Hayley & Shaun in Canada: Quebec City & Montreal, PQ

Bonjour French Canada! We are now in French-speaking Canada.

Quebec Apr 29th - May 4th
Montreal May 4th - May 8th

We arrived in Quebec City on Apr 29th after about an 8 hour train ride, at 7pm. We took a taxi to our hostel, which turned out to be pretty much right around the corner, meaning the taxi only cost $5 which is always a bonus! This was our first hostel for this trip so we were a little unsure of what to expect but we were greeted by a man named Steeve (yes two E's) who ran the hostel and he was very friendly and gave us HEAPS of tourist information straight away which was great. The hostel was a skinny building between two other buildings but went up quite high too. There was a big TV area and kitchen and laundry to use. We had a room to ourselves upstairs, however we did have to share a bathroom but it wasn't too bad. The only bad things about the hostel were the complete lack of pillow and a plastic mattress that was horrible and really hard to move on and the fact that our room faced a 24 hour bar that people liked to stand outside of every morning at 4am shouting stuff really loudly!

We soon found out the Quebec City was a city that you could walk all of, which was handy as we didn't have to pay for transport (or try and work it out in french) but it did mean that we basically dropped dead every afternoon from tired and sore-ness, especially as there were a lot of steep narrow areas of the city that we had to walk up. The city had a couple of different areas, the old quebec and the new quebec. The old Quebec was enclosed within walls and was very beautiful to walk through. Lots of boutique shops, cafes, small side streets with people selling their artwork etc. The houses and buildings were all very old and frenchy which you will see in the photos and it was nice to feel like we were somewhere completely different. It was interesting trying to decipher everything into English, but we found it a lot easier to read French than try and speak it to someone. Most people who worked in Restaurants and shops spoke English if you told them you couldn't speak French. But it did feel like we were in another country for a little while which was lovely.

We mostly spent the days in Quebec just wondering the old city looking at the scenery. They had a nice boardwalk area and a big castle that was actually a Fairmont hotel. We walked around the newer city a bit too but there wasn't really much there just a few office blocks. We had some yummy french crepes too at a really nice cafe where you could watch the girl making the crepes! We also managed to find a free day at the Civilisation Musuem where we spent one afternoon looking at some different exhibitions which was pretty interesting.

We left Quebec City in the morning of May 4th and took a 3.5 hour bus to Montreal. The bus station was just around the corner from our hostel there too which was good as we could walk. The hostel we had their was similar as we had our own room and a shared bathroom and could hear every noise on the planet, except the staff weren't as welcoming and helpful as in Quebec which was a bit disappointing. However we did have an advantage of having our own french montreal tour guide, a girl that we worked with at Nakiska who lives in Montreal, Marie. She met up with us the next day we we visited the Montreal science centre and saw a Imax movie, we went to a mall and saw her house in the suburbs which was nice, we went to a mexican restuarant for dinner and then went with her and her friend to the Casino which was a nice sight to see (although we didn't play, just watched, we are saving that for Vegas!).

The next day we walked to the old town of Montreal and saw similar to Quebec, lots of old buildings and streets and it was near the water which was lovely too. We ended up walking around most of the city and had lunch in Chinatown for about $5! Montreal had a bigger 'city' area than what Quebec did, and they had lots of long streets with lots of restaurants and shops that we walked around a lot too. Our hotel was fairly central which made it easy to get around.

We also went out to a nightclub, Radio, with Marie who got us in for free because her friend works there which was cool. It was a really cool club and it was packed with people by the end of the night. It had about 4 floors with about 4 bars on each floor! But it was fun to go out and see a club in a different city. On our last two days we just walked around and saw the sights, we also met up with Marie one more time before we left and saw a movie and did some shopping. We then caught a late (11:30pm) bus to USA and went through the border which took some time as we all had to get back off the bus and wait for ages to get our passports checked and we ended up having to pay more money to go through (it wasn't much but it was the idea of it!) and that was very annoying because we already paid $160 and went to sydney for the big ordeal that some of you know about and it seems like we didn't even need to do that now grrrrr.

We arrived in Boston this morning at about 8am and went straight to our hotel and were lucky enough to get into our room pretty much straight away so we could sleep as we both didn't get any on the bus. We are a little out of the main downtown area but have found a bus that should be able to take us in there. We are very excited to be in USA now and begin the rest of our travels, but we were quite sad to say goodbye to Canada after nearly 5 months there, where has the time gone???!

Check out our pics of french canada below, and stay tuned for our USA-goss!
Love to all
Hayley and Shaun xx