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Quebec City
Jan. 7th, 2006 11:24 pmThe train journey down was quite impressively bleak; long stretches through farmland less interesting than Lincolnshire, or parallel to a major highway where you could see only white snow, black asphalt, brown slush, black trees and a leaden sky. I know the hymn was written during the Little Ice Age, but this felt a bleaker midwinter than its writer would have known. Moreover, the windows on Canadian trains aren't very well insulated.
Thankfully, the weather today was better — blue sky, bright sun to bring out the contrast between grey stone and the snow. 260 kelvin, feeling at times like 248 due to wind-chill, but clothing technology's pretty good nowadays. I have taken roughly a dozen score of photos.
Quebec City has a small walled old-town, a tourist-trap old port (but much less sticky and less in-your-face a tourist trap than most I've met this trip), and an utterly absurd Gilded Age and Twenties Bubble folly of a gigantic hotel, the Chateau Frontenac, built in 1893 as the railway hotel of the company that had just sent the rails from coast to coast. We went round it on a fantastically well-guided tour, and saw possibly the only hotel-room view (miles down and across the St. Lawrence) to make me understand why people sometimes pay five-star-hotel prices. Though to have paid that price and got weather like Friday's would be dismaying.
Supper on Friday was at a very nice French bistro; pork souvlaki with an excellent Greek salad, dense mushroom soup, confit de canard, ile flottant.
Thankfully, the weather today was better — blue sky, bright sun to bring out the contrast between grey stone and the snow. 260 kelvin, feeling at times like 248 due to wind-chill, but clothing technology's pretty good nowadays. I have taken roughly a dozen score of photos.
Quebec City has a small walled old-town, a tourist-trap old port (but much less sticky and less in-your-face a tourist trap than most I've met this trip), and an utterly absurd Gilded Age and Twenties Bubble folly of a gigantic hotel, the Chateau Frontenac, built in 1893 as the railway hotel of the company that had just sent the rails from coast to coast. We went round it on a fantastically well-guided tour, and saw possibly the only hotel-room view (miles down and across the St. Lawrence) to make me understand why people sometimes pay five-star-hotel prices. Though to have paid that price and got weather like Friday's would be dismaying.
Supper on Friday was at a very nice French bistro; pork souvlaki with an excellent Greek salad, dense mushroom soup, confit de canard, ile flottant.
