[ July 2019 ] After staying three nights in Toronto in Canada, we flew to Quebec City.
We had booked the tickets long ago through an agency in London.
The airline was called Air Canada Rouge, which is the affiliated company of Air Canada.
We checked in at the airport by a machine and found that our tickets did not have the seat numbers.
At that time, I had thought Air Canada Rouge is the cheap flight company, so I thought the seats could be the first-come-first-served basis, like Ryanair in the past.
But in fact, apart from us, only two people did not have the seats.
We had to wait until the last moment and finally they gave us two middle seats just behind the business class.
I asked the worker at the gate for the explanation and he said curtly “Oversold” without apologizing.
We had arrived at the airport early, so we could got on this flight, but if we had been later, they would have made us fly with the later flight.
It was an uncomfortable 1 and a half hours’ flight, sitting between the big men.
We had read in our guidebook that only way to get to the centre of the city from the airport in Quebec City is by taxi, so we took a taxi.
It seemed that they had a fixed fare of 35.10 C$ (£21.60, €23.85, $26.40).
We arrived at our hotel, Delta Hotel which was another huge hotel and situated outside of the old town, which made me a little disappointed, thought the room was large enough.
We went out immediately to the old town and first we looked for the tourist information office.
The sign of information office is usually “i” in Europe, but here in Canada, it was “?”.
As you know, Quebec City is the French Speaking area and the town was somewhat similar to French towns.
We finally found “?” which was quite commercial and we booked the walking tour for the next day, which cost as much as 26.43 C$ (£16.30, €18.00, $19.90).
The strange fraction of the price seemed to be coming from the 15% tax.
After that, we looked for some place to eat light dinner, but the fried food smells coming from the restaurants put us off.
We had been expecting good foods at the French speaking Canada….
My husband searched on the internet and found Bistro Le Sam, a restaurant serving cheese and wine, so we looked for it but could not find it easily.
When he asked the local people with the dog who were standing chatting on the street near the famous symbolic hotel ‘Le Château Frontenac‘, they said “We have never heard of it. Why don’t you ask at that hotel?”, so we did and found that it is inside the hotel.
So we could glimpse the gorgeous interior of this hotel.
This is really a magnificent hotel, which I do not think it is going too far to call this the most famous building in Canada.
It is called ‘Château’, but it has never been a castle and always a hotel.
According to our guidebook, it is one of the luxurious hotels Canadian Pacific Railway company built and it was completed in 1893.
It was named after the Count of Frontenac, Louis de Buade who governed New France (French colony in North America) in the late 17th century apparently.
An important meeting during the second world war was held here and among the famous people who stayed here are Chiang Kai-shek, Princess Grace of Monaco and Paul McCartney.
The assorted cheese served here in Bistro Le Sam was wonderful.
5 different cheese were on the board (the waiter explained each one but I completely forgot) and everyone was very tasty.
We said each other that we could come back here to eat the same thing again.
For the drink, we had something called ‘Winter Spritz’ which was similar to but different from the familiar Spritz we often drink in Italy.
To be honest, by then, we had been sick of fried foods which seemed popular in this country and our mood had been down, so by eating these cheese, we felt we came back to life.
Foods are very important.
Becoming happy, we left the place at around 8 pm.
The sunset was beautiful, so we took many photos on the way back to the hotel.
