Welcome to France! Or so it seems. Quebec City, our next destination onwards after Montreal, is entirely French speaking. The signs are in French, the menus, booklets, everything, even McDonalds is called McDou's! Its a strange thing, considering we are still in Canada. While this is all good fun and looks nice, the problem is about 80% of most written French words are NOT accompanied by English translation! Naturally this makes such things as ordering, or just communicating quite difficult. Montreal however is bilingual, meaning we have had a much easier time communicating and just plain talking to people.
The last 4 days in Montreal have been very relaxing. After everything we did in Toronto, we seriously needed a rest. Because after all, this holiday is not a sprint but more of a marathon, so we have to make sure we pace ourselves. Having 2 blocks of 4 nights in Montreal separated by our stint in Quebec for 3 nights, the past 4 days we have been doing almost literally nothing. Its been nice. Sleeping in to 10am, cooking dinners and lunches instead of going out, watching Netflix and just taking it easy. Apart from eating some incredible poutine, the only noteable thing we did was go to the Montreal vs Philadelphia Hockey game Saturday night, which was absolutely awesome. Montreal is pretty much known as the birthplace of Hockey, most of its foundations exist there and as such the fans are mental. So in the spirit of hockey, we dressed up in jerseys and mohawk beanies and went along. And damn those fans were crazy, any player that made a slight move the crowd went mental. Luckily, Montreal won, to Laurens dismay as she hid her Philadelphia scarf that she was wearing, otherwise it wouldn't suprise me if we had a riot on our hands, they have been known to do such a thing before.
So that brings us to Quebec City, and like I was explaining before, the language barrier is literally our biggest barrier. We have been choosing places with English translations on menus because that generally means someone, anyone speaks a tiny bit of english and we don't make fools out of ourselves trying to order in French and sounding like dills. But Quebec City was beautiful, its a heritage listed city with all its old buildings and ancient architecture. So far we've seen some old buildings, more old buildings and these other old buildings. But it doesn't sound that dull, because these are some very nice looking old buildings in which our photos will do a better job of describing.
While the language barrier has been difficult, I think the biggest issue we have been facing is my outfit, I appear to be very underdressed (even in my nicest clothes) at some of the nice eateries in town (mainly because the old town is very touristy and only nice places to eat exist). One example of this was last night, we decided to have pizza and pasta for dinner and found a nice Italian restaurant. As it turns out it was a little bit upmarket but reasonably priced, so we thought you beauty. Upon entering the restaurant, we were both looked up and down vigorously by the female waiter, as to say 'I'm sorry but you must have gotten the wrong place, McDou's is just down the road'. But keep in mind we both looked very respectable. You see I had my jeans and nice runners on with a purple and black stripped T-shirt, which from a distance looked fine, but it wasn't until we looked closely did I realize that I was not as presentable as we had previously thought. So start with, my hair was greasy because I hadn't had enough time to wash it in the morning due to us leaving early to catch our bus, I had not shaved in almost two weeks so I was rockin a pretty dirty beard and mo, I had managed to dribble a tiny bit of toothpaste down my nice purple and black top, I had a small hole in the front of my jeans (hopefully no one noticed that), and as I found out last night, I have a huge hole in the front of my new runners, which now I can understrand why my feet were getting wet. So I'm guessing that glare was justified.
So that brings us to today, we have been strolling around the city for a couple of hours looking at the boutique shops and some more old buildings, but it has been nice as we've had better weather than what we got in Montreal. Tonight we are off to do a ghost walk throughout some of the spookiest spots in Quebec city, so scaring Lauren on that should be very entertaining.
We are back in Montreal for 4 nights from Friday onwards so we will get a chance to upload some more photos of the beautiful Quebec City.
So until then, hope everyone's well and we will talk soon.
Kristian & Lauren.
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