Actually about Canada this time. Really.

Quebec City, to be precise.  I was there this week for work, and I had a bit of time to do some wandering.  Because it is now getting rather late, I will put my observations in bullet-point form:

Quebec is cold.  I expected it to be slightly colder than New York, but it was much colder, probably in part because of its situation on the St. Lawrence River, which means the touristy Old City gets a lot of wind.

It's expensive, too.  I didn't expect that, because while it's a tourist destination, it's a fairly small city without any particularly noteworthy attractions.

Aside from the complaining, it does have an attractive and nice-sized (eminently walkable, but big enough to explore for a few hours) tourist area, with fortified walls, historical signposts, old buildings, public art, a surprising number of ice cream shops for somewhere so cold (I was interested in, but could not bring myself to actually eat, the maple-flavored ice cream), and lots and lots of shopping.  I was particularly impressed by one Canadian(?) clothing store called Roots.

I had a "traditional quebecois" meal, consisting of split pea soup, meat pie (I thought this would be a pot pie or a shepherds pie but it was an actual slice of a pie, filled not with fruit but with meat, and it was served with french fries), and maple tart (another pie, filled not with fruit but with an exceptionally sweet and mildly maple-y substance).  Fresh fruits and vegetables don't seem to be a big thing there.  They do, however, seem to like their dead animals - my other two meals in the city were a fettuccine-with-duck dish and veal ravioli.  I am not a big meat eater; most of what was on offer was far more carnivorous than that.  I suppose there is not a word in Canuck French for "vegetarian".

The city, in particular its airport and restaurants, seemed very European to me.  Aside from the French-speakingness, everything was very leisurely and everyone was very pleasant.  Nobody made me take off my shoes or inspected my toiletries in the airport, and nobody tried to take my food away in the middle of a meal (I'm a slow eater, so this happens all the time in New York).  It was quite nice for a change, although if I experienced it all the time I would probably find it slovenly.  

I suppose it is a bit too obvious that I would find Quebec to be a mash-up of Paris and Anchorage, but I did.  Small historic downtown with moose souvenirs everywhere + French-speaking and full of overly fancy meats.

Some photos:

The Promenade.  More picturesque than it looks, although if something is picturesque it should probably look presentable in pictures.

Starbucks!  Sadly, they were closed in the evening.

Modern downtown through a gap (like those chinks for arrows in medieval castles, but probably for guns) in the fortified wall.

It was cold and dreary.  Somehow I thought that looked good in pictures.

Building on top of the wall.

Really awesome mural of the city, populated with historical and modern figures, plus ruins in the foreground.

This man walked into my picture and ruined it.  I took another one without him, but it turned out to look much better with the intrusion.  I'm sure that has something to do with symmetry, or serendipity, or both.

also...

We went to Dumbo.  The neighborhood in Brooklyn, not the cartoon elephant.  We walked around the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and the Dumbo (DUMBO?) waterfront, went into a bunch of little stores (mostly bookstores and fussy gift shops) and watched a dog play in the river.

Manhattan skyline

Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges.

The Great White Freezing Cold North

It would be nice if I maintained a regular habit of posting here.  Then, when I did something cool but not so exciting that it merited dusting off the old blog, I might post a short remark about it.  I hear that elsewhere in the blogosphere, people are not so wordy, and that blog posts can be just a paragraph or a sentence, or even a picture.  I am dimly aware of a type of blog called a "tumblr", although I cannot pretend to understand what this word means or how it is pronounced.  It seems to be a blog made up of pictures whose wit and relevance is far too subtle and intellectual for me to understand.  So I will have to stick to mundane and tiresome words.

Fortunately, I have no shortage of words.  Before we get to the Land of Freezingness, here are some:
- I have somehow, more or less by accident, planned five trips in a ten-week period, of which the Arctic Circle was #2 (okay, that's probably enough jokes about the cold).  While I like to travel, this schedule may be a bit to frenetic for my taste.  But, at least there is no danger I will be bored.
- The first trip was to my parents' for my semi-customary early-fall beach visit.  It was a pleasant weekend of barefoot surfside runs, long afternoons on the beach, a craft festival, crab legs, and my mother's special secret-recipe triple-chocolate bundt cake.
- I saw my first theatrical production of the fall season, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecological Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center of New York City.  It is, as the name indicated, a comedy about cancer.  It's a small cast and a low-budget theater, and while there's some mother-daughter stuff and some cancer-and-mortality stuff and a very well-done portrayal of the straight man of the show by Michael Frederic, the whole thing really rests on Danielle Slavick's tour de force as the main character, who is by turns funny, furious, and vulnerable.  It's not a subtle portrayal - subtle isn't in the script - but she's in full-intensity mode for the duration of the 90-minute play, even when someone else is talking, and her character is utterly convincing.
- This morning my Fellow Traveler (as I am meant to be calling my boyfriend-turned-roommate now that he can no longer call on me as a proper Gentleman Caller would) went for a run by the water.  This is unusual for us; usually we run separately, sometimes at the same time but on separate routes and paces.  I like morning and evening runs and hills and dislike tourists; he likes sunny runs and does not take a very creative approach to direction of travel.  But today we really made an event of it.  We took the train to Fulton Street and walked to South Street Seaport with the plan to head around the southern tip of the island and north up the West Side Highway toward our apartment.  A couple passed us while I was still getting my headphones set up, and since they seemed to be going only slightly faster than I wanted to go, I decided to follow them.  Fellow Traveler had to point out to me a couple of times that perhaps we could not keep up with them for the duration of the run, but having other, pushier runners to follow came in handy when we ran into a half-mile-long tourist scrum around the ferry terminal and had to weave through the crowds.  We survived the first couple of miles but eventually lost the other runners, and we had a nice few miles until the sun and heat and lack of water in the vicinity of Chelsea Piers began to get to me.  I finished the run in decent form, but it seems like my hoped-for half marathon pace may be out of reach unless I become significantly faster / stronger / more able to bend space and time in the next six weeks.

Okay.  What were we talking about?  That's right.  Canada.