The Quebec Experience

Besides doing a lot of walking in Quebec, we did make some time for a few activities as well.  There are a few museums in the city, but we aren't really museum people.  I wanted to do a few educational activities without boring Ryan too much!

One of the big things to do in Quebec is to visit The Citadelle.  The Citadelle is basically an old fort that is shaped somewhat like a star in order to increase the protection of the city.  It was built in the early 1800's but was never really used as Quebec was never attacked after the War of 1812.


We arrived in time for the changing of the guard at 10am.  Although this was a long and somewhat boring event, it was still somewhat interesting to see.  I figure that so much time was spent on it because they had all of these soldiers and they were never attacked, so they had a lot of time on their hands.


They don't use these anymore...

The Citadelle is still an active military base, so we had to do a tour and couldn't wander by ourselves.  That was probably for the best anyways as we learnt much more about the history on a tour.

We also did a tour of The Morrin.  The Morrin was the city's first jail, which was then a college and is now a library.  I found this tour to be very interesting and well worth the money that it cost us!

From inside the jail cell

We started in the old jail, which for whatever reason they never renovated.  It was really neat and they told us some old stories of the jail and some examples of punishments.  Ryan was put in solitary confinement.  I was just held in the jail for awhile before they shipped me off to Australia.  Australia is much better than solitary in my opinion!

The library at The Morrin

The one night that we were there, we went on a Ghost Tour of the city.  This tour was more stories of murder and mystery that had taken place in the city, but they were still very interesting and gave us something to do.  The last stop was an old church that had a ghost story.  The guide took us in and we sat in the dark while she told the story.  That was slightly scary.

We also saw a free Cirque du Soleil show.  Free!  I was expecting it to be super boring because of this, but it was amazing!  They had so many acrobats doing different things.  I honestly thought that somebody was going to fall at any second.  I didn't even stop watching to pull my camera out.

 Other than those things, we did a Parliament Tour and a lot of wandering and exploring.  It really felt like it was walk, eat, walk, eat, sleep, repeat.  It really is nice to offset those nice relaxing beach vacations with something that is a bit more active and makes you think more.