to Quebec City
2011/09/08
No photos today, and not a whole lot to comment on.
I drove to Quebec City via the old Chemaine du Roy highway, which is slower but more scenic as it hugs the St. Lawrence river more closely than the express highway.
Some nice areas along here – a few so reeking of picturesque quaintness that I can’t imagine actually living there. You know, the ancient barn beside colorful farmhouse sort of thing.
Every town has a gorgeous stone church that you know took them many years to build. I was thinking about that a bit – looking at shared religion as a security blanket, what does it say about the times these towns were founded that they invested such a huge effort in erecting the place to house said security blanket?
I saw a crazy number of Spyder roadsters today. I’ve seen the occasional one on other days of this journey, but I saw over a dozen on the road today, and not all at once either. I wonder why they’re more popular here. Perhaps because they resemble skidoos, which are hugely popular in winter here? Actually, someone should invent one that can be converted to a skidoo. I don’t get the appeal of these roadsters though – they offer less freedom and excitement than motorcycles, and less stability and protection than cars.
On arrival in QC I just looked for a room, did my laundry and settled in to catch up on my accounting and blogging. Tomorrow is the big tourism day.
Speaking of tourism – I am now east of Montreal for the first time since I was four years old. I only have memories of two places east of here. One I don’t know the location of, and the other I will be attempting to find in a couple of days. Other than that, I’m fully a tourist until I reach the end of the country.
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Montreal day 3
2011/09/07
Today is my last full day in Montreal.
I started off with one more short outing with Claudette and Gaëtan. We went up the funicular that rides the back of the tower above the Olympic pool I mentioned yesterday. Turns out there is a much better view of the city from there than from Mount Royal:
My attention was also directed to the so-called Pyramids, which were athletic housing for the 1976 Olympics and are now high-priced condos.
We also went to the adjacent Biodome, which is a small zoo/conservatory inside a large domed building. By far the best part of that was the very tame and curious puffins and penguins who were watching us as much as we them:
After that, I went downtown alone to have lunch with my cousin Angela Rose. She’s the mother of my second cousin Ayla, whom I met for the first time on my recent arrival in Toronto. It’s kind of weird – the last time I saw Angela, she was less than half Ayla’s present age. Time flies.
We caught up over burgers and poutine – first time I’ve ever had that. It was all right but I prefer ketchup to gravy, and the cheese probably would not go well with that.
It was good to see Angie again and find out what’s up in her life these days. Between her, Tanya and Claudette I’ve learned more than I ever previously knew about my father’s family history.
I spent the afternoon relocating my stuff to a hotel, then went downtown again to have supper with the Shaws – my former co-worker Stephen, who now works at Ubisoft in Montreal, and his wife Lisa, who is now working for a famous designer here. We had a great chat over pub fare, and then it was time to call it a night since I was tired.
(Aside: The island of Montreal has by far the most complex traffic regulations I’ve encountered on this trip. If you’re going to be driving here, you might want to look them up first to avoid accidentally breaking a bunch of laws. For example, there are lots of places where you’re not allowed to turn, but there’s no sign saying so – that information comes from the stoplight and is time-dependent. No parking zones move depending on the day of the week ( I had to learn the French day-names to deal with that). Green stoplights have a couple of phases not seen elsewhere in the country. Et cetera.)
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PSA too
Thanks to Frink for covering my absence – I was staying with relatives for a few days in Montreal, and they didn’t have net access – or rather they did, but not in a way I could easily hook up my laptop.
Back in hotels now, so I should be good for at least the next few days.
Backlogged posts will be coming through soon.
Montreal day 2
2011/09/06
Today was another day of driving around with Gaëtan and Claudette to see the sights. We got his repaired van back, and dropped my vehicle off for an oil change with his favorite mechanic.
I got to walk by the old Olympic swimming pool, which is not far from my grandparents’ old place. My mother and I went swimming there once or twice when we were living here. It was a huge pool. Not a good memory though because we’re pretty sure it was a result of going there that I got contagious warts on the soles of my feet. Not the normal shapeless brown bumps you normally think of as warts – they were rather fascinating and complex structures that looked like little craters with four-globed lanterns in the middle. It took almost two months of annoying skin-freezing treatment that required me to remain lying face-down for a couple of hours per day to get rid of the damned things. Thankfully that was a skin-only infection and they never returned.
We went downtown again for a somewhat rushed tour of the Montreal underground shopping mall, a couple of train stations, a ride on the Metro and three more churches and cathedrals.
Nice places, but I still like Notre-Dame (yesterday) the best.
Sir John, eh?
The Metro is nice, but not as nice as I remember. Some of the stations are more nicely decorated than the ones in Toronto, but not all of them. The trains look nicer and are quieter because they run on rubber wheels, but they are also smaller inside and jostle around more while in motion. I think I like the Toronto subway better.
We also went to St. Joseph’s Oratory, a place I’m told my father likes though he never mentioned it to me. It’s friggin enormous – this may be the most cavernous indoor space I’ve ever been in, short of an indoor sports stadium (yes, I admit, I was once roped into attending a hockey game – I was young and foolish!). It’s very nice and would make a great living room for my house, but it’s still not as pretty as Notre-Dame.
The main event today was a trip on Mount Royal, the big hill in the middle of the city, to get some photos of the city from above.
In the evening they took me to a church that had been sold and converted into a sort-of soup kitchen, sort-of restaurant by a nonprofit organization. Basically you get a full meal (soup, salad, main dish, veggies, drink and dessert) for $3. It was not bad for the price, though not my first choice cuisine either.
Gaëtan is very much a jokester and not above the occasional small prank. Today he overheard me mentioning that living in Vancouver I miss the snow, since we don’t get much there – later on he demanded I close my eyes and hold out my hands, and put a large snowball in them – shaved ice from an indoor hockey rink. That was a surprise. Naturally I threw the snowball at him.
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Montreal day 1
2011/09/05
Today Gaëtan and Claudette gave me a driving and walking tour of some of the scenic parts of Montreal. We started out with a drive-by of my grandparents’ old house on Rue Sicard, which is where my mother and I lived with them for a month or two one winter.
The place has been partially renovated at the front but is much the same as then. When we were there, we stayed in the room at the back behind all the stairs. Aunt Winnie and cousins Tanya and Angela Rose lived upstairs, their place reached by the (treacherous in winter) outside front steps or a very tiny, cramped spiral staircase at the back – typical for old Montreal houses.
Next we headed over to Ile Sainte-Helene to look at the giant Buckyball left over from Expo 67:
Lovely piece of architecture, that dome. We also were going to go to the fairground called La Ronde, which occupies half the island, but the parking, admission etc fees came to about $75 so we decided to skip that.
Next stop was the nearby casino, which it turns out is also a leftover Expo building. It’s a huge casino – mind, I’ve never been in one before so I have nothing to compare it against. I wasn’t allowed to take pictures inside, unfortunately, but it was very nicely decorated and there must have been nearly a thousand various kinds of slot machines in there. They also had poker, blackjack, baccarat and roulette areas. I saw people laying down rows of hundred-dollar bills on some of those tables. The slot machines ranged from two cents to two dollars per play.
The casino experience set my mind working in two directions.
The first is that my aunt and I observed that most of the people playing the slots didn’t seem happy. Many of them were very old and were in there blowing their pension checks; others were spending their welfare checks. They were sitting there pressing buttons and receiving bad news, but they kept pressing the buttons all afternoon. They reminded me of lab rodents pressing a bar for food pellets, except in this case they rarely received a reward for their actions. Honestly, people. Go sit in a park. Read a book, develop some artistic skills – all cheaper and more rewarding ways to spend time.
The second thought is how nice it would be if this were an arcade. The place was full of shiny machines with video screens and bright, colorful flashing lights. I’m not kidding that there were hundreds and hundreds of them. It looked very much like an upscale arcade, yet sadly there weren’t any fun games; just machines that ate cash and hope without providing any but the very rarest excitement. Ripoff and waste of space combined. But I sure would like to build an arcade that looked like this.
We then went and drove by the third remaining Expo building, Habitat 67. It’s still in pretty good shape and fully populated with tenants. It was considered ugly when it was built, but up close it’s actually not so bad – I wouldn’t mind living in it.
Then we parked downtown and walked around Old Montreal for a while, looking at the old and well-decorated stone buildings. I had my smoked meat sandwich – not from Schwartz’s as planned, but it was still pretty good.
I think this is the McDonald’s where my mother bought me my first Chicken McNuggets (just weeks after they were introduced, as I recall) with the last change in her pocket, starting a junk food craving that lasted a good twenty years:
The highlight of the downtown trip for me was visiting Notre Dame Cathedral. It’s nice on the outside, but inside it’s one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever seen.
There are something like seven thousand pipes in this organ, and it has four keyboards plus a zillion other controls. I’ll have to beat that when I build my science-villain pipe organ:
Check out this kinky staircase:
On returning to Gaëtan’s van, he discovered a mechanical fault and we had to drive to the garage without power steering (I had to help steer since he’s recovering from a shoulder operation) and with failing electrics – in fact the vehicle died just as we pulled into the garage lot and stopped behind their tow truck. Very elegant; any difference in traffic or signals and we would have ended up pushing it the rest of the way or getting a tow. But on top of that, there was a priest there who asked us for directions, and he ended up handing us the keys to his car so we could drive ourselves home from the garage – he rode along to get his car back afterwards. Very generous of him.
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