Quebec City - Day 2

Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Today's topics: Architecture, population dispersion and Foreign Policy.

Architecture doesn't have much of interest to me (sorry Anne and JR), but there were a couple of interesting points that were made that I thought bore repeating.

The architecture of Quebec City is a mix of the British and the French. The French style of basically using no hallways, but instead having one room go straight into the next phased out when the British took over the joint. Evidently, privacy as something to value has increased steadily since the middle ages, and we, as modern citizens, are the most isolated in the history of humanity. Being a recluse myself, I consider that a good thing, but others may not agree.

An aspect of French architecture that has persisted due to the weather is the highly pitched roof. Evidently ice gathers on the roofs here and they hire people to literally beat it off with a hammer. Those crazy Canucks.

One thing that was mentioned and that resonated with me was the mandatory construction of "firewalls" between individual residences that share a common wall (like a brownstone). The firewall is supposed to prevent fire from spreading between structures at a time when fire was pretty much a fact of life. The reason it resonated with me is that the Navy used the same theory in its older warships, containing ships into A, B and C sections, with watertight integrity being shared within sections, but not across them. I guess good engineering is a cross-discipline sort of thing.

The lecture on the peoples and population distribution of Canada didn't really surprise me - it turns out that 90% of Canada's population live within 100 miles of the U.S., which has everything to do with weather. Sorry, Megan. It also turns out the Canadians were just as foul to their indigenous populations as we were. Bad behavior - an equal opportunity character trait.

This afternoon we had a chance to meet and listen to the outgoing U.S. Consulate General, David Fetter. He was well spoken and engaging (he's a professional foreign service officer, after all), and his perspective was interesting and insightful. He explained the mission of the Consulate (like a mini-embassy), and how they accomplished it. He then invited all of us to his residence (very nice - I can assure you that foreign service officers live much better than military officers of the same putative rank, at least in garden spots like Quebec City) for champagne and conversation. The Consulate recently celebrated their 175th anniversary, so he gave us each this commemorative coin that celebrated the event.


For dinner a bunch of us and the professor went to a local Italian eatery for dinner. The antipasto was excellent, and the carbonara was pretty good, too.

Tomorrow promises to be interesting and exciting, too. So far a fabulous experience!

1 comments:

mom in northern said...

My Canuck tells me they all huddle along the border for warmth.