What I Did On My Holidays – Montreal Pt.2

Back to my inability to speak French.

I have yet to see Mission Impossible 3 in English.  But in French, it was quite clearly a work of towering genius.  I mean, in a totally rubbish way.  Oh the running!  Oh the sweaty vests!  Oh the profound staring distantly into space while declaring love on the edge of death!  I vaguely remember something about a thing going to explore inside Tom Cruise’s brain (and how this was fixed by pumping his heart?), I vaguely remember someone drawing angles on a window in a place that might have been Hong Kong.  I have a vague recollection of Simon Pegg, in French.  But plot?  Narrative?  Not a clue.  And frankly, who needs them?

In many ways, the highlight of seeing Mission Impossible 3 in French were the ads.  My favourite was a Canadian film with the title ‘Good Cop, Bon Cop’, which I’ve always remembered as ‘Bon Cop, Bad Cop’, because that would make more sense, but no, my diary tells me I’ve got this wrong.  ‘Good Cop, Bon Cop’ – according to the ad – tells the story of two policemen from either side of the regional divide, one from Quebec, one from Montreal, who are brought together when a corpse is found exactly on the county line.  Whether or not all sorts of hillarious gags ensue based upon the difference between English-speaking Canadians and French-speaking Canadians, I really couldn’t tell you, not having either the language or the social background.  But it was, I felt, a nice summary of the entire English-French thing that dominated the area.

Street names alas also suffered from this division, with catchy names like ‘Rue la Councillor Bernard Smith’ and ‘Avenue de la John Howard Jones’ (I paraphrase but only a little) and so forth.  We even found some of the history of the place in the form of a largely grassed over military structure on the river now turned into a museum, where I think Wolfe either won, or lost, or both, either together, or one after the other.  I am sorry to report that it’s really not my period, and suggest you look it up somewhere more reliable.  An American hallmate of mine, when I was talking Napoleonic history with him, once remarked ‘ah yes!  1812!  That’s when the British and the Canadians burnt the White House down!’ which at kinda proved that I know absolutely nothing of the history of North American conflict and that he knew next to nothing about Napoleon.  And why should he?  Discuss.

Deciding to explore this whole Quebec thing a little more, we hopped on a bus (trains in Canada are not exactly user-friendly, it turned out) and went to visit Quebec City.  Quebec City felt like a European heart surrounded by an American sprawl, all wiggly uphill streets and crooked power lines with neat supermarkets and doughnut bars on the edges.  It was also in Quebec City where I tried to buy postcards to send to my family (eventually falling back on the time-honoured tradition of handing them over in person when I returned) and discovered that while you can get all the images of squirrels and maple leaves you’ve ever wanted in the tourist traps of Canada, it is remarkably hard to find a picture of a moose.  Hours of frustration ensued.  Quebec City was also the only place where I’ve ever visited a 5* hotel.  I didn’t stay in it, of course, but this thing sat at the very top of the highest point of the city above the oldest and most genteel square, dominating the skyline and looking out upon all it surveyed.  We assumed it was a government building of some sort and went to investigate, and discovering it was a hotel, decided to investigate further.  Finding the door to the gym unlocked we wandered into a world of swimming pools, saunas and white fluffy towels.  Investigating the corridors on the highest floors we found ice makers and endless brass handles.  There were shops selling the kind of perfumes at the kind of prices I associate with duty free, and whiskey, and newspapers in many languages, and men in white gloves and, all things considered, we felt extremely naughty just being there, before heading back to our Bed and Breakfast at the bottom of the hill.

Quebec City will also be fixed in my memory for two more remarkable qualities.  First, was that Quebec was having a regional celebration, so in the evening the streets filled up with every kind of performers.  I remember a fire dancer, swinging great big balls of flame on the ends of chain, explaining her act in 4 languages as she went along.  There was a troupe of three silent black-and-white mime artists who were oddly enough the funniest on display, largely owing to their signs declaring ‘Oh no!’ with matching expressions of dismay.  There were brass bands and we had the strange experience of sitting on the remnants of a winding city wall watching a concert that, we suspected, was highly regionalistic and full of ballads about the misery of being cultured-French-Canadians while surrounded by all these fat semi-American-Canadians, but which, alas, our languages weren’t really up to grasping the details on.  The other thing I associate Quebec with is table football.  Many happy hours spent in that pastime.  I can’t promise that you’ll get a brilliant game out of me; but you’ll certainly get a game.

From Quebec City we headed north, along great tree-lined winding roads laden with trucks (all heading the other way) carrying huge fallen timbers, across a ferry and over a fjord, to the town of Tadoussac.  Tadoussac is an escapee from a Stephen King novel, a small place of silent wide streets, white-timbered houses, low chapel, washing waves and dark trees.  On our first night we walked along the sand of one of the beeches, and found ourselves outside the main hotel (again, a thing we were not staying at) to discover a wedding being presided over by a man that all evidence could only suggest to be a druid.  Tadoussac, it turns out, is a town of fjords and whales.  It was, in fact, in Tadoussac that I saw my first ever whale, a white beluga with a (anthropomorphically unsound) smiling face that examined our little boat with the attitude of a local judging the tourists.  We also went up a fjord, a great massive valley carved out of stone and trees on every side, to a statue of the Virgin Mary raised on a mountain, to which the boat sang songs in the Catholic traditions of the place.  A national park nearby turned out to be all it claimed on the cover, beautiful until the first insect bit.  My boyfriend, being more adventurous than me, tried lobster, since it seemed to be the town’s tourist dish of choice, and I was disappointed when he managed to convince me that it wasn’t staring at me accusingly with its one beady eye, to discover that it was a rather bland dish and he could probably go back to the cheesy chips with comfort.  I have never had such breakfasts, by the by, as I had in Tadoussac.  I have never seen a plate piled so high, or so many different uses of syrup… the breakfasts, and the whales, I think, are what I shall take away from that experience, along with the low long sound of huge freight lorries come from the north, lining up in the small foggy hours of the night, for the first ferry at dawn across the fjord.