Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
I've mentioned before that when I was a kid I lived for a time just outside Ottawa in Eastern Ontario.
To my friends and I (we were not generally Quebecers BTW) a place like Quebec City felt bigger than Ottawa because it had an NHL team, had TV shows set there like Lance et compte (He Shoots He Scores), had a bigger winter carnival that was much more fun - read booze available all over the place - and more international visitors, had more and bigger highways and bigger malls with midway rides inside them, a waterpark, cool winter activities other than skiing and skating like inner tube hills with loud pop music and discotheque style lighting, cuter more stylish girls who weren't as "square", better bars and nightlife and generally had more panache and style. They even had FM radio stations playing pop music which believe it or not Ottawa did not yet have!
At the time, the metro population difference between Quebec City and Ottawa(-Hull) was probably in the 200,000 range. Today it's almost in the 500,000 range, and Quebec City though still great has in most ways been left in the dust by Ottawa when it comes to how big either one feels relative to the other.
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I had a similarly disorienting experience in Dublin recently. The past times I've been, my overall impression has been boozy and trashy. The nightlife was comparable to George Street - the same types of people, just Dublin then has fewer bodies on the street, although spread over a much larger area. But I always left Dublin feeling pretty damn good about St. John's. And Dublin was always miles ahead of the mainland Canadian cities in my mind, so it's not like it was an also-ran.
This most recent visit... I saw only one woman in fishnets. I was in a crush of people like London everywhere I went. The style was posh, completely different. And everything was elevated. It feels like a large city now, it never did before. It was kind of like Tokyo where you know it's big, but outside of a couple of tourist hotspots it feels like a manageable smaller city. This literally was untrue 5-10 years ago, but as of now, St. John's is irredeemably provincial compared to even the fringes of Dublin's core. So I get the melancholy/disorientation you probably feel regarding Quebec City versus Ottawa. lol
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As for radio, that's another good way to tell. When you flip through the scan button and it stops at every second frequency... here you might hit three stations scrolling through the whole range. And they're almost all Newfoundland/Irish folk, pop, Classic (which, here at least, is now 90s-2010s), and one horrific country station. Every now and then you'll latch onto one of the French stations rebroadcast in St. Pierre.
But even what's on the radio. About 30% of the radio market in Newfoundland is talk radio, left-wing call-in shows like Open Line, Nightline, Cross Talk, etc. The nearest province to us in that genre is Quebec at like 9%, or 19%, I forget which, but either way, it's way lower. So that's... something.
When I went to visit my parents at Christmas when they were both teaching in northern Manitoba, the local Indigenous people were shocked and touched. They talked about us on the radio for 30 minutes, they could not believe white people not only stayed in their community for a holiday, but even brought family to spend it there.
But that same radio station would not only announce birthday parties, it would read out the 30-40 names of everyone invited
Can you imagine? So that's the radio-related thing that most screams middle-of-nowhere to me.
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