and hope for the best.
Being a Saturday, it was pretty busy. A surprising number of other tourists and tour groups, which caught me by surprise - I'd never really considered Quebec City a tourism destination until I had a friend move there and spruik the place aggressively. Apparently their Winter Festival is quite excellent though. And I was constantly told about how amazing it is in Spring. Except this was the middle of March it was supposed to be Spring, dammit.
After wandering the old town for a while, we caught the ferry across the river to the south side.
The St Lawrence was frozen, but not so much that the ferry couldn't break through the ice to cross the river. It was definitely one of the coolest sights ever though, seeing these giant slabs of ice floating around the river and crunching up against each other to make way for the ferry.
There were some people canoeing across the river. They would pull their boat up onto the ice and run it across until they found a gap to get back into the water. Seems like a kind of extremely dangerous sport, since one wrong step and BOOM, instant hypothermia!
There wasn't a great deal of interest over on the south side beyond a neat chocolatier and a cool view of the north shore, so we headed back after a while in search of lunch.
Le Grand Château, from the shore, with the Quebec flag in the foreground. I'd thought the fleur de lis was a Louisiana thing, but given its prevalence in Quebec, to the point of being on its flag, I'm thinking that it's maybe just a French thing. The Château is where they planned D-Day apparently. Makes sense, geographical proximity to the United States, English colony, historically French area, as close as you can get to neutral ground for three major allies. Quebec is a pretty interesting place in that respect.
We finally located some lunch. Seafood chowder pie. So amazing.
They had a bunch of little electric-powered buses roaming Quebec, they made the best sounds and were cute as hell to boot. Never actually had an excuse to ride one, tragically. One interesting thing though, bus fares in Canada appear to all be flat-fee - three bucks to ride, no matter how far you're going.
We headed up to the Grand Château via a weird diagonal elevator. Up top they had a toboggan and some stalls and whatnot. They also had a sugar shack!
A sugar shack is where they lay out a string of pure maple syrup on the snow, which freezes it, then you can roll it up on a stick like taffy! Pretty tasty, more or less pure sugar really. The maple syrup we have in Australia does not even come close to comparing to the fresh stuff they have in Canada. Canada is very serious about maple syrup. Understandable, I guess, when you consider their flag is a maple leaf.
I gathered a bit of a crowd who watched and all ooohed and ahhhed when I muddled my way through rolling it up, none of them were brave enough to try it for themselves I guess.
Check it out, Quebec City is actually a walled city, here's one of the 'gates'. Surprising when you consider it's not really more than 300 years old. Walled cities were a thing even that recently?
Parliament House. Note the Quebec flag again. I don't think I saw a single Canadian flag in Quebec City, it was all the state flag.
Separation is actually totally serious in Quebec! Heh, we wound up going to a party that night at a self-professed separatist's house, she was very insistent that everyone spoke French! (I got a free pass as a tourist and for at least attempting to communicate a little bit in my very very basic French). It's a pretty interesting notion - could Quebec survive as its own independent nation? But Quebec itself is very very different from the rest of Canada.
After the party though we went back and played Rayman Legends. Has anyone else played any of the more recent Rayman games? They're amazing if you like a challenging platformer.
On the Sunday we wandered the area a bit more. This is the exterior of Quebec City's Notre Dame.
Pretty crazy and lavish inside. I think it might be one of the few actually functional churches in Quebec - the area is incredibly secular, most other churches we passed had been converted into libraries or public buildings or concert halls. I also learned a few Quebecois swear words - all derived from Christian things, such as 'chalice' and about the very worst is 'tabernac' (aka tabernacle).
We had lunch at a place called 'Le Hobbit', which did fairly amazing steaks and burgers and somehow hasn't been shut down by Tolkien's estate. Then after that, we discovered there was a 'History of video games' exhibition going on at the Art Museum!
Assassin's Creed statue by the entrance. Easy to kill an entire day in that area, it's basically a giant low-cost retro arcade. A similar thing came through Brisbane a while back, we sampled a whole bunch of games, best bits were the Bubble Bobble and Dance Dance Revolution marathons. We wound up having to race through the 'modern games' section because the museum was closing and we'd spent so long in the retro area!
For dessert that night, had this amazingly weird mix between fudge, cake, and mousse. It is probably one of the most delicious things I have ever eaten.
At this place.
The next day wound up being fairly quiet - my friend headed off to work, so I mostly just wandered the immediate area, checking out stores, and then headed back early to do some much-needed chores such as laundry and job hunting and sorting out some bookings for my next destinations since it was about this point in the trip where I started doing absolutely everything by the seat of my pants with usually nothing more than a week's notice.
The next day my friend played hooky and with another acquaintance to drive we headed to Val Cartier! It's a snow slide park in Winter, and a water slide park in Summer. It was about ten below and had been lightly snowing all morning, so everything was covered in fresh powder, which actually made the slides a little slower it turns out.
To get up the hills they had a bunch of tubes hooked up to a pulley system - you plonked your butt on one and it carried you and your own tube to the top of the hill so funtimes could ensue! You go sliding down the hill on your inner tube, usually with a group of people. They also had sort of life raft boats in some of the bigger slides which took more people and were totally awesome.
I do not own snow pants, and there was little purpose in purchasing any - I'd been making it through with jeans, heattech leggings, and tall leather boots. For the most part this was fine, but not so great when you land on your butt in the snow or have to clambering over snow drifts. Also my jacket, while pretty warm, was not remotely water-proof, so had to borrow my friend's spare jacket instead, so got to look like a five-year old wearing a jacket five times too big for me. Still, completely worth it. We got an early start so the park was quite empty, filling up later in the afternoon, which was excellent for gathering more people for the snow boats.
This was genuinely terrifying. Wind and ice stinging your face, you wind up closing your eyes so they don't freeze in their sockets!
We headed back inside to defrost for lunch. Had poutine. I LOVE POUTINE. It's basically fries with cheese curds and gravy on top, which sounds really simple but you really can't skimp on the quality of any of the ingredients. Quebec's speciality, possibly the secret national dish of Canada right after maple syrup. I am amazed it's hasn't taken off elsewhere. Massively unhealthy of course, but so delicious who cares!
We redid a couple of the runs in the afternoon around Val Cartier, also tried making some snowballs and snow angels. The amount of snow in Quebec is kind of crazy.
We eventually got tired (dragging those inner tubes around is exhausting! Not to mention walking through snow is similar to walking through sand in that it tires you out extra fast) so headed back into down and had an Italian hot chocolate from the Chocolate museum which was so thick you almost needed a spoon to drink it.
Also, a squirrel! Still love squirrels.
The next day was when things started to get crazy. The temperature plummeted to something like -24 Celsius, so I slept in, ventured outside for lunch but spent most of the afternoon inside. When my friend got out of work though we went out to dinner and then he had a dodgemball tournament. Dodgemball is totally a thing in Canada still! Crazy violent game, seems dangerous for anyone with glasses, even if the balls are soft and puffy. Some of the teams got some serious velocity on those things. Mildly interesting but not really my thing.
Of course, at this point there are warnings of a blizzard and the snow is coming down hard and fast and the wind picking up when we get outside, so one of the dodgem team members offers to drive a couple of us partway home. So far so good, anything to avoid dying in that insane weather and getting buried in a snow drift. But then we turn down this steep hill... and the car starts sliding.
The guy is slamming on the brakes but he's like, 'I don't have traction!' and the road is all ice and there are people crossing the intersection at the bottom of the hill... so he steers the car into the snowdrift at the side of the road. It worked! Bumped and scraped but ground to a halt. But brush with death, jeez. Some good defensive driving in retrospect, have no idea how people handle driving in the snow.
He let us out a bit after that and we shivered the last few blocks against the wind and snow. I was so grateful for my hot pockets given my less-than-optimum winter gear. The snow got horizontal that night.
Luckily it had all finished up by morning, though it was still a pretty damn chilly -17. It was also my last day in Quebec City.
We celebrated with cakes at Le Croquembouche.
Then it was onwards to the picturesque train station, to head to Montreal! Which was honestly not that much warmer.
A lot of people asked me 'You came to Canada in March?' And I really had no defence to offer.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2014-04-20 07:32 pm (UTC)Heehee, I saw a sugar shack on tumblr a while back! Makes me want to do that but it probably relies on Canada-level fresh syrup. Hope it was tasty! :3
Oh wow, that cathedral is gorgeous. *A* I may or may not have lol'd at the swear words. xD //language nerd
Gosh, looking at all these sweets is making me hungry. Makes me wish we had a decent bakery on this side of town but alas.
And I definitely lol'd at the last line. Forever. We love you anyway. x3
no subject
Date: 2014-04-21 02:18 pm (UTC)I'm not sure, is it the quality of the maple syrup or the low temperature that makes the sugar shack possible? Worth trying once, but be prepared for the sugar hit~!
<3
no subject
Date: 2014-04-21 03:59 pm (UTC)I can't plural foreign languages sob...That is a very good question. :Va I almost wish winter wasn't over so I could test that. Almost. I'm kind of done with winter for like, ten years. <<;;