timxu

A mere couple of weeks after coming back from Hong Kong, I’m now on a family vacation to Canadia! These past two days we’ve visited the cradle of French civilization, Québec, and the former commercial capital of Canada, Montréal. I wasn’t anticipating just how French the place was (English isn’t even an official language in Québec!), but the first store we went to, a Subway for dinner, had no English at all. It was definitely quite the shock, but we got used to it and spent a day in the historical city of Québec, spending most of our time in the original city boundaries (Old Québec) and the government buildings outside the walls.

Our day in Québec city was an overcast, rainy day, although the rain always seemed to pour when we were inside, which was fortunate. It’s the only city north of Mexico with intact city walls, though after seeing the Xi’an city walls, these are pretty lame – no wonder Québec got taken by the British! Kidding aside, the Old City (Vieux Québec), was quaint but colorful. Narrow streets, open shops, stone-cobbled streets made it feel very much like a stereotypical European villa. It even kind of felt like a European city: most of the tourist attractions were churches. We did visit the Québec Parliament building, where the leaders of the “nation” of Québec – as they call themselves – govern. It also gave a glimpse into the curious history of French Canada, with its initial history under French rule, middle history under British rule, and now a very French region of the Canadian federation.

Parliament in Québec. Note how the renovations on the left side don’t interfere with your photography of the building. It’s not even see-through scaffolding; the image of Parliament is on the fabric itself. We saw this all over Montréal too!

Notre-Dame church in Québec, one of dozens in the city.

Afterwards, we walked around the beautiful narrow, winding streets of Vieux Québec and found our way to the Morrin Centre, now the home of the Québec Historical and Literary Society. However, the building, built in the early 1800s as the first jail in Québec. The building still has a basement room that is an unmodified, unrestored cell block from the original jail. It was a dank, dark place with scary stone walls and metal doors. I’m sure modern jails are any also stone walls and metal doors, but this just felt like a cave with chains. The building was then restored into a college for English speakers, and when the English-speaking population declined, converted into a library. Very cool place with a unique history.

The library inside the Morrin Centre. Hard to imagine this used to be a cell block in a jail.

Since everything in Québec seems to close around 4pm, we then headed out of town to the rural Île d’Orleans, a farm-heavy area primarily involved with fruit – vineyards, apple orchards, strawberry farms, etc. The pastoral scene didn’t seem like a huge contrast with the old stone walkways and old buildings in Québec city, and seemed like merely going into the countryside of an ancient European city. Quaint, but beautiful.

Montréal

The next day, we headed out to Montréal, which was, until Toronto’s rise in 1976, the commercial capital of Canada. I definitely didn’t get a favorable impression of this supposedly wondrous city. The problems started fairly early: the exit from the highway into the city advertised the visitor’s center, so we thought we could go there and grab a map to get a sense of where to go. Yet as soon as we got off the highway, there were no further signs for a couple kilometers. When a sign finally showed up, it said the center was about 9 kilometers away. We thought it’d be quick, so we just plowed ahead. Bad idea. Roadwork narrowed the street to only one lane, and there were traffic lights on every block. It took us about 30 minutes to travel 2 kilometers. We decided to turn around and go to the Botanical Gardens and not waste time sitting in traffic.

The gardens were actually pretty neat. They had plants and flowers from all over the world, including an area devoted to China, another for Japan’s banzai gardens, and more for areas like Russia and the Alps. Not a huge park, but definitely quite beautiful. No pictures for now, since I didn’t bring the USB cord for my other camera, but I’ll post them up later!

After a (very) late lunch, we decided to try to find that visitor’s center. Eventually, though, the signs became so scarce that we got completely lost in downtown Montréal. GPS is great, but only if you know where you’re going. The only place we knew was our hotel, so we gave up on the visitor’s center and ran head-on into Montréal’s strange road signs. At one point, the GPS told us to turn left, so we turned left. Suddenly, a pedestrian about to cross waved at us and pointed at a road sign. It was a green circle with an arrow pointing forward and another pointing to the right (example here) with text beneath it that said “7hrs á 22hrs”. I figured immediately that it was the equivalent of the American no-left-turn sign (a left arrow with a cross on it) but I couldn’t figure out why they just didn’t put that on the sign. It was hardly intuitive to tell someone you can turn right and go forward and not say anything about the possibility of left turns. I’m not sure what they were thinking when designing the sign, but it was frustrating because the GPS kept telling us to turn left, yet we couldn’t. And after we got out of the city, we hit rush hour traffic.

Later on, we went to visit the rest of the city, ending up in Chinatown and Old Montréal. Unfortunately, many of the sites (including the square in front of their Notre-Dame) were under heavy renovation, perhaps explaining the dearth of tourists in the city. My overall impression of downtown Montréal: poorly lit, low population, many homeless, and fairly creepy. The only vibrant, bright area in Old Montréal was one block. The rest was dark and shady. Not the best impression at all!

Notre-Dame in Montréal. Material and architecture looks kind of familiar…

In any case, we only planned one day in Montréal. Tomorrow is Toronto for two days, then Niagara Falls!