Quote:
Originally Posted by kool maudit
How so? I'm aware it's not particularly diverse ethnically, but if I thought that was the most important thing I would move to an anglosphere city (London, Toronto, Melbourne...). That's their game.
For me, Quebec is about the Quebecois and living in a truly francophone environment in North America. But it is valuable for a place to feel sort of "plugged-in" to some sort of world/historical current (Montreal has a nice mix of 'big city' anglo North America and the francophonie). Is Quebec a bit isolated in this sense? I have spent a lot of time there but never really knew many people in the city. I was always a tourist.
I know it's probably not quite a Canadian Geneva in terms of how many people are passing through (that's probably good, though – UN/WHO/NATO people get spooky after a while), but is it more self-contained than, say, Lyon or Antwerp? Or, say, Halifax, for that matter?
(This is all very idle speculation as I am happily based in Denmark, but still...)
It's easy to look and photos and think "yeah, that's interesting. That's pretty amazing that this exists."
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I guess I sometimes forget that not everyone here is a "world in one city" type. You're used to being a fish out of water and perhaps even revel in it to some degree. I mean, you lived in Pristina.
Trying of a comparable to Quebec City and the best I can do is maybe Reykjavik. I mean, they're isolated to different degrees in different ways, but they're both reasonably sophisticated and fairly worldly in spite of their homogeneity, and they both have a sincere eagerness to engage with the wider world but they're a bit awkward when it comes to welcoming elements of the wider world into the family as full-fledged members.
Quebec City is a place where movies that aren't Hollywood and or aren't from the francophonie, or books originally written in Norwegian or Arabic can be number one on some popularity list and the talk of the town. That basically never happens in Toronto, Calgary or even New York.
But as a good friend of mine from Quebec City's who's worked in international development and relations says, that doesn't mean they'd easily accept the creators of all that stuff as part of the family.
As an example, she says that Quebec City is where someone like Portuguese language singer Cesaria Evora from Cape Verde in Africa can draw 25,000 people on the Plains of Abraham, whereas in Ottawa she'll draw 1000 people to a small concert bar with 750 of those people being Cape Verdean, Portuguese or Brazilian, and the other are 250 Québécois from Gatineau.
But on the other hand if someone like Cesaria Evora moved to Ottawa, she'd be more quickly and readily accepted as a Canadian and even a local than she would in Quebec City as a Québécoise.
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