Quebec City

I headed up to Quebec City for a little less than a week for work and was blown away by the beauty of the city. It's definitely the most beautiful city that I've seen in the Americas. It's very old and European-looking and is amazing. My pictures cannot even begin to describe the beauty of the city, but maybe they can start.

I was there on a work trip to meet a group that I work with on a daily basis. It was so great to get to finally put faces to the people that I communicate with on such a regular basis. And they are a really wonderful team to work with, not to mention to visit! They took me out for a night on the town and showed me Quebec - great food, shows and sites. It is the summer of the 400th anniversary of the city and people are out all times of the day and night. I was amazed at how many people were still walking around town at midnight on a weeknight! My co-workers told me that's pretty normal in summer anyway because their winters are so rough, but with this summer having such festivities, it is even more so now. I guess they'll just have to catch up on sleep in the winter when it's cold and snowing! We saw an amazing "movie" on the 81 Bunge grain silos down by the water. It's the world's biggest architectural projection ever created and showed the history of the city for the last 400 years. It was created by Robert Lepage and was incredible. It shows every night at 10PM and is 45 minutes long - and it's packed there. That just shows you how everyone likes to stay up late! (or am I just getting too old!?)

I spent a lot of time on my own too and even stayed over for an extra Saturday to get to visit the city a bit more. I spent one evening at an outside exhibit at one of the museums with all sorts of vegetables and plants growing to make it look like an art exhibit. It was pretty cool and since I've been reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle for my bookclub, I was very interested to see what all of the crops look like. They had a water exhibit too in which they projected down into a well the city in day and night and though I couldn't understand what they were saying because it was all in French, I think they were talking about conserving water. I also spent a weekend night out on the town and just hung out by myself, but met very friendly people everywhere I went. People from Quebec are very nice, even to someone from the US who doesn't speak a word of French. I spent Saturday just walking around the city and visited Canada's highest waterfall (I think that's what I heard). I climbed about a million steps to get high enough to walk over the waterfall. It wasn't the most beautiful water I've ever seen, but it was pretty cool to be able to walk over it. It's also frozen in the winter enough to climb on - imagine all of this water frozen! Maybe I'll have the opportunity to visit sometime in the winter, though they all warned me that it's CRAZY cold!