| THE COOLEST PLACE IN NORTH AMERICA: |
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| There are colder places in the world to be sure but Quebec
City in winter is cold enough for most travelers especially ones from
Southern California. Quebec can be cold even for the locals and January
often the coldest month the city ever records. But the natives don't
complain about cold. They embrace it – and rejoice. |
   
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| The annual Winter Carnival, now in its 51th year, allows
Quebecois to show their irrepressible joie de vivre and belief life
can be freezing fun. On the sidewalks they chatter happily to each
other as they lean into biting winds that would make citizens in a
Chicago winter take to their beds. In front of their shops locals
carve ice sculptures of Bonhomme, the logo of the winter festivities
– and he's always waving a cheerful hand. Quebecois even build
a hotel of blocks of ice and, gulp, sleep in them – on blocks
of ice. And encourage tourists to join them. |
   
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| And tourists do. For the last five years the Ice Hotel
in Quebec has lured guests in for the extraordinary, let’s say
it, weird, experience of sleeping in a building made entirely of 400
tons of ice and 12,000 tons of snow (877-505-0423 www.icehotel-canada.com
). The builders and ice carvers start in mid-December and finish a
month later. The 32 rooms then open for what has to be the shortest
tourist season for any lodging. The hotel will be bulldozed in early
April 05. |
     
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| Guests arrive in all forms: one came back to the front
office and said, "We can't find the thermostat in our room. How
do we adjust the heat?" Others jump in the hot tub, dry off in
the sauna and wander back to their rooms wrapped only in a towel,
then sleep naked in the sleeping bags provided. The tapered bags,
worn tight around the face and neck, are neither for the claustrophobic
or those who've never slept as if handcuffed. The guest book comments
reflect the different attitudes: the Americans often writing stuff
like "We'll be back – in summer!" and the French,
with perhaps more bravado, inscribing cryptically "Une expérience
unique!" |
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