by The Meandering Canadian August 10, 2018 “What do you want to do?” he asks as soon as we’ve set down our bags on our bed in the hostel. We’ve just made it to Rievère du Loup, Quebec. We had planned to stop in Quebec City (one of my top favourite cities in Canada) for a night, but the hostels there seemed to be all booked up. I was a little bummed because I had my sights set on visiting a few places. Oh well, next time! “I dunno; I’m a bit tired.” I reply. “Common’, it’s early. Let’s go out. What do you want to do?” I look at him. “You want ice cream don’t you?” he asks. Why yes, yes I do want ice cream. He knows me so well. “Wellllll...I did see something on Yelp about an ice cream place somewhere close-ish by,” I reply. It turns out that the only ice cream shop open in Rievère du Loup is a place called Ali-Baba’s. They proudly proclaimed that they were not an ice cream shop but a gelateria. I wasn’t holding my breath for good gelato from a place called Ali-Baba’s, but I figured that it was ice cream and I couldn’t complain much about that. “Turn here!” “Where?” “Here!” He turns the car and we seem to be headed for the highway. “....are you sure we’re going the right way?” he asks. He’d been driving all day and a lengthy drive for ice cream didn’t seem on the docket for today. “That’s what my phone is telling me,” I reply.
After a short drive on the highway, seemingly out of the city, the GPS on my phone tells me to turn off on an exit that doesn’t look entirely right, but hey, what could go wrong? We turn off the highway; I can see something in the distance, and as we come closer to it we notice that it’s Ali-Baba’s. Getting out of the car, we notice that there’s a large store located right off the exit of the highway. Luckily, I had stashed some cash in my wallet before we left because as soon as we entered the shop we noticed that it was a cash-only kind of place. I started to drool at all of the different ice cream flavours. “Bonjour!” the shop keeper said excitedly. My brain began to whirl. How does one speak French again? What am I supposed to say? What are some French words? Pomme de terre? No that’s a potato. Ah!
The shopkeeper must have noticed the panic on my face because he promptly switched over to English. As a Canadian I know that I should be better at French. Mental note: get better at speaking French. The shopkeeper told us what all of the flavours were, and I was excited to see actual pieces of pistachio in the pistachio flavoured gelato. Hmmm, could it be real? My excitement started to grow. Most people go to Italy and become wine snobs. Me? When I went to Italy I became a gelato snob. We each grabbed an ice cream and went to sit on the outdoor patio. I revelled in my gelato (yes it was real!) and thought about how strange a place Canada could be. We were sitting in Quebec, having had used English in a French speaking place, eating Italian ice-cream sold to us by a French man with a Middle Eastern shop name, watching the traffic go by on the highway with nothing else around but grass and trees. Sometimes there is a reason why you are thrown off the beaten path - to get gelato!