"hearts in need sing symphonies" - bathroom stall quote, White River Junction, VT bus depot
Château Frontenac, a giant hotel in Québec. (Links for place names are to websites, random links are to more photos.)
On Tuesday, we woke up at 5am to take a bus to Québec, which is very touristy with cobble stone streets and gorgeous buildings.
At Nessa's insistence, the day was entirely spontaneous. We picked up a free map at the bus depot, but the streets were not where it said they were, so we wandered around a lot.
Québec is very proud of having lost their independence, so there are canons in every open space in the entire city. This particular one even had a wooden canon ball sticking out of it.
No trip to the province of Québec is complete without gratuitous graffiti photos because they have the most interesting vandalism. I rather liked this both because the style of the stenciled man does not match the Magritte painting it references at all, but it does include a pipe (mais ceci n'est pas une pipe!). There was also an entire park filled with visual instructions for how to throw out trash, lay or sit on benchs and walk down stairs.
Wednesday morning, we visited Château Ramezay in Montréal, which is part museum and part historical house. We got to dress up like French settlers. Nessa wore the woman's outfit and tried out quill pens as well.
Since we'd been walking all day for the past two days, we relaxed on the grass along the St. Lawrence in Vieux Montréal. We celebrated our unbirthdays on Wednesday, so we broke out the hats to shade our eyes from the sun.
After a birthday dinner of delicious Tibetan food, we got chocolate fondue at Juliette et Chocolat. Our waitstaff couldn't decide whether we spoke French or English, so they kept switching back and forth.
Every time I have visited Montréal, I've gotten my photo taken at the boba shop, Cactus, so we stopped in there Thursday before we left so I wouldn't break with tradition.
A photo from the bus ride back to Boston. Québec is surprisingly rural. I couldn't pick my favorite, so here's one more.
Meeting up with Nessa in Montréal was fantastic, although I'm not sure how it couldn't have been. We didn't do anything particularly monumental, which is fine because I just wanted to see her in the flesh as opposed to read letters on my monitor or cell phone.
We saw contemporary art, went on a haunted walking tour with a Francophone who lisped ("her deaf was tragic") and ate crêpes. We visited a soley Francophonic industrial history museum located in an former swimming pool that made the best use of space I've ever seen (there was an exhibit inside the pool!) that had a moving exhibit of photographs taken by Nicaraguan children accompanied with quotes about their lives. We learned the entire history of Canada in 10 minutes from an animatronic news anchor and witnessed even more corny video acting as we solved a mystery using forensics at Le Musée de la Civilisation. I used the men's bathroom and convinced an Anglophone that I am fluent in French. We ate at a Chinese restaurant where the table clothes were plastic bags and spent half our time wandering lost. We climbed four flights of stairs to get to our hostel room where our German "friend" Birsen was literally always asleep, regardless of the time of day.
So much of the trip was "you had to be there" moments, but I am really glad I was there.