Eh, Canada?

Canada is so consistently mocked by “clever” Americans who call our neighbors to the north the 51st state that it’s easy to be lulled into believing there isn’t much difference between life down here and life up there -- that Canada’s pretty much just like a northern suburb where hockey is especially popular and they have more Tim Hortons.

But set foot in Quebec City, and you will quickly see this notion for the fallacy that it is:  in Quebec City, there are no Starbucks.

Also, everybody speaks French.  Sort of.

The French-speaking was one of the main reasons my wife Nicole and I chose Quebec City as the destination for our honeymoon this summer.  We wanted to go someplace where they spoke French, but we were also insistent that we be able to travel with our toothpaste close at hand, in case of a brushing emergency, which meant across-the-pond France was out, but across-the-border Canada was in.  That, and we’d heard the city was beautiful.  And nobody told us about the Starbucks.

So off we went, excited to explore a new city, and, in my case, eager to experience life in a foreign land with my own personal translator by my side -- Nicole not only speaks French, she teaches it to college students.  Naturally, I figured this meant I could kick back and relax all week while she ordered my Big Macs.

But nothing quite prepared us for Quebec City, partly because it’s unlike any city in the United States, and partly because their French isn’t exactly French.

We discovered this latter tidbit en route to our destination, when we stopped for lunch at a Tim Hortons in Magog, a series of strip malls and vintage 1950s architecture about three hours south of Quebec City.  Charmed by the French everywhere, we even took a picture of the sign posted on the front of the restaurant, which read, “Il nous fait plaisir de vous voir chez nous mais pas de flanage et laisser le trottoir libre.”  This means, basically, “It pleases us to see you at our place, but please don’t loiter, and leave the sidewalk clear.”  Like I said, charming.

Inside, we were welcomed by a friendly worker.  Her greeting was in French, and I’m sure it was some variation on “Can I take your order?”, but I had no idea how to respond, so I turned to Nicole.  The look on her face was as blank as the one on mine.  Turns out Quebecois French and French French are not the same thing.  Apparently it’s sort of like the difference between Iowa English and Alabama English.  If you learned to speak English in Iowa, you’ll be able to pick up a word or two in Alabama, but if you want to converse, you’re gonna have to ask them to slow it down, and then you’re gonna have to think for a second before attempting a reply.  It was by far the most unique coffee-and-bagel-ordering process I’d ever experienced.

But this exchange perfectly set the tone for the trip:  we’re not in Kansas anymore.

With that in mind, the next few days became an adventure of discovery.  Rather than let myself be frustrated by the language barrier, I was mesmerized by it.  (And fortunately, everybody spoke English if you really needed them to.)  Everywhere we went presented an opportunity to see how they did it differently in Quebec.  And friends, they do it differently.

One of the first things I noticed, before we even left Magog, is the way Canadian car dealers promote themselves.  Unlike most states in the U.S., Quebec does not require a front license plate.  What to do with that gaping space on the front bumper?  Certainly not leave it clean -- practically every car we saw on the trip had the name of the place that sold it printed on the front where a license plate would’ve been.

I find it invasive when car dealers put their name above the name of the car on the back panel or on one of those cheap plastic license-plate frames, but as best I could tell, there seemed to be no outcry against this full-frontal advertising.  Perhaps this is because the cars there are so much smaller, and thus the ads that much less aggressive.

I don’t mean to say, for example, that a Toyota Tercel in Quebec is any smaller than a Toyota Tercel in Kentucky.  It’s just that in the hierarchy of Toyota vehicles you’ll find in Quebec, the Tercel lands a distant third:  the ultra-compact Yarises (Yarii?) and Echoes were everywhere.  The Tercel is too big for these people.

But tiny Toyotas were hardly the only miniature vehicles on the road -- nowhere I’ve ever been is the Chevy Aveo or Kia Rio more popular.  Even though they have 11-plus months of snow-packed winter, SUVs were almost nowhere to be found.  There were so many petite autos lined up on one street that a PT Cruiser in the middle of the row looked like a Hummer.

(It seems appropriate at this point to make a joke about Canadian gas prices, but their gas is sold by the liter, and I have no idea how many liters are in a gallon, plus I frequently got mixed up about the exchange rate.  But I know I paid $1.06 Canadian for a liter of gas at Petro-Canada.  The mathematically inclined among you, feel free to insert your own joke here.)

While I was intrigued by differences in culture (I’m guessing you’ve never heard of the hot band in Quebec right now -- Les Breastfeeders, who in name sound like a perfect opening act for the one Canadian band you have heard of, Barenaked Ladies, but in fact sound like the Strokes doing Pixies covers in French) and cuisine (at the fancy restaurant where we dined our last night there, I spotted caribou on the menu, and asked the waiter what caribou tastes like, explaining that I’d never eaten it before.  “It is like reindeer,” he said) it was the differences in language that captivated me.

It’s not just that everything sounds different in French -- it’s that everything sounds sophisticated.  Nowhere was this more evident than at the bookstore.

When I walked in, I felt something I’d never experienced before:  unrecognizable familiarity.  All the books were both new and old to me -- they had new titles, and new covers, but bore the names of authors I know and love!  I spotted “Haute fidelité” by Nick Hornby, and even though I’ve read the book in English and seen the movie (also in English), I want to buy “Haute fidelité” and read it in French, even though I do not read French.

This is completely illogical I know, especially since the things I want to do in reading the book, namely to see how it reads in another language, see whether the jokes work as well, and experience a book I know well through a new set of eyes -- French eyes, and the eyes of the translator -- are things I cannot do.  Yet it is all I can do to not buy the thing.

Had you suggested before this trip that I would’ve been enraptured in a bookstore in which I couldn’t actually read any of the books, I would’ve thought you daffy.  But that’s because I couldn’t have predicted my own fascination with the wonderful familiarity of a store full of new books, with their perfect edges and their crisp sliced-paper smell, woven through with a language completely new.  It was like I knew, but I didn’t know.

What I did know is that I had realized my true desire as a writer -- to walk into a bookstore in Quebec and see my book on the shelves in French, knowing that I wrote the whole thing, and yet not a word of it, and to buy 14 copies (15 if the exchange rate is favorable).

Every shelf in this bookstore revealed new treasures.  SpongeBob SquarePants?  In Quebecois, he’s simply “Bob L’éponge” -- très sophisticated!  Even the “For Dummies” books translate up -- they’re “Pour Les Nuls.”  Personally, I’d rather count myself among “les nuls” than the dummies.

“On a scale of 1-10,” I asked Nicole on our last day in Quebec, “with 10 being Paris, France, and 1 being Paris, Texas, how much is this like being in France?”

“A seven,” she said.  That’s pretty good.

But Quebec definitely has one distinct advantage over both:  neither Paris has Tim Hortons.