Parlons-nous Français?

Nope, no we don’t.  Well maybe a little!  We got by!  ((Do we speak French))

So, it was a short tourist day, but I’ve got some good stories out if it, so I’m a happy little bear ((ourson))!  It all started with the shower, or lack-there-of.  Robin tried, called Clare in to investigate, and neither could figure out how to change it from the tap to the shower-head, and it’s not like either of them haven’t had their fill of weird showers in weird countries!  Oh, and there was no plug to have a bath either.  Sponge bath it was.  Don’t fear for me though, I do not have to deal with them being stinky all week - they have since learned the trick of the hidden button.  All will be clean again!

The day started  slow as my companions fully unpacked and checked out all the brochures we picked up yesterday (they were a little tired last night) and then tried out the restaurant on site for lunch.  Our server spoke broken English and we attempted even worse French, had some good laughs and got some great poutine (a Quebec must-have - some may remember it was on the must-have itinerary in Montreal too).   For those who don’t know, it’s fries and gravy with cheese curds.  Today there were multiple options - Clare chose “poutine de chef” which had steak on it!  Yum

We finally headed off property, but only a few minutes up the road to Mont-Sainte-Anne (The mountain and ski resort we can see from our room).  There we took a gondola (when we finally found it) to the top, climbed up a viewing tower, and were blessed with a 360° view of mountains!  Just mountains as far as you can see (and a bit further when you used binoculars).  Breathtakingly beautiful!  I’ll be adding a few different viewpoints at the end of the blog as Clare gets whiny when I ask her to format too many pictures into the text. *sigh*

While atop the tower, Robin suddenly starts laughing, moves closer to us and whispers “men should learn to look up, not just around, before peeing into a bush.”  She had watched him wander away from the building, glancing side to side, and then… well… do his business, completely oblivious to the tower right above him!  We moved to the other side of the tower for a different view.

As we were coming down off the tower a woman approached us speaking French.  Clare and I stared blankly while Robin got quite excited and answered “Oui!” ((Yes))   Clare blurts out “You understood that?”  The woman bursts out laughing and says “She’s bilingual now” to which Robin quickly says “Not even close!  I only got ‘prendre une photo’ at the end, no idea what you said before that.”  The woman laughed as she handed her phone to Robin to take a photo of their mountain biking group.  As Robin held the phone up she called out “say… cheese?? … fromage?? Some had already started to say cheese, so I guess that was correct, but they all laughed at fromage.  Robin got some great photos either way.  …So, cool summer fun around here is hanging your bike on a gondola to ride to the top, then bike down.  I probably don’t need to tell you that Robin and Clare were not into that, so I had to ride the gondola back down.  I get it, but man what a ride that would have been!

We next attempted to get to a visitors centre that Clare said was just in Beaupré.  It wasn’t!  (turns out the map wasn’t to scale and it’s back near Quebec City).  Instead, we found a grocery store, which was also on the to-do list of the day.  Umm… my experience with other languages is limited to the tourist sections of Peru, and Montréal where we had a Québécois Girl Guide leader as our Guide.  Clare’s experience includes Paris, but again she was on a tour bus and was only there a day.  A grocery store was next-level experience for all of us!  This is not a tourist spot, and while all the food is recognizable and labelled in both English and French (as it is in Ontario), the aisle headers are not.  We found everything though and the headed to the self-checkout because we wouldn’t have to talk.  Umm did nobody think this through?  The self-serve terminal was completely in French which was easy enough while scanning things - not so much for produce and items that won’t read the bar code.  Twice we had to ask for help from the wonderful girl who spoke less English than we did French!  We did it though.

Not much else to do in Beaupré on a Sunday after 5, so we headed back to the resort to make a plan for the week.  This also meant I had lots of time to push Clare to write for me, and no excuse for her to skimp on the story-telling. 

Whatever!

PS. To my Québécois friends: Clare kindly figured out how to add accents to letters for me, and is trying hard to spell things correctly, but I’m sure we’ll screw up more than once - let’s blame Google-Translate for those.  Your province is beautiful!