Halifax 2007: Farewell to Nova Scotia

I leave tomorrow for Vancouver. I will now just put up as many pictures as I can.


This is what I have been doing for two weeks. Every day is different, but the nights are all the same.






One of Halifax's landmarks. It is on a bunch of brochures. I have no idea what it is, but thought y'all might want to see it.






This is the "Explosion Clock". The hands on the north clock face in the City Hall tower clock are permanently fixed to 9:04:35, the exact moment of the Halifax Explosion on Dec 6th, 1917, in which the north end of Halifax was blown to smithereens, 1900 people died, and more than 10,000 were injured.




Halifax's city planning is a gong show. I do not profess to know a damned thing about urban planning. I point out only that some of the most heinous-looking- and most likely, polluting- industrial operations are quite literally next to the city's main tourist attractions.




An example. This is the part of the Halifax waterfront. Now, there is a huge ongoing project aimed at removing hazardous waste from the sea at the waterfront. Let's just say that swimming is discouraged. I cannot honestly say what has caused all the waste to be dumped in the harbor, but the way the city of Halifax is planned offers some pretty good clues. Look at all that industrial activity in the background, not a stone's throw away from Halifax's main tourist area. I will show you another example when we get to Point Pleasant Park.


The Great Wall of Halifax; another excellent example of curious city planning. It's a series of titanic grain silos; one of the largest buildings I have ever seen. It is also planted squarely between the waterline and several posh housing suburbs, blocking any possible view of the ocean from those residences. Nor is it particularly on the outskirts of Halifax- Garreth and I found it while walking to Point Pleasant Park. I wonder what the property value is for the houses right under that building's shadow. Doesn't accepted wisdom dictate that all the necessarily ugly industry take place on an isolated part of the city/waterfront, so that the city's tourist, housing, and social areas will remain clean and attractive in order to entice prospective developers, business giants, and home buyers- which could in turn kick-start a dozen different business areas, bring in revenue for the municipal government, and help fuel the city's development?







This is the other end of the great railway that stretches from BC to the east coast. Are any of you expecting me to now make a wisecrack about how Chinese people build railroads? Go fuck yourselves, you Philistine pigs.





This is Point Pleasant Park, Halifax's counter to Stanley Park. It is also one of the most ravaged, post-Apocalyptic landscapes I have ever seen. In the last few years, two disastrous plagues reduced the jewel of the city to a weeping sore of slash piles and splintered kindling. First, Hurricane Juan swept up the coast and levelled 75,000 trees. Then, a huge infestation of spruce beetles came in and started chewing on what was left. A good three-quarters of the park is currently under reforestation. I swear to God, Point Pleasant looks worse than many plots of flattened forest I had to replant during my short time in Prince George as a tree-planter.




Garreth ragged relentlessly on how raped this park was. He said that Point Pleasant was what he imagined the world would look like after Armageddon- thin, decaying trees, the clanking remnants of industry thriving in the background, and a lonely, rusted gazebo to remind us of the lost innocence of an earlier age. But really, WHY are we able to see the docks at work? Isn't this supposed to be a tourist attraction?




City planning at work. If you can take a picture of crates being unloaded from huge cargo ships while standing in your city's main park, it's time to call your local councilor. Garreth wondered how many Chinese migrants could fit in one of those crates, but I was more bothered by the fact that I didn't even have to use the "zoom in" camera option to take that shot. It was right next to the park.




I dipped my hand in the Atlantic. It immediately turned black and fell off.








This is why.








The ruins of a pillbox with a commanding view of the water.












This is a "brewtender". We watched the first Sens-Sabres game at a pub called Maxwell's Plum, which apparently serves several hundred kinds of the most obscure beer in the world. We didn't bother to test their inventory, and ordered this monstrous tank of cheap domestic beer. Four times.







Maxwell's also serves free complementary peanuts. I imagine that this is because peanuts make you more thirsty. Congratulations, Maxwell's- your insidious ploy worked. However, we also paid them back by whipping the peanut shells across the table, on the floor, at each other, and into each others' beer. It was absolute carnage. Nor were we the only people to do this- the bar's patrons reenact the Battle of Normandy with peanut shells every fucking night.





Spent ammunition on the battlefield. I pity the employee that has to vacuum up that shrapnel every night.







And people wonder why the world doesn't change. But really, people rag too much on the UN. If you look up the organizational rules of the UN, you quickly realize that it is a completely hamstrung organization. It has no ability to enforce its resolutions, it has no overarching, supranational authority, and it institutionalizes the sovereignty of individual nation-states. So most states treat the UN as a big forum to complain and push their own narrow state agendas by supporting resolutions that help them and ignoring those that don't. The world's states have a strange affair with the UN- they want it to have enough authority to interfere with the internal affairs and foreign policy of states they don't like, but they don't want such authority to be used to interfere with their own activities. Ultimately, the UN is a toothless hydra- a helpless, schizophrenic joke used at 100 different cross-purposes by 100 different states, and guess what? Most of our governments like it that way. Apart from the efforts of UN bodies like UNESCO, FAO, UNICEF, UN-Habitat, etc, I really can't think of anything that the UN does usefully.




We also tried to break into the Citadel (the big fortress up on the hill). Guess what? We did not get in. I was rather unhappy about this, as one of the great maxims of my life is that there is some way into any forbidden area. We did manage to hop a few fences, scale a few walls, and went right through this old grated gate that we just wrenched apart- and got into the outer moat. But no further. Garreth laughed, and pointed out that the Citadel WAS a FORTRESS, after all. I guess that if the French couldn't get in, I don't feel too bad about being stonewalled either.





I will now describe my last three meals. (1) All-you-can-eat honey garlic ribs at Montana's. I had a rack and a half. (2) 25 mussels in white wine sauce- for $8. (3) Thirty 25-cent honey garlic and spicy wings at some bar last night when the Red Wings lost to the Ducks. I haven't touched a vegetable since I landed in Halifax- unless you count the tomatoes used for the Chef Boyardee sauce or the garlic used for the sauce that flavoured my wings and ribs.





And finally, we also went on a tour of the Alexander Keith's brewery. Unfortunately, I have no pictures of this. I was not allowed to take any. I will say only that we were confronted by actors in period costume (circa 1863) who talked in affected, lilting accents and pretended that we had been transported back 200 years in the future. They sang a bunch of east coast ditties, explained the brewing process, hooked us up with a couple of brews each, and introduced us to some of the pop culture of the times.

We found it impossible to remain in character with these actors. When one of the girls- decked in a bar-wench's lacey bodice- asked Garreth where we were from, he quipped: "We're from Vancouver. It hasn't been founded yet." When one of the actors pretended that Alexander Keith himself would be along shortly to have a brew with us, but was presently delayed at a meeting, I said in a loud stage-whisper: "Psssst! I hear he's DEAD." And Mike just sat there with a bemused, bored expression on his face, and like a broken record, repeatedly asked for more beer.

Inside joke: When we left, we found the visitor's log. I signed myself off as "Craig Guinan" from "County Clare, Ireland". Garreth penciled himself in as "S. Lo" from "Not Halifax". When we turned back the pages of the book to last year, we found that "Amber Annett" and "Mike Collins" had gotten there before us in Aug '06.

So, this is the last communique from Halifax 2007. Now I am off to the Yukon on the 28th of May. If my camp has the internet, I will post insights to life in the Great White North. Otherwise, you will not hear from me until October.

Farewell and slainte! I'm so sick from the drink; I need home for a rest.

Halifax 2007: Road Trip

A few days ago, Garreth and I decided to take a road trip through as many Atlantic provinces as possible in one day, for the sole purpose of pissing on them.

Yes, the word “pissing” is not a typo. Not “posing”, or “passing”, or “poising”. We were going to travel almost a thousand miles and spend a ton of cash in gas for no better reason than to urinate on the soil of our nation’s eastern provinces. West Side, motherfuckers!

I’m not even sure why we did it. We were blind soused one night. The conversation meandered aimlessly (as drunken conversations are wont to do), and finally settled upon a much-beloved topic of discourse among my group of friends: our dislike of all things French.

In a fit of drunken enthusiasm, Garreth proposed we drive to Quebec, ten hours away, just to piss on a “Bienvenue a Quebec” sign. We got on Google Maps, and quickly realized that the logistics for such a venture were unfeasible. What was possible: a day trip through New Brunswick to PEI. Four hours there, four hours back, about 900 km of driving.

Too bad about Quebec. But New Brunswick, as Canada’s only official bilingual province, is ALMOST French. PEI was just an afterthought in our plans... just as it is in Canadian politics. I also want to add here, in a very loud voice, that I would never dream of pissing on Nova Scotia or Newfoundland.

We managed to get a Yaris (Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun! Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun! Dun!) from the local Enterprise Car Rental. Garreth reported that it steered like a drunk ox, but at least it was pretty economical on gas.






I won’t pretend. The drive was as dull as the Canucks-Stars series. Scenic, I suppose- or at least, it will be in another month. The trees on the West Coast come into full bloom a good two months before those in the Maritimes. All the forests and thickets we passed by had huge barren patches of winter-ravaged trees; bare, grey branches with just an occasional hint of budding leaves. Nor were the fields we saw amber waves of grain or rolling, wind-rustled meadows- they were mostly just big brown swaths of dry, brambly grass. When June and July come, perhaps their wide open spaces will burst into half-a-hundred radiant shades of summer, and the Maritimes will be absolutely beautiful. But as it was, the scenery made me recall BC’s evergreen forests and craggy whitecaps, and I shook my head.


We finally got to Target #1: “Bienvenue/Welcome to Nouveau/New Brunswick!” We urinated on it with great satisfaction. How dare you welcome us in two languages? Don’t you know who won on the Plains of Abraham? Wolfe beat Montcalm, damn it- you can read about it in your Socials 11 textbook.



We then took a little detour to Moncton; we wanted to have a meal in every province we went through. It’s a cute little area in its own fashion; not quite small enough to be a town, but too isolated and not populated enough to be a true city. This is true of most of Atlantic Canada’s cities- they hover in limbo between the modern amenities, architecture, and brash noise of the big city and the homey familiarity and quirky eccentricity of small towns.



Moncton is, of course, fully bilingual. You can walk down the street and hear a conversation switch rapidly and casually between English and French. Everything is labeled in both languages. A street sign will say “Rue CHURCH Street”, the local mall will say “Le Baie/ The Bay”, and Moncton Place, the city square where City Hall is located, has the singularly absurd misfortune of being labeled: “Place Moncton Place”- as the word “place” is exactly the same in both English and French.

On we drove to PEI across the 12.5 km Confederation Bridge. An aside: I later asked someone who paid for the bridge to be built, the federal government or the PEI provincial government- it was only 5 years old. Knowing that I was from BC, the person deadpanned: “You did.” I laughed- of course we did. Ottawa regularly takes money from the rich economies of provinces like Ontario, BC and Alberta to give to the poorer provinces of the Atlantic, the prairies, and the north. And Quebec, of course, but that’s another story.


And we found the “Welcome to PEI” sign. Bladder-emptying time! Though, in light of what happened later, I wish we had done more.



Garreth told me on the drive over that he’d heard that PEI was the potato-growing capital of Canada. I called bullshit on him; there was no way that a province that small could produce more spuds that Ontario or Saskatchewan. In retrospect, however, I think Garreth might have been right. That province is a mass of potato fields. Lovely, lovely place: great patchworks of furrowed farmland interspersed with those wood-boarded colonial-style houses I’ve grown so used to. I think I finally understand a little bit about the sentimental attachment small-towners have to those isolated hamlets where they grew up.



Charlottetown is apparently quite busy in the summer, but not this time of year. The place was dead. We were there long enough to take a shot of the Province House where PEI’s legislature meets. It is also the place where the original delegates of Canada’s British colonies met to discuss the formation of Confederation- PEI’s claim to fame. It’s even on their license plates- these read: “Birthplace of Confederation, PEI.” I told you the Atlantic had a huge focus on the past.




On our way back across Confederation Bridge, we were slapped with a $40 toll. Garreth almost fell through the windshield, and incredulously told me that he should have taken a shit on the PEI welcome sign. You see, coming to PEI, we’d seen a sign telling us that Confederation Bridge charged a toll, but ONLY on the way BACK. You could not see what the return toll was- and you automatically assume you would not have to pay more than 10 bucks. It is only on the return journey that you are confronted with a large sign (and unbearably friendly toll booth attendants that you just can’t get mad at) that you are to be heavily taxed for going to PEI to see a whole lot of nothing. The fact is: if the casual traveler knew how much it would cost to leave, he’d never enter PEI in the first place. So PEI tourism lures you in, and then makes it hard (or at least expensive) for you to leave.

I laughed. I knew that people were leaving the Atlantic provinces in droves for job opportunities in the West. We joked that we had no idea that the exodus had gotten so bad that the PEI government felt it necessary to charge an exorbitant toll to prevent people from leaving the province.


We got back to Halifax at close to midnight, just in time to show Mike the pictures and play a few rounds of Guitar Hero II. The next morning, when we took the car back to the rental place, we discovered that we had committed insectocide on a truly unprecedented scale.

So, to sum up the road trip according to a well-worn formula:

Renting a Yaris: $100.
Two full tanks of gas: $90
Tolls at two checkpoints and one bridge: $70
Eating three different meals in three different provinces in the same day:


Priceless.









Too bad I didn’t get to piss on Quebec.

Halifax 2007: Fisherman’s Wharf

Peggy’s Cove is a picturesque little town forty minutes out of Halifax, one of a series of tiny fishing communities hugging the coast. What Santorini is to Greece, Peggy’s Cove is to Nova Scotia- one of those places that are memorialized on postcards and tourist brochures and supposedly capture the essence of a region... in this case, the old-time, small-town, maritime culture of Atlantic Canada.

The town itself has a population of about 40, half of whom are apparently related to Paul, Garreth’s Nova Scotian buddy, who brought us there. Most of the townsmen are lobster and mackerel fishermen. The lobster season begins in November and stretches into late May- this is when the lobsters stop molting, and their exoskeletons become hard and their insides packed with meat. The locals work in pairs on small trawlers; one man drives, and the other retrieves, unloads, and resets the traps. It’s hard and potentially dangerous work, but rewarding- one of the locals would later tell me that it is possible to make $20,000 in six weeks at the height of the season.

But before I get into that, I want to tell you about the lobster meal. We had lunch at a place called the Sou’wester, and Garreth and I each chowed down on a 1.5 lb lobster. Lobster is hard to get cheaply in the West; they aren’t native to our coast, and with rising gas prices, it takes bucketloads of cash to ship them out to Vancouver. I can’t afford Alberta beef nowadays, let alone Nova Scotia lobster.


The restaurant was kind enough to furnish us with bibs and a printed guide to eating lobster. (Paul jokingly told the waitress that we were from Vancouver and needed all the help we could get.) Regardless, I got a local perspective on all the little tricks of cracking open the lobster and finding the hidden nuggets of meat. I now know how to get all the meat out of the tail without breaking the shell, and can suck every last millimeter of flesh out of the legs as though they were straws. If anyone wants to head down to the Atlantic Trap some night, I will happily demonstrate.

But the true glory of the lobster is what the locals call “tomalley”. When you crack open the thorax, you find a bunch of feathery gills, milky fat, roe (if your meal is female), and a mass of grimy, sickly-looking puke green mush- the “tomalley”. Neither Garreth nor I knew what this was, and Garreth pushed it off to the side with distaste. I, on the other hand, come from a culture that eats pig intestines for breakfast and considers tiger penises and dried worms forms of medication. So I slathered the green stuff all over my fries, poured melted butter over it, and ate it with gusto. It was rich and tasty, much like what liver would taste like if it were ground to mush.

I later learned that tomalley is the lobster’s feces. No, I did not throw up on the spot. In fact, I was stoked. I had just used lobster shit as dip for my fries- and it was in all seriousness the tastiest part of that meal. Well, if I get killed by a grizzly up in the Yukon later this summer, I hope it will do me the courtesy of eating my tomalley.


We spent a few minutes walking around the town’s coastline, with the Atlantic lapping calmly against huge rock formations of windswept, sun-bleached granite. In the summer, Peggy’s Cove is jam-packed with tourists, and according to a few prominently placed plaques, a few unwary visitors have fallen to their deaths on the rocks. I did not see how this would be possible in the summer, though in the winter, those rocks would quickly become slippery and treacherous.


Most of my friends know that I love the ocean, but few know that I hate beaches. I have traveled on three continents and a dozen coastlines, and not once have I lounged on a fake beach and sipped a cocktail while ogling at scantily clad bimbos, and I never will. I hate the sheer artificiality of the Cancun or Bali-style beach: the white grain sands, and the tourist bars and Pina Coladas, and palm trees and bikinis. So false, so contrived, so tame. The ocean should be wild and beautiful, with a beach to match. A real beach should have rocks, damn it... rocks! Rocks, and a strong salt wind, and a crashing tide.


So I was gratified that I got to see something of this at Peggy’s Cove (calm and touristy as it was), and was able to appreciate the Atlantic without having to resort to a beach. With any luck, I might have the opportunity to head up to the Bay of Fundy, which has the highest tides in the world, and see a wild and rugged coast- nature as God intended, not man.



The town itself is a gem. It consists of a couple of dozen tiny, brightly painted wooden houses that probably have not changed in design since the first Scots-Irish colonists cast their nets off the coast. There are no fences, and Paul told us that the locals have a lot of trouble with tourists wandering into their backyards. Down by the little harbor were a few fishing boats, and masses of lobster traps piled up on creaky wooden wharves.

Paul stopped by the house of one of his family members, and over a round of Buds, I learned a few interesting things about the Maritimes’ present-day fishing culture. One of the guys I talked to was a lobster fisherman- a bluff man with a thick accent, bright eyes and a booming, genuine laugh. He had that peculiarly unhinged disposition unique to small-town folk- capable of switching his mood and manners from calm reserve to manic joy at the drop of a hat. I have seriously never heard a man laugh as hard at his own jokes.



According to this jolly tar, Peggy’s Cove has two industries. From November to May, they fish for lobsters, and from June to August, they fish for tourists. A good third of the buildings in town house no residents- they are souvenir stores and restaurants. The fishing and tourist industries don’t necessarily overlap; by the time the tourist season begins, the lobster season is over. So when the tourist industry is just kicking up, most of the lobster fishermen are living off unemployment insurance, which can be a few hundred bucks every couple of weeks. This was interesting to me, as in BC, I don’t think that anyone is covered for doing seasonal work. I figured that this was a quirk unique to the Atlantic, whose strong maritime traditions perhaps demand that the provincial governments cover the fishing industry during the dead months.

Anyway, this also means during the summer, all the lobster at Peggy’s Cove is actually imported from PEI, whose season is still ongoing. All those tourists are, in fact, not eating the local lobster as advertised.


I was unwilling to ask the man about the future of Peggy’s Cove. It would have been impolite to parry his hospitality with rude questions about how he would feed his kids if the lobster disappeared, which we all know is likely to happen within the next few decades. It is highly likely that Peggy’s Cove will then become reliant on the tourist industry... or they will disappear entirely. I think that soon there will be a tollbooth set up at the town’s entrance, and the fishermen will convert their warehouses into gift shops, maritime museums, and bases for tour boats.

I have seen this happen many times before- how traditional lifestyles become obsolete because of resource scarcity or some quirk of consumer demand, and communities have to pimp their culture out to the tourism industry in order to survive. I saw it on Santorini in Greece, where out-of-work fishermen set up gift shops and donkey-rides. I saw it in the highlands of Chiang Mai, Thailand, where Karen villagers weaved scarves and sold Pepsi. And I am seeing the beginnings of this in Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia.

History is a cruel god, and cares little for the cultures that fall by the wayside. Culture evolves just as species do, and just as the neanderthals died so that humans could live, a million vibrant cultures have been born and have died so that humanity could look the way it does now. And many more cultures will be born and will die in turn as the modern processes of globalization grind on ceaselessly, shaping and reshaping traditions, lifestyles, peoples, and nations.

I am reminded of a song, Fisherman’s Wharf, by Stan Rogers. Here are some lyrics.

“It was in the spring this year of grace, with new life pushing through.
That I looked from the citadel down to the narrows and asked what it’s coming to.
I saw upper Canadian concrete and glass, right down to the water line
I have heard an old song down on Fisherman’s Wharf; can I sing it just one time?

And haul away and heave her home; this song is heard no more.
No boats to sing it for, no sailors to sing it for.
There rises now a single tide of tourists passing through.
We traded old ways for the new,
Old ways for the new,
Old ways for the new, for the new.”

Halifax 2007: Halifax Hijinks Part 1

I have a little habit at home in Vancouver of wandering the downtown on sunny days (and rainy days) just to see what quirky sights I can find. Garreth and I spent three days walking circles around Halifax, and here's a few things we found.


This picture is for Nick. Some things never change. Like the meals Sean and Garreth have.






We found the grandfather of all lobsters in a tank at the local Sobey's- which I guess is Atlantic Canada's Save-On-Foods. He weighed 8 lbs, and absolutely towered over his minions.




There is a big "star-shaped" fort in downtown Halifax called the Citadel. This means only that the walls are build at weird, sharp angles, so that attacking cannonballs will bounce easily off the walls and the fort's own cannons will have intersecting lines of fire. It does not look overly impressive from the outside, but on the inside, it has a huge marshalling square, with high walls ringed by cannons and a very deep moat.



Here is a bird's eye view of the Citadel. It's a small scale model, but you can get the picture about how the shape of the walls display a very sound military sense. Analyze it to death and see if you can think like an 18th century general.



Take this fort, motherfuckers. The wall on the right is the outer wall, and the one on the left is the inner wall.






Mike and Garreth weep from the inside of the Citadel's jail cells.














Note the little arrow at the base of the cannon indicating the direction the weapon should be pointed. "You point THIS end at whatever you want to die!"









Like those hideous neo-Soviet monstrosities. So ugly. So, so ugly.





Or Big Mike. Look at that look of terror on his face. He surely fears my wrath.






The Citadel's Boom Boom Room. Those barrels do not contain wine.








"FIRE IN THE HOLE!!!"









Right after this picture was taken, the bird came to life, burst into roaring flames, and carried me into the starry cosmos.







There are no words in the tongues of men to describe how funny I found this. An absolutely incommunicable experience.








I fulfill a longtime dream side-by-side with Garreth: jigging on a Halifax pier.









This is part of a monument commemorating the mass deportation of the region's Acadians after the British took what used to be called Acadia and renamed it Nova Scotia. 10,000 were thrown out; some went to New Brunswick, some returned to France, and others went south to Louisiana and became what we now call Cajuns. I found it amusing for two reasons. (1) It has the word "deportation" on it. (2) It's such a handjob monument to multiculturalism. "Look! Our ancestors massacred your people and trampled your culture because you got in the way of the British Empire. C'est dommage, motherfuckers! But nowadays, we're SUPPOSED to feel bad about things like genocide, the Komagata Maru, Japanese internment camps, the Holocaust, and Native Residential Schools. So we'll put up a cute little cross as a token gesture." Christ, I don't care at all. I don't believe that present generations should have to apologise for the "sins" of their fathers, because we cannot judge actions conducted two centuries ago by present day liberal morals.










Halifax's version of a chopper.










Shout out to the girl who got me my kilt. I couldn't get a clearer picture, but I think you can see enough.









An eyesore. I told the guys to strike an insulting pose, but neither knew how to properly degrade something so ridiculous looking.






"Give me an 'R'!" We meet an old pirate outside the liquor store. I want to wheel him down to the nearest pier and fulfill another longtime dream. If you do not understand the joke I just made, you are surely no friend of mine.








O grave new world, that has such hilarity in it. Read the first line of this sign.













Garreth had some spare quarters.









"NO SPEAKA INGLIS!!!"





It's funny, but the only times I ever feel Chinese is when I see gross stereotypes like this. I'm so whitewashed that I honestly have no self-conception as an Asian, and in Vancouver, there are enough of us bananas that the racial difference between English-speaking whites and yellows is completely forgotten in the grand scheme of Vancouverite culture. But in Halifax, there are no Asians. And suddenly, I am visibly reminded that I do look different from everyone else- and my memory jolts and I go: "Oh, hey. Right. Chinese. Gung hey fat choi, and all that." In Halifax, people are polite enough not to stare, but then you see this cruel cariature of a sign, and I want to go into the restaurant and punch the owner for perpetuating a stereotypical image of Asians.

Okay, I'll get more pictures up tomorrow. I honestly want to show you some pictures of Point Pleasant, Halifax's version of Stanley Park.