It has been many weeks since I returned from Canada, and whilst it was full of some of the most stimulating experiences of my life, I am painfully conscious that I still haven’t blogged about it, and my several hundred photographs languish unseen. It’s perverse.Of course, it’s the very richness of the trip that makes it so overwhelming to think about putting together a blog entry. Not to mention that we moved to a new flat a few weeks ago, and that we have no internet connection. The answer is to fire it all out in isolated little bullets of wonderment and fascination, rather than in one big indiscriminate bombing raid. We were in Canada for over three weeks and it cannot really be treated as a single holiday. It was a series of trips and visits, and it makes sense to blog about them individually. Let me just start by saying thank you to Laura’s friends and family for being so welcoming and for making the trip so enjoyable. I was very relieved to find that, like Laura, you are all wonderful people.
(To my British readers: please forgive any emotional effusiveness here. I do try to retain the traditions of reserve, cynicism and grumpiness that come so naturally to people on this little island, but I fear I may have been corrupted by Canadian niceness)
(To my Canadian readers: please forgive any emotional restraint here. I retain the traditions of reserve, cynicism and grumpiness that come so naturally to people on this little island; despite the influence of Canadian niceness, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks)
(To my Italian readers: Ciao!)
Following are the characters appearing in the forthcoming blog entries.
Tavin
Laura’s best friend, whose dry sense of humour doesn’t conceal her warm personality, and who provided the best steak and corn I’ve ever tasted (Alberta sirloin and “peaches and cream” taber corn)
Mary
Laura’s aunt, Judy’s sister, with a wicked sense of humour and excellent eclectic cooking skills
Greg
Mary’s man, Laura’s uncle, with a never-ending fund of stories to tell (or should that be a fund of never-ending stories?)
Judy
Laura’s lovely Mum, another great cook (I have to say that now, don’t I? I should never have got into all this personal stuff) Hope you can make it over to Edinburgh.
Dave
Judy’s man, Laura’s stepfather, a world class conversationalist with whom we spent some hugely enjoyable wine-fuelled evenings (thanks for the CDs – they work fine and they’re great)
Alan
Laura’s Dad, who showed me how to canoe and bought clothes for me (looking forward to our next paddle on Thetis Lake)
Jeannie
Laura’s sister, a warm-hearted person with a disarming smile, and a great cook
Richard
Jeannie’s husband, a mischievous young fellow, and a very good and exciting guitarist and songwriter – but a terrible cook
Lilia
Jeannie and Richard’s daughter, a curious wide-eyed good-natured baby
Joe
Richard’s canine sidekick, what I might call a “real dog”, with, unfortunately, a life-long self-destructive mission to dig up large rocks and drop them a few metres away
Pat
Feverish and fascinating musician and engineer, somehow both at home and out-of-place in tranquil Gabriola
Dinah D
The spirit of Gabriola, and a great singer/songwriter
The two photographs in this post show different sides to British Columbia. At the top you can see floating logs being transported across the sea, probably to be pulped, and in the background, the mountain range that dominates the coast of mainland BC. In fact, BC is pretty much all mountains.Below, one of the figures in the totem pole that stands outside the Royal British Columbia Museum. Although there are many token totems around BC, the Indians still seem to be struggling to adapt to the modern world that has overtaken them and surrounded them.The museum, which has many totem poles and dioramas illustrating everyday life in the BC First Nations (formerly tribes) prior to the arrival of the white man, is a treasure of knowledge and artifacts, and grand, as all my favourite museums are (if a building’s important, it should say so in its architecture, in its atmosphere – that’s why classical architecture is so fitting for museums). The important elements of BC – native history and culture, natural history, and the story of European colonization – are represented here beautifully. But perhaps what I will remember more than all that is the huge screen near the entrance on which a film played constantly on a loop, in which various states and countries were superimposed on a map of BC like jigsaw pieces.
http://www.viewpointmotel.bc.ca/european.htm
The image above gives a rough idea of how big BC is in comparison with European countries. But! The combined population of the UK, the Republic of Ireland, France, Germany and Switzerland is 218.7 million, while BC’s population is only 4.4 million. In fact, Switzerland on its own has a considerably higher population, with 7.5 million people, but only about 4% of its area. (figures from Wikipedia)So it’s big. Too big to comprehend. And it’s just one among the ten provinces that make up Canada. It is young, wild, free and innocent, a land of opportunity – or so it seemed to me. But please, ditch the pancakes!
