What we did on our summer vacation, part 1: Quebec City

Quebec City is awesome.  Amazing.  Super cool.

We checked into our hotel in the old part of the city and was told that there was a FREE Cirque du Soleil show that evening. It was under a highway. We had a minor snafu at our hotel with both our credit card and them losing a set of our car keys, which they later found, so them tipping us off on the Cirque show was really lovely.

The show site during the day. Note the use of shipping containers, the highway structure, and the general sketchiness of the locale. The directions from our hotel literally included: and then it is under the overpass.  What?! People normally pay hundreds of dollars for these tickets. Cirque started as a street show in Baie St. Paul, a small town an hour farther east up the St. Lawrence River, so this is very much in keeping with their roots, which was part of what made it so cool.  The show had a steampunk vibe, which seems very Canadian to me - at least, I hadn't heard of this movement in the U.S., though it appears to be global.*

 This is what you walk into at night. Good thing Canada is safe. 

 The show site, and the Ringmaster, entertaining the standing crowd, below. 

The public bathrooms in QC actually have classical music playing. And they are clean. It was surreal. I have never experienced that in a municipal toilet before.  

Part of why Quebec City is amazing is the old European city feel of the city, even though it was founded one year later than Jamestown, Virginia. (Yes, Canadians, the 4th grade teacher in me needs to tell you that Jamestown was founded in 1607, one year earlier than QC. Virginia history is taught in 4th grade, and was the first grade I taught.)  There are many, many old buildings and the fortified old city has a wall encompassing it. I suspect much of the old city has been preserved because of the difference in building materials, dictated by the difference in climate. You can see from the pictures that even in August, we were wearing pants, raincoats and long sleeves.   

There are buskers throughout QC, but there is a stage outside the most famous hotel, where the best ones perform, maybe inspired by their Cirque cousins? We watched 2 shows here.

E sometimes has inspired fashion sense.

Below you can watch the funicular that takes you from the lower old town to the upper old town. S and E loved it!

We had delicious food in Quebec City. Above you can see the picnic plate J and I shared for lunch one day with a bottle of wine. It has rabbit (sorry, Mom)**, pickled carrot and onion, tapenade, local cheese, fennel, smoked salmon, etc. It was one of my favorite meals of the trip. E and S had their own 3 course lunches at this restaurant.  J also had some pork lard spread at breakfast one day. Yum, pork lard. But it was served with baked beans, which are always delicious at breakfast.

We took the Governor General's walk along the St. Lawrence, which just proved to me that we Americans were right to rebel against the British.  It was a terrible hike of many open stairs, which S hates, so we had to carry him, to get this view of the river.  It was high. We could see far. Yippee. We ended in a park that we could have accessed easily from another direction. At least it was not icy in the middle of winter.

Next up: The blog you've been waiting for: HUTTOPIA!


*The steampunk movement reminds me of the book 21 Balloons.
**My mom had a pet bunny once. It was cooked for dinner. It is a sad story.