(Message sent Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:15:51 -0700)
Until I started planning to come to Canada I'm not sure I even knew that there's a city called Quebec, in addition to the province. I'm sure glad I know about it now, as it's an amazing place.
I'm sure that the modern city of Quebec is much like the other Canadian cities, but I wouldn't know, as I haven't seen any of it. For, on a promontory above where the St Charles River flows into the mighty St Lawrence River sits Old Quebec. It's the only place in North America which has the town walls still standing. Much of it has clearly been rebuilt in modern times, serving more to show you where the walls ran rather than what they looked like, but still you can walk most of the way around the town on the walls.
In places the walls are still defended by batteries of black-painted cannons and bombards. The cannons themselves are installed in a most ingenious fashion. Each is on wheels, and is mounted at about shoulder height on a track that is sloped such that, when the cannon is fired the recoil will drive it up the slope, and gravity will return it to its firing position. But then the whole track is mounted with a pivot at the front and two transverse wheels at the back, so that the whole shooting match can be swiveled to point the cannon where needed.
At the highest point of the town sits a star-shaped citadel, still an active army base. I went to the changing of the guard ceremony there one morning. It involved a goat.
Within the walls all the buildings are old, and many are small and quaint and made of stone.
And in a commanding position at the top of the bluff dropping down to the river sits Le Chateau Frontenac, the most photographed hotel in the world. Now, I don't know who dreams up these dopey epithets, but there's no denying that it's a most extraordinary building. It's at N 46 48.752 W 071 12.278.
The lower part looks a bit like a castle curtain wall, with a series of round towers connected by straight sections of wall. And then a huge rectangular tower climbs up from behind the curtain wall, much taller than it. Everything is made with a reddish brick, and all sections are capped with steep roofs made of the same greenish copper alloy that all large buildings of a certain age in Canada seem to have.
Churchill and Roosevelt planned D-Day there, dontcha know.
The overall effect as you wander about is that you could swear that you are in an old town in Europe somewhere. I had no idea that such a place existed in North America. The whole of Old Quebec is a UNESCO World Heritage site.
As much as I like the place, my arrival might have been unpleasant where it not for a stroke of luck. I arrived at the train station, chose a hotel from my guidebook, and rang. Sorry, no rooms free. So I rang a second place. The guy who answered had quite a story to tell me. I had arrived on June 23rd - Quebec Independence Day. By which I assume he meant Quebec Wouldn't It Be Neat To Be Independent Day. The city was expecting 250,000 people to descend, party all night, and then realise that there was nowhere for them to sleep and nowhere for them to go to the loo. I got the impression that the locals spent a month cleaning up after the celebrations, and then the next eleven months dreading the next onslaught. The upshot of all this was that there would be no hotel rooms available anywhere. Only he had just had a cancellation and so had a room for me! He turned out to be a great bloke. He came and picked me up from the train station, gave me a whistle-stop tour of the town on the way to his hotel, and generally couldn't do enough to help me out. He also told me to expect raucous partying under my window all night, and advised me on the best way to stuff pillows into the window alcove to try and deaden the sound.
And verily, the hordes did descend.
The Quebec flag is a white cross on a blue background, with white fleurs-de-lis on the four quadrants. So soon the town was packed with people wearing fleur-de-lis hats and painted faces and "J'(heart) Quebec" tee-shirts. Lots of people were wearing Quebec flags as capes, with one guy going one step further and wearing a Superman suit in Quebec blue, with a fleur-de-lis where the "S" should be. It was striking how similar an Independence rally was to a sports event - even the chants were the same, with "O-wayyy o-way o-way o-wayyy-o" being pressed into service as an anthem.
The crowd was very rowdy, but good-natured. Wandering about I didn't feel in danger of anything worse than being vomited on.
The party lasted all night, with shouting, screaming, fireworks, klaxon-blasts, the odd ambulance, and interminable choruses of "O-wayyy o-way o-way o-wayyy-o" going past my window.
You can imagine the state of the streets the next day, with broken bottles and rubbish everywhere, and noisome smells in the corners of the battlements. Cleaning crews were out in force, and there was a machine driving down the roads with an attachment that was being used to sluice down the footpaths.
But it turned out that the ruckus in town was just the edge of the maelstrom. The real action was taking place just outside the walls, in a place called the Plains of Abraham, the site of the deciding battle between French and British forces for control of Canada. When I went on my second circumnavigation of the walls, on the day after the party, I couldn't believe the difference. This green and pleasant land had been turned overnight into a black quagmire of mud, laced with about ten bottles or cans or who knows what per square metre.
2008 marks the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec, and so there are various events going on. One of these was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. About 500m north of the town walls sits a rather ugly complex of 100 huge grain silos or more. The whole complex must be 500m long. Some genius came up with the audacious idea of using this complex as a vast screen and projecting images onto it.
I arrived at a suitable viewing spot on the battlements an hour early to ensure a good view, and sat watching the sky darken and the stars come out. The presentation itself was very hard to describe. It wasn't a film as such, but rather a series of vignettes featuring important people and events in Quebec's history. There was no narration, just a soundtrack. Some sections used archival footage, others animations - some stylized, some realistic. Sometimes they used the rounded nature of the silos to good effect, with each silo becoming a bullet, or a glass of beer, or a test tube, but mostly they just used the banks of silos as screens, having somehow figured out how to project a nearly distortion-free image onto a multiply-rounded surface.
The complex was divided into three banks of silos and two straight-sided buildings, one much taller than the silos, thus naturally forming five separate screens. Sometimes they treated all five screens as one big one - like for example showing a train traveling across the full width of all screens - but more often they showed a primary image or movie on the tallest screen, and related scenes on the secondary scenes - like for example a picture of an artist on the main screen and examples of his work on the secondaries.
It was astoundingly well done, completely freaking amazing, and I was utterly mesmerized. And to think that, had you told me a month ago that I was going to be sitting beneath the stars on an 18th century battlement watching a 500m-wide movie being projected onto a series of grain silos, I just would not have believed you.
(I watched the projection show from N 46 48.964 W 071 12.250, with the grain silos obvious in Google Earth about 500m to the north. They look a bit like a train from above.)
|
|
|
