Quebec is Brilliant!

(I wrote this yesterday in the car, and we didn't have wi-fi until now. Incidentally, we're now in Nova Scotia [or Nouvelle-Ecosse], in Atlantic time zone, the existence of which I was only vaguely aware until we realized the time had skipped an hour.)

Emma here to tell you about the marvelous city of Quebec! Yesterday we walked around the old city area, or Vieux-Quebec, as I suppose it's properly called. We had time to kill before our hotel check-in, so we gruesomely murdered it by walking around the area. The streets were very lovely and cobblestoney and filled with tourists. People seem to just walk in the streets, because they're too steep to drive on. Anyway, our plan was to walk around if it was nice outside, and go to the Musee de la Civilization if it rained. It was relentlessly sunny, so we didn't get to go to the museum, but we did walk past it. The outside of one of the buildings looked a bit like the Kimmel Center (without the glass roof), and another was hung with banners that said "SAMOURAI!" -- presumably their current main exhibit. Their logo is this stylized "Em" thing, which makes absoulutely no sense to me. Dad says it has to do with E equals m c squared... but without the equals, or the c, or the squared. There's a picture in Dad's post below.

And now for the things we did actually see! Predictably we walked around and saw a lot of local shops and things, including two stores that sold almost exclusively stuff made out of maple syrup. We got ice cream at the first (mine was maple toffee) and maple syrup on a stick at the second. Seriously. It was just maple syrup, poured out in a line onto a block of ice, and then wrapped around a jumbo Popsicle stick. Really. 

The stuff was amazing at the first bite, but after that, it kind of made us want never to eat anything sugary again. If I'm remembering correctly from French class, it's called  cabane  à sucre, but that might just be maple syrup, so in that case it's sirop d'érable. It's definitely one of the two. Sorry. Nobody paid much attention to Geoculture, not even me. 
Anyway.

We got lunch at a boulangerie/cafe place that was essentially Panera after taking the funiculaire up the hill. Then we went to a bookstore! There weren't really a whole lot of tourists there because all the books were in French. I was allowed to purchase Les Trois Mousquetaires and Harry Potter et le Prisonnier d'Azkaban. Then we checked in to the extremely nice hotel. You could see the sailboats in the river. Speaking of the hotel (which was, I think, called the Port-Royal), across the street there was a very cool sculpture fountain thing that was meant to look like the prow of a sunken ship. It took us nearly a whole day to figure this out, despite several very big clues, including the fact that the adjacent streets and sidewalks were tiled with wave patterns. 

After chilling out for a few hours (for us, this consisted of hide-and-seek; for Dad, it consisted of telling us to stop) we went back outside and walked around. It was almost dark by this point, and we were slightly less tired. We passed a whole lot of cafes and restaurants and shops called Le Cochon Dingue. One, in fact, was called Le Petit Cochon Dingue, which seemed eerily familiar, because I had definitely seen that font before - as it turned out, on the cover of our French textbook. Huh. [picture] There was also a T-shirt shop called T-Dingue, where we finally asked the woman there what "dingue" meant. As it turns out, it's a Quebecois word that basically means "crazy." I suppose this explains the T-shirt that said JE SUIS DINGUE DINGUE DINGUE DINGUE DINGUE. 
More miscellanea about Quebec, the province: there are campaign signs everywhere. I now know why American presidential hopefuls don't put their faces on posters. Most of the ads we saw either had the faces cut out or had a scribbled-on Hitler mustache. There's also a chain of restaurants called St. Hubert's, the logo of which is a chicken (or a rooster, or possibly a turkey) and there are ads for it everywhere. I don't know if this is a Canada thing, or what.
Correction: Dad is now, between complaints about the price of gas (which is like $6 a gallon!) and the GPS (which is stubbornly telling us to turn around and take the overly pricey ferry across the river), claiming that we don't know what the Em building is and it actually isn't the Musee de la Civilization. Bah.

So currently we're in the car on the way out of Quebec. I don't know when this will be posted, because our next stop is a campground and I seriously doubt they'll have WiFi, but at the moment it's 9:40 on Monday morning. Dad bought some cheese curds at the gas station and is trying to persuade us to eat them: "They're like packing peanuts, only you can eat them! Look, they even squeak like packing peanuts!" I think I'll pass, thanks.

As we spent a night camping at Grand-Sault and are staying in Nova Scotia currently, I should hope someone will be updating this soon. It won't be me because I'm going to bed soon.