A splendid lake in the Parc national de la Mauricie, Quebec. Click to enlarge
Our Canadian vacation has been memorable. We’ll definitely return to this country and to Quebec!
We plunged into nature at La Mauricie National Park (see images above and below.)
Click for a larger image
I finally met Paul Costopoulos and the Commentator face to face, and I met Devinder Singh for the second time (he had already visited us in Rome: read his post on our first encounter). They all live in Montreal.
Here is Paul and his wife Therèse on the Mont Royal, where they took us by car. Mont Royal is the mountain that gave its name to the city of Montreal.
Paul and Thèrese took us to the Mount Royal. Click to enlarge
And here is the Commentator and myself at La Petite Italie, the Italian district of Montreal. Commentator took us to the places of his childhood.
The Commentator (right) and MoR at La Petite Italie, Montreal. Click to zoom in
I am sorry I don’t have good pictures of Devinder. He took us a couple of times to Down-town Montreal, where he lives. This is though Devinder in Rome.
Devinder in Piazza Navona, Rome. Click to enlarge
This is Flavia and I in front of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, Quebec City, possibly the oldest church in North America. Flavia, whose face I have blurred, I now realise looks like an alien.
Flavia and MoR in front of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, Quebec City. Click to enlarge
And here some pictures at Paul’s, where he and his wife offered us a great lunch and great company.
More pictures to come in the next days. Ciao
Man of Roma 
Nice to see you back here dear Giovanni. It was our pleasure all the way and thanks to you, I met the great Paul and his wonderful family at that great lunch. Made so many friends there. 🙂
Regards to your wife and hope you are enjoying your time in Rome.
Everything’s fine here, although actually I am in Tuscany at the moment, because the 15th of august is a traditonal holiday in Italy. I’ll write you a mail. My eldest daughter is now in northern India. All the best dear Dev.
Hello MoR! It is Louis in Brazil. How great this trip to Quebec. I have always wanted to visit eastern Canada. I lived in Vancouver, BC for 15 years, which I recommend you visit one day. It too is a beautiful place. Wonderful photos. Thanks for sharing them! Auguri
Hi Louis, so great to hear from you again! I didn’t remember you had lived in Western Canada, which I heard is very beautiful. How are things going in Brasil? Do you still live there? I have lurked a couple of times over at your blog. Ciao
Wow. Now, how the hell am I going to compete in the blogging about summer travels department?
This looks like so much fun! I wish I had thought to hook you up with my brother who lives in Montreal. He is charming and smart and always ready for fun. Next time.
Flavia simply has the look of a person who has been dazzled by sparkling personalities and beautiful landscapes. Happens to me all the time. 🙂
No need to compete here. I prefere other forms of human relationships lol. I wish you had told me about your brother. Your family is surely special dear Jenny. Yes, it was fun, and all the stress is gone. To Paul, Dev and the Commentator I have to add Ken, the owner of the B&B in Montreal. Of jewish descent he has introduced us to the Plateau district and its people, VERY eccentric indeed. We loved that. I might mention this in my next post on Canada.
I always enjoy visiting Montreal, even though the locals will not speak French to me!
If by locals you mean the French Canadians, I was struck – and pained, since I love all that is French – by some lack of flexibility and by this cultural protectionism they have, which is probably not good to prosper. The Jews, the Chinese and the Italians, for example, appeared to be more reactive and successful in business.
Thus being said, they are absolutely adorable and one of the assets (and reasons) of our trip.
My French is not superb, and they all speak English, so I guess they just switch without thinking. In the countryside where I have gone biking, it’s a different story.
As far as my experience, some of them don’t like to speak English, both in towns and in the countryside. But, as you said, in the country I noticed some who had little or no knowledge of English.
At Lac Saint-Jean, close to Chicoutimi (hence the deep country) one kid heard Flavia and I speaking Italian and asked his parents in French: “Mum, WHY are they speaking another language?” The parents hushed him but it was clear to us what the kid meant. Again, at a museum about the First Nations’ culture (close to that same lake) a woman heard me talking to the guide alternating French and English and frowned upon me. I got irritated and snapped: “Madame, je ne suis pas français!” I don’t think the French (in Canada or in France) will get very far with this protectionist attitude. Which, as I said, grieves me a bit.
Welcome back, Man of Roma.
I always enjoy visiting Quebec City. Lichanos is not alone…the local French speaking people always responded to my French questions in English too. C’est dommage.
I quite enjoy their mix of friendliness, pride and refinement.
Hi Geraldine, thanks for being here. Yes, friendliness, pride and refinement. What a marvellous people and place. I also met many people from France out there. They seem to like Quebec. We stayed at a B&B close to La Mauricie National Park which was run by a French couple from Bretagne. They said they had found their paradise in Quebec.
ps. Forgot to say I love the photos.
🙂
I think you summarized properly what most “outside” the Quebecois loop think and feel.
Hi Alex! The Quebecois loop, well put. And Paul Costopoulos surely agrees 🙂
Welcome back MoR!. It doesn’t seem as if it was very cold over there after all. Are you enjoying the heat (which has finally arrived) of our summer?
Ah ah ah, Andy, not at all, not at all, and you know it. I am in fact brought to distraction these days.
Yes, I can imagine. On the other hand, I am really enjoying it. I’m hoping it means a lovely, warm September.
Ok, Andy, lovely and warm but not as now. I imagine in Milan, where you are, it must be horrible, tho not for a central England, heat-starved guy such as you are lol.
MOR is MIA.
M.I.A. — the acronym, I mean. 🙂
@Jenny
As I said over at your blog. I checked. M.I.A. and found: city of evil, a semiautomatic rifle, underground resistance etc. etc. ALL sort of devilish stuff. I am so puzzled – it must be the heat 🙂
I truly didn’t mean to puzzle. I thought it was clear when I wrote it and I liked the way it sounded–this happens to me all the time. So:
MIA = missing in action; it’s a military term. But I just meant to say: missing, or, rather: missed. Nothing devilish. 🙂
Oh, well, thanks. You American people never cease to surprise me 🙂
“You were MIA!” is pretty much standard lexicon in the English language.
Can mean “missed” as Jenny said or “where the f*** were you?”
Ok, but it also could be the witty double entendre typical of women (and of her): MOR is MIA = MOR is MINE (since MIA or MIO is mine in Italian). No wonder in the Middle Ages women were considered devilish 😉
Just innocent playing, man. It’s the heat (and age).
OK, Roma, I realized that’s how it looked only after I hit the “post comment” button! And, so the follow up about acronyms. Again, the sort of thing that happens to me all the time.
I looked up MIA too. Turns out it also stands for Master of International Affairs.
Devilish enough for you?
Not enough.
GIS: Geographic Information System – my technical specialty
GIS: Gruppo di Intervento Speciale – Italian SWAT team
SWAT: special weapons and tactics police force
I wonder what’s the use of all these acronyms. They make things more difficult, not easier.
I want to be a Master of Intriguing Affairs.
@ T.C.
MIA is a hard slog. The sunglasses work. 🙂
Geraldine! You’re seldom here, why? 🙂
I have inserted you and Rosaria into the buddies group over at the Manius soap. If you mind, I’ll erase your name.
Hi Man of Roma,
No, I do not mind, thank you for asking. I’m in good company.
I am away from my second home (temporary situation) and living in a new place for a short time. It’s a huge adjustment, albeit exhillarating.
Today, I took the wrong bus (bus rides are new to me), jumped off and then, map in hand, had to walk miles in a strange place. What an unexpected adventure! Everyone helped.
There are stories to be harvested on buses. I thought of all the great writers in this group, you, Cheri, Jenny, Sled, Phillip, Paul and Richard, and wondered how you would present them: Great faces, accents, hardship, resilience and shoes that tell a thousand tales.
I see you’re advertizing on your blog now.
It’s late here. Buono notte.
Geraldine
Hi dear Geraldine!
I guess not having a permanent home must be stressful. I always liked taking buses, even though Roman buses are often crowded. One has time to watch people better, since we are all waiting, at times bus conversations arise and so forth.
I took the Metro (Roman underground) for 15 years in order to reach various work places and I miss that ambience (and those days).
I don’t think you are a worse writer than we are (many of your comments are so inspiring), and I don’t think I’m the only one to wonder why you don’t keep a blog of your own, sweet Geraldine from far away Hibernia.
I don’t advertise much the Manius blog. Maybe I should. I consider it like a lab, after all.
What a relief to know Geraldine has not left us!
My shoes tell the kinds of stories that get banned in Boston 🙂
I wonder what kind of shoes are they, Sled.
It’s not so much the kind of shoes they are, but what they’ve seen… 😉
I’m glad you liked Canada. One my favourite place on earth!
I’m going to Toronto next week, on biz trip though. However I’ll reconnect with friends which is great.
Looking forward to see more pics!
Have a good trip Lola. I’m slow with the new pictures post because of another blog I have that is time consuming. Ciao.
Québec is a very complex society and trying to understand or to explain it would require volumes upon volumes and end up with something Mao Ze Dong would have called “contradictions”.
I don’t think Quebec is all that complicated. The Quebecois mind is pretty easy to figure out. Ask any American or European and see how fast they size it up – and often accurately.
The only thing that makes it look like we’re complex is that French is the majority language.
@Paul
@Commentator
I wasn’t diminishing the Quebecois in my above comment (I mean by this the people whose ancestors are more or less just French). Au contraire. One of the reasons that will probably bring me back to Quebec is them, I adore them!
At the Rue Saint Denis I was with Flavia and Devinder sitting at an open-air restaurant and we were surrounded by them: well dressed, sipping wine, having interesting conversations. I was in heaven. It was a New World version of Paris.
It is their protectionism that I find dangerous for their development. The exchange with what is diverse, far for being dangerous, is enriching. Italians too are at times closed up. But they are not so protectionist for the simple reason that their so-to-say glories are more far away in the past. While the French, as I said somewhere else, it’s as if they had a big headache from a recent fall.
You also, Paul, said many times that those who feel they are of pure French stock are kind of closed-up vis-à-vis the external cultures This cannot but make their progress more difficult.
[Paul when I said “I wanna go where the real French Milieu is” you gave me a list of places. I asked you: “Are they really French?” You replied: “Meme trop!”]
The world is big. There is much much more than the French culture (although I cannot live without it as far as I am concerned). This, to a certain extent, applies – in my opinion – to the European French too. Of course, mine is only a foreigner’s view.
T.C. oversimplifies and has a reductionist approach when limiting the problem to French being the majority’s language. But he has an absolute right to his opinion and to his expression of it.
I agree though to the fact that Québec limits it’s cultural and economic development by being so.
You know, when I was younger, all I heard was how “complex and unique” Quebec was. I went along with it.
In the Canadian context, maybe (and Lord knows it adds flavor to Canada) but in terms of history beyond these borders?
In any event, humans are generally a complicated bunch. Culture just determines how bad it’ll be. And in Quebec, we celebrate “culture” as long as it speaks French. It can be an ant (say, the one from the Pink Panther always running away from the ardvark) playing the banjo badly and it’ll still get a grant so long as it “contributes” however insiginificantly to the “peuple de la majorite.”
“Volumes and volumes” of what I wonder? Anyone can fill history pages up. I know intimately the history of Quebec, I just don’t feel there’s anything a competent philosopher can’t wrestle with.
Are we that much more complex from Louisiana? California? Newfoundland? If we’re so complicated, what does it make places like America, India, China, Italy, the Middle-East, etc.?
What can we point to exactly that makes people go, “hey, look at Quebec. There’s something happening there.”
Who is our Aristotle? Justinian? Petrarch? Madison? People who transcended their own nationality to bestow upon others something of value?
The biggest “accomplishment” for Quebec is Bill 101. Hardly something for the world to take its cue from. We take our own history so seriously it mocks the whole art form when we look at the world – an exercise I know Paul and MOR are capable of. MOR doesn’t see Italian culture; he sees the Latin world and Mediterranean civilization with Italy playing its own role.
If anyone is reductionivist, it’s the entire Quebecois political apparatus so riddled with dysfunctional corruption. To be fair, it is not alone as “social democracy” and the overflowing welfare state has produced a species of self-entitled buffoons. We enabled this by giving candy to the diabetic. We didn’t know how to say “no, it’s enough.”
As for me, personally, guilty as charged! If I saw anything in Canadian history that shifted the course of human events, yeah, maybe I’d be inclined to be convinced we’re “complex.”
Since I’m on this rant, same goes for Canada. We praise medicority since it fits nicely with our aims to be a “social-democracy.” Ok, it’s nice and all, but quit bragging about it.
When I was in high school, the popular saying about hte autmotative industry was how the best GM cars were being built in Canada; Oakville, Ontario I believe it was. I can’t remember. Anyway, it was nice to have such a reputation, but all it showed was that Canada was a capable branch plant society. I responded in class, “how about we start our OWN car brand since we’re so good!”
And back then, I was a hard core nationalist. Then I grew up and took things as they were.
We should be doing much more and elevating our standards.
Meh.
Bah.
@T.C. — meh AND bah? Let me buy you a drink. 🙂
Your rant is targeting the core of what we call here, ‘identity politics.’ Can we be rid of it? I doubt it – people are tribal in their outlook, but that doesn’t mean we have to celebrate it, or even like it!
Your remarks about the Canadian embrace of mediocrity are amusing. Personally, I think the USA has a lot to learn from Canada, and I’m not knowledgeable enough about Canadian culture, let alone Quebec, to judge whether it IS mediocre, but the fact that some Canadians feel it is, and feel they need to elevate that attribute into a positive virtue is typical of the dynamic of identity politics. Whatever WE are, is GOOD, because it is US.
Healthy self-esteem is important, and everyone and every culture has its value, but such rhetoric is all about creating a feeling of superiority, in order to reduce insecurity, etc. etc. It’s really tedious, and so much rubbish.
I can imagine that the Quebecquois stuff can grate after a while, even though nobody is setting off bombs these days.
I think for Canada comparing itself to America will always be a reality.
As for learning from us, from what I’ve observed, New York, Massachusetts and California already incorporate certain “social” ideals. Ironically, I remember reading an article back in university discussing how Canada actually imported its socialism from the U.S. More irony, according to the Freedom Index, Canada is more free than the U.S. – by one notch.
Quebec is indeed identity politics and always will be. It’s just the way it is. Tolerance in it goes in cycles. Right now, it’s a “grating” stage for me. Next month, it will change. But I speak as a non-Francophone, naturally my opinion is different. I sympathize with their dilemma, I just don’t believe it needs to come at a cost.
The problem with “identity politics” is when it begins to legislate laws pitting one set of people against another,and in Quebec, it’s along linguistic lines. The closest things we had to bombs came in 1970 with the October Crisis. It may come back. Who knows? It certainly isn’t Basque territory for sure.
In between all this, are the Natives (as seen during the Oka Crisis). if there’s one thing they hate (and yes, I’ve met and even hung around enough Miqmaqs and Mohawks) is their suspicion of a Quebec nationalist government. The way they see it, better to fight with the devil they know: Ottawa.
The state masters insist on restricting freedom of choice, but the people are increasingly going against it. Which is heartening.
I generally stay clear of this topic, since as Paul mentioned, it is kinda messy, but I feel like it here.
Also, I think some places on the continent are more predisposed to lean one way or another. As I mentioned above, states like Minnesota probably have more in common with Manitoba and Ontario than they do Texas; which Albertans can identify with. British Columbia probably has more in common with Washington than it does, say, Quebec or Nova Scotia; who in turn, share similar histories with New England.
The closest things we had to bombs came in 1970 with the October Crisis. Didn’t know the name, but I do remember that. There were some bombs, were there not? Just didn’t kill anyone?
I imagine the Quebecquois thing seems a bit crazy to the Inuit peoples. They must be thinking, “Aw c’mon now! Want to talk about problems?”
New York, Massachusetts and California already incorporate certain “social” ideals. Not sure how familiar you are with the USA, but the extent to which a state can diverge from the national norm is not too great when it comes to improving social insurance and that sort of thing. It’s much easier to diverge in a negative direction. The ‘progressive’ ideals of NY, MA, or CA, don’t amount to much for most people, although there are some important differences. It’s much easier to get executed, ‘rightly’ or wrongly, in Texas than in those states. It’s easier to get a job paying poverty wages in Texas if you think you can live on it. CA if very intrusive with environmental regulations, some of which I think are dumb, etc. etc.
Nice!
I’ll pick you up.
Hello T.C.,
what a wonderful writer you are. has Paul never encouraged you to start a blog?
scoop me up from ohio, and i’ll buy you all you can drink 😉
Thanks dafna. Me a blog? Why in the world would I pollute the world with my rantings….wait a minute….
Dafna, T.C. (alias The Commentator) keeps a great blog since many years with thousands of posts. Great writer and also one of the most prolific I’ve seen.
oops, i thought it was therese c.
My only knowledge of the States is from what I read and what friends and family from NY, Conn., Mass, NC, Calif. and Florida tell me.
I have friends from Montreal who moved or worked in the USA and wouldn’t trade it for the world. Conversely, I have a couple of American friends (from NYC and Boston) who like it up here.
I don’t even attempt to compare both countries. We have enough of that just comparing each other between provinces!
@Paul
@T.C. (Commentator)
@Lichanos
Interesting and instructive conversation, gentlemen.
I have nothing to add but the personal note that I have learned more from you guys (I’m referring to all my commenters) on North America and the UK during these 4 years of blogging than in all my previous life.
hello MoR!
thank you for locating geraldine for us!
have you ever visited jacob’s blog about our trip – of course he is only 12 so it is very limited. and he stalled before posting about england…
but besides the wonderful company, there were not too many pictures since we were so ill in England.
Hello Dafna!
Yes, Geraldine is here among us, I hope. I’ve visited your son’s blog. What? Are you sure he’s 12? He looks older and more mature than that. Amazing.
he’s got a little Roma in him 😉
Well, wondering if being a bit Roma is good or bad lol 🙂