Quebec City Part II

Today, our bed and breakfast serves Waffles with chocolate and strawberries to the kids and a bagel with a fried egg and cheese for the adults. The waffles, I hate to say, are so hard I can barely cut them with a knife and when Justin cuts his it flies across his plate onto the table. It's unfortunate. Justin is the only one who manages to eat the waffles. The bagels are okay but nothing special. Overall, the breakfast is not particularly noteworthy. We eat with the same family we ate with yesterday. they are from Denver and have three children, a 14 year old daughter and a 16 and 18 year old son. they've been in Quebec City for a week and have really enjoyed the time. They go to the summer fest each evening. today, they watched RV with kesh and Justin.
After breakfast, we headed for the Civilization museum which is in the old city lower town (most of the old city is in the upper town). This is accessible only through a couple of places in the upper town but we manage to find it after meandering through the winding streets and head down to the even more winding lower town. Ironically, however, along the river of the lower town are modern highrises and ferries and ships which are quite a contradiction with the ancient buildings of the lower town.
The civilization museum is in a new building along the waterfront but it's beautiful with unusual sculptures and gardens all over and around it (the roof itself is a garden). The museum is supposed to be one of the best in Canada (but I'm never sure who creates that promotional material since many museums are "one of the best"). We do enjoy the museum but the exhibits aren't very large and we are done with the museum in less than two hours (this may be partially because Rakesh rushes through the exhibits like a house a fire and everyone seems to be on his pace). But we do see a war exhibit, a mummy exhibit, an extraterrestrial exhibit and one on quebec itself. The exhibits are spacious and well done if not very lengthy (the ones in Ottawa were much longer). The most unusual exhibit is one on leisure time which includes these lounge-like beds that we all recline on and then on the ceiling are videos that play for about 3 minutes each. We actually spend probably twenty minutes here until others come into the exhibit hall. Up until 12:30 or so the museum is not very crowded, but then it starts to fill up.
When we leave, huge rain clouds are threatening and we race back to the apartment hoping to miss the rain. We stop at a bakery to get some olive bread to go with the cheese we bought yesterday and make it back just before the rain starts.