Essential French phrases

Hello — and unlike Montreal, that is the whole greeting. The bilingual 'bonjour-hi' you may have read about is a Montreal phenomenon; here you will be met in French and answered in French.

The Carnaval drink — red wine fortified with spirits and maple, carried in a hollow plastic cane and drunk outdoors at −20 °C. The animal is also called that.

Breakfast, lunch and dinner — shifted one meal earlier than in France, where dîner is the evening meal. Getting this wrong is how you arrive at a lunch invitation at seven in the evening.

Car. Standard Quebec French, used constantly, and not what a French textbook taught you ('voiture'). 'J'ai pas de char' is how people explain why they take the bus.

To shop, as a verb. Quebec coins French verbs where France borrows English ones — a stop sign here says ARRÊT, not STOP, which is the reverse of France.

The Québec–Lévis ferry. Twelve minutes across the St. Lawrence, running year-round through the ice, and a genuine commuter route rather than a tourist ride.

Upper Town on the cliff and Lower Town at the water. Addresses, weather and how hard your walk home is all depend on which one you are in.

A heavy dump of snow. You will hear it on the radio the night before, and it is the cue to move your car off the street.

Snow clearing. This city removes roughly three metres of snow a season and does it street by street on a published schedule — the orange signs are a timetable, not a suggestion.

Assigning your lease to someone else. A Quebec tenant's right, which is why nobody here pays a lease-breaking fee and why the best flats change hands off-market.

The Quebec health insurance board. Public cover with a roughly three-month waiting period — unless a social security agreement with your country waives it.

Certificat de sélection du Québec. Quebec selects its own economic immigrants, and for most routes you need this from the province before Ottawa will look at permanent residence.

Numéro d'assurance sociale. No employer can put you on payroll without one. Free, from Service Canada, usually issued on the spot in person.

Police, fire and ambulance. Info-Santé is 811 and city services are 311. Ambulance transport is billed in Quebec even with RAMQ.