Looking how newly arriving students have had to wait on long line ups to sign into the residence, and rushing to find out where the nearest grocery store is, made me feel very glad that I arrived a day earlier. Having taken several trips around campus, I feel comfortable moving around and I've by now located all the essential buildings (even though I am still having trouble correctly pronouncing their names) -- my own residence, the cafeteria, the bank machines, the gym, the classroom, the nearest grocery store-- and a couple of essential bus routes, and even some other friends' residences.
Even though I had gone to bed fairly late last night, I managed to get up at seven in the morning. I took a more broad and more aimless, half-sleepy early-morning tour of the campus. The campus is fairly big, area- and building-wise. This morning, my trip was Northbound. When I approached the northern end of the campus, I was excited to see what appeared to be a wide lake just a few hundred meters away from the last building of the campus. It turns out that it was not a lake that I saw, but a mountain range that blankets the city's horizon -- exactly as I was told: that the city is surrounded by mountains. I was slightly disappointed that my perception had deceived me, yet awed by the sight of the mountains. All the cities that I have inhabited or visited in the last few years have none of the far-but-apparently-near view of mountains that Quebec city has.
After the walking tour, I stepped into the cafeteria for a breakfast, where I bumped into a classmate I had met yesterday. We shared a coffee chat together, and were joined by another classmate and a newcomer.
The afternoon was spent with my new friend Ann touring the city. We used our instincts and got off a downtown-bound bus at an area that looked like "downtown." Sure enough, we were right where we needed to be. The location was at the border of what appears to be "Old Quebec" and a modern business district of the city. Quite frankly, this is a pure guess, as we had no map nor a tour guide that would explicitly tell us where Old Quebec was or where it began and ended. We used different cues to make our conclusions: narrower streets, more crowded and "touristy" areas of where we went to, we called the Old Quebec, and the area with a few corporate high rises and relatively newer buildings, we called the "downtown". Regardless of what our exact location's name was, a few things are certain:
That it was a beautiful restaurant that we had lunch at. We chose the restaurant because it offered a nice, well maintained backyard-looking, outdoor seating that was just a few centimeters away from the side walk. Eating there felt like eating in a cool, clean, and freshly watered garden. The service was great, and so was the food (my food vocabulary fails me here, as always, but it was rich in cheese of different sorts). The server was very polite, and was not as pushy as the ones I encounter elsewhere -- asking if we would like an expensive drink instead of the water they just provided, and so on. She started speaking to us in short English sentences when she saw, especially me, struggling with our French. I wish she didn't bother being kind and speak in English, as I feel like I need to assume that no one in this town speaks English.
That the area has some of the nicest buildings. There was this great church (Saint Jean Baptiste) and a few smaller buildings around it that looked just as magnificent. The blocks surrounding this church is rich in really cool bookstores and some of the best gift-shops I have been to. In some of the shops, I felt like I could randomly pick up an item, buy it, and use it as a good gift from Quebec. We picked up a few used and old books that would help us with the course from one of the bookstores.
That Old Quebec is beautiful. We declared the area about two blocks away from the Saint Jean Baptiste church the Old Quebec, for its unique streets and buildings. There were many tourists there. Old Quebec is still an unfinished affair for, even though we spent about seven hours touring the area, we were not quite finished with what we were respectively interested. We made several see-through and feel- or read-it stops.
Classes start tomorrow, and the exploration goes on.
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