French and Syrup

I had been listening about sugar shacks since the very moment I put my feet on Québec City, the capital of the only province of Canada in which French is the sole official language. After enjoying three hard and beautifully white winter months, snow melted with the end of March, days started to get longer and green grass showed up almost out of the blue in a sudden weather change. It was about time: for someone who is not used to considering an average of 15°C below zero a warm winter, skiing, hot chocolate and snowball fighting were becoming less and less interesting.
Although it is possible to make a visit in winter, the cold and the amount of snow everywhere are supposed to tarnish the enjoyment of the sugar shack. Apart from producing and selling maple syrup, these traditional rural establishments are supposed to offer a really Quebec experience for tourists, in which you are shown the syrup making process and then delighted with a traditional Quebec style meal.
Our destination was a large log cabin next to the peaceful Saint Lawrence River in which a horse-drawn carriage and its driver (the owner of the place that then would also be our waiter) was waiting to give us a small tour through the maple forest. Although I considered the horse carriage a bit childish, I must recognize that I really enjoyed the ride. Next to every tree, a metal bucket was patiently waiting the sap to fall intro it from some pre made holes.
Once insider the shack, the meal was not a fancy banquet: soup, salads, bread and some meet, everything with tons of maple syrup, the superstar. However, the large collective tables shared by the previously independent groups of visitors, suddenly had us chatting with former completely strangers. Food was not anymore the main character: in that two hours dinner, we had the opportunity to meet more new people than we had had in the last three months, and understood that besides French, Quebec culture is sustained by simplicity, sharing and tradition.