The Third Circle of Hell, hustlers and a cultural challenge

Chez Dagobert is a Quebec city nightclub. On the outside it looks like Rapunzel's castle in minature, complete with falling snow and fairy lights. It is looks like a romantic dream. On the inside, it is an ubermodern nightclub of three levels- pumping DJ music, excellent bar service.

And the staff pad you down for weapons and search your bag for drugs at the door.

Inside the scene makes a P- Diddy or 20 Cent filmclip look like the Saturday morning cartoons. Worse still, there was tightly coiled hatred running from end to end of the rooms. Men there of all colours really wanted to hurt each other. And the women were lost, really lost. But they did everything and nothing. What was strange is that the group of people I was there with didn't notice anything, except that the music was enough to make your eardrums reverberate so we ended up in the quieter pub downstairs.

That was my last night in Quebec city- there is more- like the other pub we were in earlier in the evening where 2 weedy-looking Quebecqois guys tried to hussle myself and another fellow traveller- Bob from Alberta in a game of pool. Bob had not been truly on his game all night- he did ok against the Canadian guy, Curtis from Vancouver, but I nearly beat him in our Aust vs Can challenge. However, he pulled up beautifully and sunk 4 in a row after listening to the hustlers tell each other revolting jokes in French directly at us that he "wouldn't repeat to a lady". Unfortunately I sunk the white off the black at the end of the game otherwise those weasals would've been toast, pool-wise.

I was proud of Bob- he kept his cool and I think also invented a new phrase- he'd threatened "to turn all Albertan". I think it means something to do with eating good quality beef and using the ingested iron to beat up rude weedy guys just because they annoyed him as much as they had tried to offend me. The attitude was not too dissimilar from the boys back home which was weird- culturally I had more in common with Curtis from Vancouver and Bob from Alberta than either of them did with their Quebecqois counterparts. Very hard to believe they are all citizens of the same country and I have no idea what the Quebecqois would do with the Queen if she did come to visit. Cheerio Bob and Curtis- I hope your hockey teams (Edmonton and Vancouver Canucks) climb the ladder, mates and at least beat the Americans.