Quebec City
Trip Start
May 07, 2012
1
22
Trip End
Jun 22, 2012
Where I stayed
What I did
Fresque du Petit-Champlain
Fresque des Québécois
Quebec City, Quebec, Canada
Monday, May 28, 2012
Our tour guide took us walking through the historical centre of Quebec City. Quebec is a walled city, so the historical part is surrounded by a big stone wall. It actually feels like you're walking through Europe. All the signs are in French, and the people here speak French as their first language (most also speak some English, but some people speak English better than others). The streets are cobblestone, and it all looks really quaint. We saw a cool mural on the side of a building which looks like a scene from the street. It is called Fresque des Quebecois because it shows a mixture of things that are typical to Quebec. For example, it depicted a couple of kids playing ice hockey in the street.
There was also a mural which looks like you're peering into the inside of a house. It's called Fresque du Petit-Champlain and shows people inside the walls of the house.
Our guide also took us to Place Royale, a town square which was used in a scene from the movie Catch Me If You Can (with Leonardo DiCaprio). The Quebec town square acted as a town square for a French town in the movie. It was in the scene where Leo's character gets arrested outside a church on Christmas Eve. The church in the Quebec town square was the church in the scene. Our tour guide told us that they spent something like 15 days setting up for the shoot, only to have Tom Hanks not show up on the day of filming so they had to reschedule it to another day.
It was icy cold weather, so a few of us decided to get lunch from a place with hot soup and sandwiches. After our walking tour, Todd and I went hunting for places from today's photo challenge. We climbed up the city wall to get a photo, and took a photo in front of one of the murals, but couldn't find the tree with the cannonball in it (one of the challenges).
I was really excited because I found a street called Avenue Sainte Genevieve (my name!!) AND a street called Rue Mont Carmel (Carmel is my middle name). Both streets were really close to each other, so I just had to get photos of both street names.
This city is really pretty, but it was so cold and windy that it was hard to concentrate on sightseeing. We got some nice photos of the Fairmont Le Chateau Frontenac (a hotel that looks like a castle), then got a hot drink in Starbucks while we waited for the Contiki bus to pick us up.
Comments
Quebec was so pretty and quaint (only set back was super winds). High five to us for scaling the wall like pros