Cœur de pirate

Here, there and everywhere

We ended our last Sunday in Québec City with the best concert yet at Scène Bell. Cœur de pirate is the stage name of Béatrice Martin, a multi-talented musician from Québec: singer, songwriter, pianist and all-round vibrant and energetic performer. She was a real pleasure to watch.

Before the concert, we dined at Les 3 Brasseurs on the Grand Allée, which was unfortunately situated within earshot of two different concert stages. Once you add in the music playing overhead at the restaurant itself, it was a very unwelcome cacophony of sound. We'll be avoiding the Grand Allée for the rest of this week for exactly that reason.

​Before dinner, we spent several hours at Le Bistro Plus, a bar and disco (we didn't dance) on Rue Saint Jean. We were there to watch the final match of the Euro 2016 soccer tournament. France lost to Portugal, 1-0, but since we were at a French bar with our French friend Amélie, listening to the French-language broadcast of the French national team playing in France itself, the complete French immersion was pretty neat.

Before the soccer match, we toured the lobby of the Château Frontenac, the icon Québec hotel on the promenade. 

Before the hotel, we toured the underground ruins of the Château Saint Louis, home to the provincial governors until the last incarnation of the château burned down in the late 19th century, not to be rebuilt.

Panorama

Béatrice asked everyone in the audience to use their smartphone flashlights.

Videos

Two videos of Béatrice.

Tidbit

Canadian mortgages are very different than those in the United States.

First, all Canadian mortgages are short-term balloon mortgages: they are amortized over 25 years but come due in at most five years. At the end of the loan term, you must pay off the loan or refinance it. So, you can't "ride out" a low interest rate for the life of your loan.

Second, Canadian mortgages are attached to the borrower, not the home. If you sell your home and buy another, your mortgage goes with you. If the new home is more expensive than the previous one, you simply get another mortgage to make up the difference.

Lastly, there's no tax deduction for mortgage interest. That might seem to be a disadvantage, but the upside is that there's no incentive to take on a bigger mortgage in order to get that bigger deduction. People mortgage within their means.

In fact, the United States and Denmark are the only countries in which 30-year mortgages are common, and even the United States used the Canadian model before the Great Depression began to better encourage home ownership.