The first settlement

The full chronology of our visit to Quebec is on Chris' wonderful Track My Tour app which has a weblink here. Please check it out for the moment by moment updates (but do ignore the pic which has us over Manitoba. That was somewhere in Quebec over the St Lawrence River).

In 1538 Simon de Champlain landed in Quebec City before it was Quebec City of course and in so doing became the first European visitor to Canada... that is if you ignore the Vikings. However it wasn't until 1608 that the first settlement was established... only a year before Bermuda's first settlement. The French had it first but that ended in 1759 as part of the Seven Years War which saw the British move in permanently. This city was the first seat of all government in Canada. Well the eastern part of Canada that is.

Meat pie and poutine. A fine staple!

It is a lovely city. Well the old part is and that is the bit that we visited. We had a great time. It is a cool food city too. The local meat pie and poutine are a treat! The great and the good things that we found were in no particular order:

Chateau Frontenac

Plenty of places competed with this lovely hotel but to us if we wanted to visit, we just had to stay here. The back story is really insightful into the history of Canada too and bears repeating.

Dominion came in 1867 which brought virtual independence (although the Queen is still head of state) from the Mother country. Gone were the subsidies and monies that flowed from Britain. Canada had to stand on its own. This was one way.

One of the pre-conditions of dominion with British Columbia on the west coast (at this time there only 4 provinces -- Quebec, Ontario and Nova Scotia in the east and BC in the west) was the need to build a railway from east coast to west. Halifax to Vancouver. 4,000+ miles across prairie, mountains, etc.  A number of railway companies came and went until Canadian Pacific showed up. Like now they had an American CEO and he was the guy that finally made it happen. However it was in one section, the most difficult, that it all very nearly came to a crashing halt. This was in the approaches to the Rocky Mountains. The trains were really swanky but as there were no tunnels through mountains back then, it was really difficult to manoeuvre the train around the mountains and through the various passes. Particularly the dining car which was the heaviest.

So the train would stop just before attempting this bit and decouple the dining car before making its way into the mountains. Back then this was a lengthy process and so the passengers would hop off the train and basically hang around or go for a walk. This was in a place called Banff Springs and it was here that the lightbulb went off for the CP CEO who said that this place (Banff) would be one great place to build a hotel so passengers could spend some time in comfort whilst waiting for the final bit of the journey to Vancouver.

That was the first hotel of the chain that would link the railway line end to end. The Chateau Frontenac was the second. Each hotel was built in the style of the locale and remain amazing monuments to this day.

Plains of Abraham

Moving over the obvious reasons why the French aren't as appreciative of this than the British (i.e. they lost here) the plains are just a great city park. Abraham was the bloke that used to keep his cattle here way back when and that in itself is just one great reason why it should be called that! Who wouldn't want a lovely park named after them? Central Park.... really!

City Walls

Quebec City is the only town in North America that is still completely walled. Now if that doesn't deserve a mention on its own, I don't know what does.

La Citadelle

Dating from the same time as the fortifications in Bermuda (Fort St. Catherine, Paget Island, Dockyard), the citadel was built 1820-50 as defence against US invasion. A real prospect as the city had been occupied before (like Montreal and like in Montreal the Americans left because the weather was too cold), the British built this huge defence adjoining the city walls on THE most strategic height in the city. We did a tour there after... wait for it... after watching the daily changing of the guard ceremony.

View from the Citadel and the city walls controlling the St. Lawrence waterway

Lovely to see in itself, but this is the only regiment (Royal 22nd Regiment) and the only place that does this where all orders are given only in... French. I've seen this before in England and the ceremony is pretty similar with the soldiers all dressed in the same red uniforms and bearskins, but that was in English. So really nice to see this and I really do hope this is a tradition that endures. So many don't these days.

French

Quebec is far more French than Montreal. This didn't used to be the case but gradually the Anglos left for Montreal and Toronto particularly during the 1960-1970 period when the independence movement was at its height. Today less than 2% of the population's first language is English. Someone told me the number of people speaking Arabic as their first language is nearly 5%!

Charcuterie française

Anyway we were able to practice our lamentable schooldays French but unlike France in the old days, we found that people were very happy to help you out in English!

Why Canada?

One of the most fascinating things was during a trip to the Montmorency Falls just outside the city. Picturesque and a nice place to hike, but it was so much more than this. In the old days people would go logging up river and drive the logs along the river to lumber mills at the foot of the falls.

La Chutte Montmorency

But why would it be that Canada was so important for lumber at a time when let's face it, Canada was a place miles away, next to a noisy and antagonistic neighbour and which other than the maritimes didn't do very much for the mother country?

Well it was all about Napoleon Bonaparte as so much of French/British history is. Blame Boney or in this case thank Boney.

Britain had been at war pretty much continuously with France from 1792 through to 1815. First was the revolutionary period which was a bit of a shambles for everyone but once Boney had taken control of things, he created the process that governed how the war would be fought with Britain and it was called the Continental System. This closed all European ports to British ships and for a maritime nation reliant on overseas trade, this was a disaster.

If you look at it from the French side, this was fair enough for British contributions to the war were mainly naval except for the Iberian expeditions. They had blockaded the European ports first... a point that the US particularly disliked as that meant the Royal Navy would frequently stop, search and in many cases seize US ships bound for European ports and was a cause of the 1812-14 war. But from a British perspective, this was an outrage and a major problem for it meant that they could not obtain amongst other things lumber from Scandinavia to build ships.

Hence Canada and indeed Quebec for the new world at that point was almost entirely covered with rivers, lakes and .... trees. Lots of trees.

So thank you Boney.

**
Don't you just love the why's?

Seaside

This is the next post of our Japan trip.  It took place in September but I only managed to write these notes a couple of months later.  For contemporaneous reports, take a look at Track My Tour -- a brilliant app that I used to ... well, track our tour.  Here is the link.

The plan for the next day was to head to a seaside resort called Kamakura for one night and check out the local festival which would feature monks on horseback shooting arrows at targets.  It took one cable car ride, 4 train rides (becoming more local at each turn) and then a final monorail ride all courtesy of the train pass to arrive.

Cool looking train.  This is the Nagoya Airport Express.  The Japanese love their trains!

Unfortunately the show took place at 1 pm and we arrived at 3 pm by which time the rain had set in again so we all split up and went in different directions.

A prize winner at the flower arranging stand... I think.

Viv and I found a nice place for dinner though.  Sushi this time!

We also enjoyed a sake experience Cat had talked about before whereby the server brings both glass and a small lacquer box to the table placing the glass inside.  The glass is then filled up and up until it overflows into the box.  It is only when the level has reached the top of the box that the pouring stops.  Apparently it is a sign that the wait staff like you.  As it had only happened at this restaurant, I did wonder what this said about us!

Big bottle of sake!  That glass is really full!!  But this is the drinking combo of choice for the Japanese.  Very nice it is too!!

Tokyo tomorrow... and we are really are heading back.

Zoom Zoom... Really

This is the next post of our Japan trip.  It took place in September but I only managed to write these notes a couple of months later.  For contemporaneous reports, take a look at Track My Tour -- a brilliant app that I used to ... well, track our tour.  Here is the link.

We were due to spend 4 days in Kyoto, the old capital of Japan, but on the way was the biggest and best castle in Japan at Himeji so we had to break our journey there.

Cat's itinerary for the days says:

Hiroshima to Himeji

52 mins past the hour, 57 minute journey

Aim for 9.52 am.

Fat chance of that!  We ultimately made the 10.52 and had our first bullet train, no sorry the Shinkansen, experience.  What an experience!

Each train apparently is designed differently so has different names like shark, snake and so on and when you see one, you know why!

The Snake!

The layout is like airline business class seating with a low purr as the train smoothly glides along on its own track.  Unlike regular trains with shorter rail lengths, the Shinkansen doesn't seem to have the same issue.  Maybe its one long rail?  When you watch one pass through a station at top speed without stopping it has an ethereal air to it with what seems like a sort of halo around it.  Difficult to explain but you have to experience it.

Whoooosh!

So all too quickly we ended up in Himeji, just the 57 minutes away and the castle was a brief 15 minute walk away from the station.  Very impressive it was too and at this point I shall digress about some Japanese history.

A charming older man stopped us in the gardens outside the castle to ask us where we were from.  We had a nice chat.  He said it had rained for 5 days straight which was why so many people were outside!  He wanted to practice his English which was very good.  Far better than my Japanese which at this point only extended to 'Konichi-wa" -- Hello.

Of course everyone is familiar with the TV series called Shogun from 20+ years ago with Richard Chamberlain as the ship wrecked westerner who unluckily fell into the hands of the Japanese.  Happily for him, he was smart enough to get on and that is what the story is about.  Good one too.  However it was set in the 1600's around the time Himeji Castle was first built and was the home and bastion of the then shogun Tokugawa.

Shoguns are basically war lords.  Actually he not they are rather the big boss warlord.  Some 1,000 years ago the Emperor was side lined by the war lords because the line became weak and the Emperors the equivalent of prancing ponies.  So they became figure heads and were used as political pawns in the never ending struggle of the big war lords around the country.  As a result the seat of power (as Himeji was for a time) followed the fortunes of the Shogun as opposed to the Emperor who was given a stipend and studiously ignored.  The last one was Tojo who fell in 1945.

The Shogunate was enforced by their soldiers, the samurai.  Essentially anyone not a war lord or samurai was the equivalent of a serf and were treated like dirt.  Japan sounds a nasty place to live if you didn't have money, position and power back then.

Foreigners were treated even worse.  Certainly there are stories of Portuguese missions and the occasional one like that I mentioned earlier, but the routine treatment of anyone unlucky enough to land in Japan either by chance (e.g. ship wreck) or design was to be executed immediately.  The Americans in particular got sick of this by the mid-19th century when their whalers who fished in Arctic waters hereabouts got into trouble and had their heads chopped off as opposed to being offered safe haven.  So Admiral Perry in his iron dreadnoughts sailed into Tokyo Bay and ... well opened the place up by the virtue of his big guns.

But the castle itself was a whopper.  The biggest in Japan and a World Heritage Site.  It has just been reopened after a lengthy renovation so was in very good condition indeed.  Those of you who have been paying attention will expect this by now but as the castle itself was first built 500+ years ago, the current one is version #24.  The earliest bit of the castle was from the 1950's.  Being in the middle of nowhere really, the castle was untouched in WWII.

We tramped up all 6 or 7 stories, depending how you count them, and even though the blurb says that it was built to the highest tech of the time, I did think that the Normans who basically built every standing castle in England out of stone in the 11th and 12th century would have sneered at the wood and mud hill construction.  However they weren't here then (and of course would have been executed had they been) so the castle was probably pretty much impregnable.

Call that a castle?

The gardens were of course lovely too and the whole visit was a most enjoyable segue into our arrival in Kyoto just in time for dinner

... and of course more sake!

Don't Mention the War...

This is the next post of our Japan trip.  It took place in September but I only managed to write these notes a couple of months later.  For contemporaneous reports, take a look at Track My Tour -- a brilliant app that I used to ... well, track our tour.  Here is the link.

We only planned to be in Hiroshima for a day, the main reason... actually sole reason being to watch a baseball match between the local Carps and the Dragons.

A month before had been the 70-year anniversary of the dropping of the first A-bomb in 1945 but none of us really wanted to visit anything that reminded us of something as ghastly as that.  Personally I think it was the right decision based on how many people died in Okinawa with the main island the next stop for landings.  Could have taken years and killed millions more.  So horrible as undoubtedly it was, it brought things to a dramatic crashing halt.  

Missed in all the talk of the horros of atomic weapons is the fact that as our holiday went along we realised more and more that every building was at most 60 or so years old.  Dating from the end of the war and the occupation in fact.  Everything else had been destroyed.  Remember I said that the O-torii Gate in Miyajima was wooden and therefore on version #38?  Well everything pre-war in Japan was also built in wood and with the night bombing focussing on incendiaries, you don't need to think too deeply to wonder why very few old buildings in Japanese cities survive.  We discovered in fact that the wonderful Horoshima Castle was in fact 20 or so years old as the old one was incinerated.

The only building that survived the A-bomb in 1945 is today in the Peace Park with a memorial to that awful occasion.

However the replacement architecture for the most part didn't harken back to the old days, rather it took the post-war London G-plan type build to extremes.  Actually pretty ugly with of course exceptions.  Hiroshima of course was flattened but being a major port had been bombed solidly before as well so all the buildings were of the newer... er, uglier type.  Except the train station.

We were staying at the railway hotel run by Sheraton which was really new, updated and absolutely splendid.  The station, as many country wide so we discovered, was under renovation, construction, whatever.  It was huge with a multi-storey department store inside and another across the street.  In Japan railway stations are THE central point of any city... because everyone uses the trains.  And boy are they clean, efficient and affordable.

Hiroshima

Stepping back from the bullet train (which comes tomorrow), transport in Japan seems great.  Indy told me it had got better (i.e. signs in English now) as a result of the football World Cup, before which no signs were in English.  But with a week rail pass and able to use everything from bullet train to local subway was a breeze.  The great thing is that the trains go everywhere, everyone uses them and did I say this already, they are very affordable.  It makes you wonder looking elsewhere when trains (in the UK for example) are so expensive and infrequent that if you build a lot, make them on time and clean, provide lots and lots of them AND make them affordable then people will use them.  Strange concept that others don't get.  They cut the service and put up the price so when people don't use them, they cut them again.  Makes no sense.  Anyway I am a HUGE fan of the Japanese train system and don't care who knows it!  If East Japan Railways needs an endorsement, sign me up.  As an aside I used to buy their Eurobonds in the past as they were AAA rated and always paid a little more coupon than some of their counterparts.

We traveled everywhere in Hiroshima on the smorgasbord of train offerings and found all of them excellent... even though it rained pretty solidly and had done so pretty much since we arrived in Japan... and tonight was the big game!

Zoom Zoom

Hiroshima is home of Mazda (zoom zoom) cars so the stadium is called Mazda Zoom Zoom Stadium!  Fortunately it was just a few minutes away from the hotel.  Cat had got tickets for Viv and I (who decided to attend late) apart from the rest of the party and provided us with home team ponchos to stay dry.  This turned out to be a bit of a problem as the tickets were in the opposing team, the Dragons, enclave and as soon as we arrived in bright red, one lady in particular came up to us saying we couldn't come in dressed like that.  She even went to get a policeman who confirmed this but really kindly when we pointed out that it was tipping down with rain gave us a couple of blue Dragons' ponchos including her own to wear.

However the rain lifted a few innings in ... and yes in Japan they play in all weather conditions ... and the night became clear and we settled in to enjoy the game which has a few local rules that I think enhance the event rather than anything else.

First are the bands.  Yes bands.  Each team has its own bands, its own songs and chants and its own band leaders.  Everyone sings, claps and howls along.  By the 8th innings, we were joining in.  However rather politely they take it in turns only playing when their side is batting so there really isn't much competition for who makes the most noise.  I thought the Dragons had the better songs, chants and moves for yes it also includes a form of in seat dancing with everyone moving in synchronicity.  You have to see it!

Instead of a 7th innings stretch there is a loosing of thousands of balloons, tonight red for the Carps and blue for the Dragons.  At the end of a particular song, everyone cheers and lets loose.  

However with all this mayhem going on, the game itself was a close run affair ending in a very polite draw at the end of the 12th innings.  Local rules say the bands must stop at 10 pm because of the noise to allow people to sleep ahead of work on the morrow, and the game stops at the end of the 12th innings so nobody gets home too late!

So it wasn't that late an affair leaving us plenty of time to find an Okonami restaurant, the local dish of choice which is a pancake with very Japanese toppings washed down with local beer and of course sake!  

When they ask what you'd like, you say "Everything"

What a night!

Happy Trails

Just back home to Bermuda and the hot, sticky weather my first thought after 2 months away was how old Bermuda looks.  Not surprising I suppose seeing as it was discovered in 1609 and being small has been built over for years now, so there's precious little leeway to build big, new things.  Or money at the moment anyway although I do hope that changes soon.

Looking back on our time away though, here are some thoughts:

Chicago

What a great City!

That's it.  Nothing else.  OK, one thing someone told me about was the Architectural Society's city tours and how good they were.  He was right.  And this really leads onto a theme running through the trip which is that exploring somewhere through history brings perspective and so much more enjoyment than simply rolling up and trying to get going.  My son, Ali, recently went to Paris for a friend's wedding and visited some of the museums there which he said he really enjoyed.  I found this pleasantly surprising as I thought the young today don't read that much (if its not on a digital device) and don't care much for history beyond the first 20 second sound byte.

Chicago Board of Trade's throne style art deco building

Museums

Many of the museums we visited had guided tours of displays, events and such like.  Do them.  These tours are provided for a reason.  They are interesting and informative.  If the guides are enthusiastic (and ours were), this translates into a wonderful experience which brings so much more to what you are looking at.

Warning: You are in danger of learning something…

In Montreal, for example, at the Pointe a Calliere Museum -- the museum of the city -- a temporary exhibit was of one district in the City just outside downtown.  I couldn't for the life of me understand why I'd care about some suburb but the tour convinced me otherwise and reminded me that everyone and everywhere has a story.  All you have to do is listen.

I now know for example why Montreal housing is built the way it is -- outside staircases because property tax at the time was calculated on living space, staircases being considered dead space were therefore built outside.  Made no sense of course as with the city being snowed in for 6 months of the year, these staircases were death traps!

Not many people know that.

Baseball

The 2 games we went to were brilliant but make me wonder why there are so many games in a season. 162 regular season games is a lot so teams have to have large rotating squads and make sure they win 52% of their games to make it to the play-offs.  (Watch the movie Moneyball to see what I mean). This means the game can be managed statistically; beat that team, rest the good guys for this other team…

Takes some of the immediacy out of things.  Had we realised the St. Louis game was the final one in a 3-game series against LA and they'd already won the first 2 games, we may not have spent the $100 per ticket to watch a game that was fairly low energy (and importance to St. Louis anyway).

I think this is likely the case with NBA and NHL too.

Bourbon

I was hoping I'd like Bourbon but even the smoothest drink felt like a dagger in the throat to me (just like Scotch too).  But when incorporated into a cocktail such as an Old Fashioned or a Manhattan… whoo-hoo!

Draw daggers…

Old Fashioned and Mint Julep… that's what I'm talking about!

Interestingly as a side comment the barman at our cocktail course said that Canadian Rye whisky is the most popular US drink so that now many US distillers make rye too.  This is permeating into Bourbon making as well where the area in which it was originally distilled (Bourbon county in Kentucky) was expanded to the point where it could be made anywhere in Kentucky and still be called bourbon, and then again further still so that bourbon can be made anywhere… and still be called bourbon.

This would never happen in the EU who make sure that you can only legally get Yorkshire Pudding in Yorkshire.  Mind you the French are highly guarded over Champagne and Cognac so maybe the EU learned it from them.

Movies

We like movies and when away take the chance of spending lengthy periods in the local Cineplex 24 or whatever the local name is.  If you plan properly, you could spend an entire day in one of these places moving from screening room to screening room -- our record was 4 in a day.  The challenge is to find movies you like in the right order.

The biggest irritant is going out to buy multiple tickets and makes me wonder why these multiplexes don't just sell a day pass, or a week pass for that matter.  Double or triple a single ticket and enable movie goers to stay and go as much as they want.  They'd buy stuff at the concessions and probably generate more revenue for the cinema and at the same time obviate the need to hire people to check for those who hop from screen to screen without buying new tickets.

Make the experience better for moviegoers in fact.

Service

We went out a lot in the last 2 months.  Pretty much across the board we found that service in bars, restaurants and hotels was excellent but stand out moment goes to the Toque Restaurant in Montreal (see link here).

We were recommended this as being one of the best restaurants in Montreal and expecting it would be French-ish, we went.  Montreal isn't as French as I thought it would be nor was Toque.  It was new, elegant and had some French components to it but it was new American… and very nice too.  I'd ordered a bottle of red wine I thought would be nice and while drinkable it wasn't great and for some reason I mentioned this to the sommelier when he asked.

He apologised and asked if he could change it for us.

I hadn't expected this as it was my poor choice in the first place that I was happy to live with.  I certainly didn't ask him to change it.  He offered.

He also said let him choose a wine he thought we'd like… and he did.  And we did.  And it turned out to be a Serbian cabernet.  Very nice it was too.  The sommelier said he didn't want to tell us first as we'd never have agreed to try it.  He was right, we wouldn't.  I wish I'd made a note of the name as it actually was lovely.

As was dinner and the stunningly unexpected service level.

Luggage

We made some very poor choices regarding luggage in our trip earlier in the year and had cut things down to just the 3 bags … from 6.  Progress certainly but still not perfection.

What were we thinking?

Travelling these days with luggage is a real pain.  Virtually all airlines now charge for luggage -- AA I think was the hold out in the US but they gave up in April when they merged with US Airlines.  Yet another added cost on top of the quoted fare.  Security and Immigration controls are also a pain.  If the US ever increases its Amtrak routing, I'd consider trains more.  No immigration, no travel to/from the airport, no security… sounds wonderful.

Or we could just go tubing…