What they miss is reality. They miss the Grande Allee, lined with bars and restaurants with prices that actually vary. This is a true Quebec hangout, filled with people who live in the city year-round, who parallel park their slick sportscars along the old roads. Well-dressed, French-speaking college students bounce from bar to bar in small groups as others sip German beer and eat pizza at the outdoor tables, just people-watching.
THOSE STALE TOURISTS miss the annual agricultural fair, L'Exposition d'Agriculture, held every August not far beyond the city limits. It's a French-speaking twist on the 4-H county fairs I'm used to seeing in Maryland.
The barns are lined with small, hay-filled, putrid-smelling stalls with "meuh"-ing cows. Inside a big auditorium, the farmers judge the bovine beasts on muscle tone and udder size. Outside, the opportunists hawk cheap jewelry and miracle carpet cleaner from makeshift booths. Kids get sick from the rollercoaster ride whizzing in circles and blasting loud rock music. It's dirty and confusing. And nobody speaks English for any tourist's benefit.
There's no hint of the Grand Allee or L'Exposition d'Agriculture inside the walls of Old Quebec. Within the walls, scarcely a cobblestone lies out of place. Those that do were probably knocked out by somebody's Toyota.
ALL THE TOUR BOOKS describe Old Quebec as a colonial town. But this is not an old town, or even a rebuilt one. It's as artificial as the global villages in Epcot Center. Everything in Old Quebec is made of plastic, somebody's idea of what an old European town would have been like if Walt Disney had been around to design it.
The buildings in the seventeenth-andeighteenth-century town of Quebec weren'tperfect-they were crooked and lived-in and worn.The cobblestones weren't perfect but filthy andcrumbling, broken by horse drawn carriages thattoppled over, dirtied by horses who left trails ofstench and defecation.
THE ONLY HORSE SHIT in Old Quebec now isdropped by the few big beasts who drag the heavynew carriages, pulling tourists through the townfor 50 bucks a pop. It is quickly swept away,before it can offend the sensitive nostrils of theout-of-town visitors.
There was a lot of horse shit at theagricultural fair. It sat and stank, toocommonplace to be cleaned. It smelled terribly,but I liked it much better