Murad, Laura, Alicia and I went off for the august long weekend to see three cities in three days. Well, that’s a bit of a lie, we count Toronto in there, but since we come from here, we didn’t see it much, other than leaving it and coming back to it. So that’s one city down.
We left at 4am on Saturday morning to evade the traffic and to not need to pay for another hotel room. I slept at Alicia’s place to avoid people having to come down to my place, which meant I would be leaving my cat on her own for even longer. We drove to Quebec City first, and that’s a long haul. I forget how long a drive that was, like 8 hours or something. On the way we got breakfast from Wendy’s, which was kind of bad for me since most fastfood breakfasts are egg-centered. When we got there, we went a sightseeing a little in the morning until settling in the hotel room at the checkin time. That morning sightseeing was at Montmorency Falls, which I like better than Niagara falls actually. Niagara is so big that you can’t really see the falls as distinct from the not-falls. At Montmorency, there is a bridge over it where you can see the falls, the erosion, and little waterfalls near the trails. We didn’t walk up the stairs, and a good thing too since the city itself was still to come.
We spent the rest of the day poking around Quebec City, in the old section. It’s a hilly place, like a sheer cliff is hilly. The streets are narrow and charming, but I can’t help but feel sorry for the people who live there, with all us tourists hanging about. We had lunch/dinner at a restaurant that I honestly can’t remember much of, other than the waitress remarking “oh, you speak english” in a way none of us felt very at ease with when we arrived, and that Laura, when cold, was offered a restaurant blanket that was honestly a new concept for us. At night we watched a sort of heritage/propoganda film projected against an old building with many silos. They made very interesting use of the space. It was done without dialog, mostly using animation that was in an interesting style, with special effects with lights on the building itself, and lit-up steamwhistles and such, so it was more than just the projection telling the story. We left early as it has begun to rain and none of us had brought umbrellas, alas. After failing to get a cab, we hiked back up the hill to our hotel. Laura and Murad had one room, Alicia and I had another. Neither of us snore, so it was a restful night. The next day we had brunch at a nice french place. One thing that surprised me was how easy it was to get around with english, everyone seemed to speak it. Montreal I saw had been like that, but I thought other places would be more exclusively francophone, but I guess a tourist spot like Quebec City would be bilingual as well. Just as well, as most of my french has fled me.
We made the shorter trip to Ottawa that afternoon and arrived in the evening, and checked into our hotel. There were some street performers around and we watched this one guy juggle an apple, knife and flaming torch whilst on a bicycle which was perched on a 15 foot pole being stabalized by members of the crowd, it had a long pre-amble but it was an amusing show. Then we went to The Poor House to sit on their second-floor patio and had bar food (since it was after midnight at that point). Then we went to the parlement building where they were showing their own heritage/propoganda film projected on it. This was really did seem like propoganda, “I love my country. My country will grow with me. All hail the hypnotoad”. But at the end the national anthem started to play (I quipped “Oh, the building is going off the air”, meh), Murad made us stop (correctly, though it caught us off guard) to face the building and stand for the national anthem. It was one of the versions that flips between both languages, and it was so slow that I had a hard time knowing where we were in the anthem. We headed back to the hotel and slept.
The next day we had breakfast at a place underneath the place we went to the night before and met up with two of Murad’s friends. We hung out for a bit, did some limited sightseeing since we were still kinda tired from the day before, went to the market, went for a stroll in some wooded trails near Gatineau if memory serves. The people who programed the traffic lights obviously want pedestrians to die since the walk signal gets displayed for all of two seconds before the flashing hand comes on, and even then, that doesn’t last nearly as long as it does in Toronto. Later we went back to his friend’s place and had some snacks and then started the drive back home.
I was decanted at York Mills and got home sometime after midnight, where my cat of the same name was very annoyed at me for effectively having been gone for 4 days. After a few bites on my feet, she got over it. My only regret is not having bought a souvenir from Quebec City (Ottawa is not very exotic for me) to put on my bookcase of souvenirs. I have a number of them from friends who have traveled, but none of my own, alas.
I don’t have any pictures of my own since I’ve had some entertaining time with my camera. After getting a new battery and even a new charger, it seems that nothing works, both batteries in both charges show as defective. So my brother who was dealing with Henry’s for all of this gave up and just bought me a new camera, which seems to be a rather extreme solution especially for someone who I wouldn’t normally describe as being made of cameras. In any case, I didn’t have it for the trip, so no photos from me. But I’ll have it for the next one, and that’s the important bit.
It was a nice little trip, and now the next event in the distance is the trip to Greece, I’ll have to get a souvenir from there definitely.
