Québec
Our last full day
31 August 2007
In front of Parlement
After the excitement of the whales on the Thursday our final day was going to be back on land in Québec.
Our first stop was going to be the Parlement Buildings which required us to climb back up along the fortification walls.
The Québec Parlement sits within its own wee park in this huge open space with fountains and statues. Alongside is the Battlefield Park and the Grande Allée leading to the west.
Built in 1877 in the style of the French Second Empire (which had ceased to be in 1871) it is one of the few great buildings of the town to really feel French.
Along the font are numerous bronze statues of the famous people from Québec's history, including Cartier, Champlain, Wolfe and Montcalm, plus a number of native Indian scenes. I picked up a leaflet from the desk explaining who is who as there are dozens of statues.
Visits are possible and we had assured that we had our passports with us to act as ID. JJ was made responsible for the pair of us as they kept all his details and I was very good and did all I was told.
Like so much of Québec which was preparing for its 400th Anniversary in 2008 the Lower House was being refurbished but we were able to visit the former Upper House (the equivalent of the House of Lords in London).
The founding of Canada
Originally decorated in red, the colours had to be toned down when television broadcasting began as the chamber is still used for parliamentary enquiries.
Each province of Canada has its own parlement (with a federal parlement in Ottawa), and Québec had been the last of them to dissolve its Upper House finally considering that a chamber made up of unelected members was an anachronism they could do without. The debate about Ottawa's Upper House continues as to whether it should be elected or just done away with.
Rather like the Changing of the Guard we had seen it all struck the pair of us as a bit bizarre. The Québec Parlement is so British in its function, colouring and traditions and yet it is all housed within this huge French building where English is the foreign language.
Symbolism is quite strong and we saw a number of motifs based on the rose, thistle, shamrock, fleur de lise and maple leaf. In the central hall plaques of the English, French, Scottish and Irish coats of arms are situated above the corridors all reminding people of the mixed heritage of the founding kingdoms - in 1608 James IV of Scotland had only been James I of England for five years.
The Aquarium
Time for lunch then and we walked down the Grande Allée to look at the shops, restaurants and find a bus stop. Jean-Jacques had read that there was an aquarium in Québec and wanted to go and visit it to see the polar bears and walruses. We had, however, been advised by the hotel that it was difficult to get to without a vehicle.
First though we had to eat and in the midst of yet another road works we found a good restaurant and another sizeable feed for lunchtime. I had come to the conclusion that you could spot all the important sights of Québec by the incessant beeping of the diggers, tractors and dumper trucks as they reversed. I came to despair of getting any video at all without a background noise of building going on.
The receptionist at the hotel had told us to take a No 11 bus which would leave us reasonably close to our destination and we could walk it from there. Thus we found ourselves a bus stop which didn't have a map of the routes nor any form of timetable and sat down to wait. Something niggled at the back of my mind that there was something about tickets which was a bit bizarre in Québec so I re-read our guide book - oui! sure enough, you have to get them at either a depaneuse (which in Québécois is a corner shop and not a breakdown lorry) or a pharmacy !
Back to the side street then to get our tickets and back to the bus stop. The bus came along and off we set towards the suburb of St Foy. I had a wee map of the general area and was able to more or less follow where we were going up until the area of the bridge across the Saint-Laurent. At this point it became a mass of highways and interchanges and instead of turning left we turned right - but I thought that this was just the way the bus was taking. Wrong !
We soon realised that we were actually getting further away from the bridge and going in the wrong direction so we asked the driver for assistance. He seemed surprised that we had been told to take his bus in the first instance but pointed us in the direction of a No 7 with a correspondance at Marly for a No 25.
The No 7 came along and off we went to Marly, which turned out to be a large terminus in the middle of a forest, if there was a town or village nearby it was not evident at all. By the time the No 25 came along we were getting to the stage where time was going to be very limited, so I made it clear to the driver that we wanted to be dropped off at the intersection for the aquarium. He forgot.
This time instead of thinking that perhaps the bus took a weird route I asked as soon as we were passed where I thought we should have got off and he stopped the bus so that we could walk back. What an afternoon - thanks JJ, I could have been sitting on a terrace somewhere drinking cold beer.
We arrived at the aquarium just in time to see the walruses being fed and entertaining the kiddies. It was roasting hot and my back was soaked from carrying our bag so as soon as the walruses had demonstrated how to suck a tube of shrimps dry within seconds we went to look round the main building.
It has to be said that we were disappointed. We must be spoilt by having Nausicäa at Boulogne which is far grander, though this aquarium did have a huge conical tank which you could not only look down into but walk through by means of a glass corridor. That was impressive but the rest took us no more than twenty minutes to wander round.
Next up were the polar bears but in the heat all the female wanted to do was lie out in the shade and the male was happy enough to paddle about and completely ignore the keepers who were trying to get him to dive for fish and generally show off.
All in all then it was ok, but the journey had almost been more interesting and a lot cheaper. Getting back to Québec town was easier: the No 25 bus direct all but to our street.
Getting back into town we went off to magasiner as the locals say, have directly translated the English word shopping.
It has to be admitted that after all the walking we had done in the afternoon the idea of climbing anywhere to eat was out of the question so we we decided to stick with the Saint-James bar in the hotel which was definitely good value for money.
At the table behind us a lady came in with a lad of about twelve. They were both anglophone and she sounded English whilst he was Canadian. They were I thought aunt and nephew or something like that from the way they interacted. She ordered a meal to be shared between the pair of them and he then kept me half amused and half disgusted by his table manners which were absolutely zero.
He appeared to have mastered the fork but that was as far as it went. Food was going everywhere and at one point he was standing on the seat to get a better look at the TV above him. JJ grinned as he waded through his French fries, for once it wasn't him being reminded about broken glass along the edge of the table.
See also