A bit of old world charm

After being wowed in Montreal with the architecture, Quebec city knocked my socks off. The old city itself has been fantastically maintained, with the original city walls intact, rambling cobbled lanes and houses and hotels older than anything in Australia. The first thing we did upon arrival, was to find the city walls, and walk all the way around them! Old Quebec is actually quite small, with the walls only being 4.5kms. Great wall of china it is not, but it IS the closest fortified city to Mexico City. And believe me, that’s a long way. Anyone who has gone greyhound in North America will agree.

We have spent three nights in Quebec city, having to change hostels after the first night. The hostel we originally booked into was nice, clean and cheap, but it also had no locks on any of the doors, no lockers in the room, and sadly, no security whatsoever. We made the change to the nearby HI, which although has lots of older people and school groups…also had a bar! We met some more top people there, and hopefully will be catching up with some of them in New York City.

To be honest, there are plenty of museums and tours, restaurants and carriage rides to do in Quebec, but we spent all our time walking and just enjoying the random sculptures and taking it all in, and Tom taking 300 photos a day. You can’t even explain what a contrast to the rest of Canada it is. And to be honest our French is appalling, and even trying to buy bread is a big ordeal. More than it should be. But in saying that, some French people we were talking with, said the difference between French-french and Canadian-french is massive, and even they struggled. Not that we can speak French-french either, but hey, I’ll take any reason right now.

After a great three days walking all around Quebec, we have decided to move on, but had the slight dilemma that everywhere in Canada doesn’t seem to have beds available tonight, so we thought, stuff it, lets head to Boston! So the next stop will be the hometown of Harvard University, and the Samuel Adams brewery. And considering my impending career change to brewmaster, we’ll be forced to do tours of both. (market and production you see).

written by

no_fosters_thanks on June 29, 2007 from Quebec, Canada

from the travel blog: Canada

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