Friday 2 Feb- Tapdancing the old town

One of the first people I met in Quebec was a loud Aussie, Sarah. She was just popping into Quebec on her way to Sth America (of course !!) and was, without a doubt, madder than me :-) I am grateful to her because the first thing she told me was about a walking tour available for free the next day.

The walking tour that we went on was lead by Valerie, a Parisian girl who is the daughter of a musican father and a dancer mother, and she has been a special effects makup artist for French cinema for a number of years. If you have seen a French movie with a dead body in it for the past couple of years, chances are, she's created the dead chappie. Very cool. For now though, Valerie and I have since become mates because she is on working holiday too.

Our walking tour group actually all became mates that first afternoon- Claire, from the midlands in the UK, Sarah and I from Australia, Maude and Valerie from Paris, Greg from Lyon (France), Nicola from Dublin and Laura from Texas. We stomped around the old town, with me surrepticiously doing a little soft shoe shuffle in the cold when we stopped to see various historical features, which were everywhere. Highlights included the Breakneck stairs (aptly named)which overlooked the oldest commercial street in North America, surviving the wars between the French and the British. The old medieval wall circling the old town was exactly like the Magic Wall as described by Garth Nix in the Abhorsen series of books.

There were two particular magic moments that afternoon. There is an English cannonball still wedged into the base of an old tree on one of the main streets of the old town. Sarah was pretty quick off the mark in her shock, "Bloody hell ! Who did that? Have the English been here?" Claire (UK) didn't miss a beat, "Not for awhile- I think we upgraded from cannonballs not too long ago".

Another magic moment arrived when we entered the Place Royale. Valerie was telling us that this was the set for one of the final scenes in Catch Me if you Can, when Tom Hanks chased Leonardo de Caprio through a "French village". Sarah went nuts, running around the statute of Louis XIV, renaming the square, Leonardo's Place. And unfortunately it stuck :-) The rest of us have been calling it Leonardo's Place ever since.

Fast forward with me now to the street party on that Friday night, as described in a previous post. All of us went out together that night. It was a terrific party. Apart from all of us girls having to deal with Frenchman Greg's shock and outraged pride when he realised that we all liked him as a mate but that there was not enough alcohol in the world to convince any of us to faire l'amour with a 270 pound hairy Frenchman, not matter how cool his accent was. I'm afraid some sterotypes prove true.

Ona completely random note, I recently found out that Michael Buble, the smooth jazz singer is not American. He is Canadian. The nation has suddenly gone up another 5% on the attractive scale.