Quebec

 

Well this was about as French as one could find without being in France. Well, not that French as it’s August and people are still turning up to work, but a feel of the continent about it nonetheless. Admittedly with fewer Renaults, more bears, a staggering number of uses for maple syrup and equally baffling quantities of cheesy chips and gravy.  I joked as much to a porter. His mouth smiled but his eyes flashed a warning about mocking the syrup and poutine.

  
Well isn’t this a vibrant scene

We turned up at the Hertz office –which was fortuitously attached to our hotel- and divested ourselves of the Focus and the half-tonne of Algonquin mud up it’s rear window.  Newly-pedestrianized, we set off about town to see what’s happening.  Street performers, it turns out.  Some rather good ones, too.

 
Mexican chappy.  Was doing gymnastics trilingually, which has got to be worth a couple of bucks.

We popped in for some obligatory cheese, wine and cocktails in Le Château Frontenac, which is apparently one of the more photographed hotels in the world. One must drink in such places. The cocktails below both have some variation of maple syrup in them, because they cannot help themselves. They were very nice, however.

  

We made sure to go to the Citadel because I loves me a fortress, I does.  It’s rather impressive and the outer fortifications are spread concentrically through town, so you happen across quite a few cannon and mortars as you walk about.  It must’ve been a mild disappointment that no-one bothered to attack (the French within or the Yanks without) after it was done. 

  

Ah well, as my grandmother used to say: we Brits do know how to fortify a dominion using irregular star-shaped citadels, comprising four bastions and three curtain walls to maintain two defensive fronts from any direction of attack. 

The museum staff call this monster here “The Ikea” because it came in pieces and took 12 years to assemble.  We only export our finest fucking imbeciles to reassemble our guns.

 
3 kilometre range and never fired.  Blue balls.

So, it was a fascinating juxtaposition with the other Canadian cities we’d visited, such that it feels like a totally different country.  Which, I hear, is a point the locals haves raised once or twice.

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch:  Die Einwohner aus Québec sind viel wie die Franzosen, aber sie essen Pommes Frites und Käsebruch in Bratensoße.  Auch Ahornsirup.  Alles mit Ahornsirup.