Touristing in Alberta

It seems shocking that we've covered a large part of the world's surface and hadn't (until last Thursday) been north of Red Deer in our own province. So we decided to deal with that.

A couple of months ago we reconnected with Ron's cousin Ralph at a family reunion. When Ron was growing up Ralph was one of the old kids and not part of his circle at all. Funny how 50 years can change all that. Five years don't make any difference at all now. So we were delighted to discover how well we clicked as friends.

Ralph and his partner Raymond live in Edmonton. I'd been to Edmonton on business in 1989, but that doesn't really count as a visit. We needed to see the place, and Ralph was eager to show it to us. So last Thursday we drove up that way via Custom Woolen Mills, an extraordinary fibre factory in the middle of nowhere somewhere east of Carstairs, giving us a chance to get off the highway and into some real farm country. I picked up a Turkish spindle and some slubby, bumpy wool to spin with it.

I'm afraid I'm hooked on spinning now!

Friday we discovered that Ralph missed his true calling: he should have been a tour guide. He drove us all over the place, showing us the Edmonton he loves. We shared lunch with two of his lovely daughters, Judy and Jodi (we'd met Judy at the reunion, too) at a fine sushi restaurant, and then "did" the West Edmonton Mall - you haven't seen Edmonton unless you've seen the Mall.

Ralph's daughter Shelly came over after dinner to share my birthday cake (apricot-pistachio torte: yum!).

Saturday morning was a trip to the Edmonton farmers' market, where I picked up more wool to spin - actually hand-dyed kid mohair from the supplier's own flock. Oh dear, I'm going to have much too much spinning to do, just like I have far too much to knit. Then, off to Mannville and cousin Charlene, via Vegreville's giant Easter egg.

Charlene had arranged a tour of a Hutterite colony for us that evening. What an interesting place! About a hundred people share the work and earnings of a large piece of land, making everything possible and living almost completely self-sufficient lives together. They were completely open and willing to answer every question we could think of about how and why they live like they do. And they gave us some awesomely delicious pie to finish off the evening. I don't think we could live that life - you have to work too hard - but I think they're the richest people we've ever met; they have more than enough of everything a human being could ever need.

Sunday Charlene, Paul and the two of us visited the Ukrainian village near Edmonton. Interesting place - old buildings rescued from destruction and set up in groups as they would have been in the 1930s or earlier. Each building is staffed by a young person who acts in character for the time and place, very knowledgeable and able to answer all sorts of questions. Definitely a place worth another visit.

Sunday night we spend with cousin Gay and her husband James near Wetaskawin. After moving from High Prairie last winter they lived in their RV for a couple of months. It worked out so well for them that they bought a 5th wheel to live in permanently; they have their two homes parked next to each other in a small RV lot just outside Millet. They put us up in their RV that night, leaving us full of admiration for their ability to get along together for a long time in a very small space. We're certainly not made of such stern stuff!

Monday we made our way homeward via Rocky Mountain House, where I picked up more fibre for spinning - bison this time, from a couple who raise bison and non-allergenic horses just outside of town. I envied their two little kids who had the run of the place and looked full of health and life. Every child should have that much fresh air and sunshine!

Rocky Mountain House reminded us of pre-tourist boom Canmore, very plain and not at all affluent - but you wouldn't call it poor, because it was tidy and well-kept. Its greatest treasure is its historic site, well worth the couple of hours we spent exploring it. The Canmore museum has been celebrating the bicentenary of mapmaker David Thompson, who was based in Rocky for some time, and I found their display on his life interesting in comparison.

We were going to spend the night in Lake Louise or someplace like that, but the weather began to turn rainy, so we retreated to our own mountain resort home. It's still the most beautiful place in the world, but the rest of Alberta isn't too shabby, too.

Turista in Iguazu

So we got to our gaucho show, which turned out to be Opera Pampas, a song, dance & horse-riding survey of Argentina's history. Brief summary: there were native people who sang and danced, then the Spaniards came with their horses and gave them a really hard time and sang and danced, then settlers came and wiped them out and sang and danced, and now we're all happy, singing, dancing Argentinians - sort of a southern hemisphere Oklahoma!. I'm not doing it justice, though. It was very well done, and the horses were amazingly well behaved (as they would have to be for the sake of the barefoot dancers who followed).

The next day we left for Iguazu falls on a LAN flight, a small and seemingly very competent airline. They avoided having to give us headsets by playing soothing classical music quite loudly during takeoff and landing (how's Ave Maria for takeoff?) and showing Just For Laughs Gags during the flight. Just for Laughs is perfect for multilingual situations. The whole plane was laughing for much of it (interesting hearing cultural differences in humour, though) and we got off in a very good mood.

Unfortunately I began paying the price for inadequate hand-washing on Saturday's expedition. Remember, children, WASH YOUR HANDS! I was really reluctant to be out of sight of a washroom all that day and much of the rest; Ron caught up with me the next day. So we got to know our hotel in Puerto Iguazu very well. We were right up north in Missiones province, within sight of Paraguay and Brazil. The Iguazu river flows into the Parana just there, and about 20 km east up the Iguazu are the most amazing falls in the world. We got to see them for a much-too-short visit the next day - Tuesday - on our way back to the airport. Utterly stunning. When I can, I'll post some pictures to Flickr, but they won't begin to capture the full impact of this mass of water surging over a 2 km-wide wall of basalt. And the falls are relatively small this year, with northern Argentina/southern Brazil going through a record-breaking drought.

The drought was a blessing for us, though. We'd expected masses of mosquitos and had to get yellow fever shots to go there. I think I heard one mosquito. And the humidity was low enough (30-40%) that the 35-degree heat was not a problem. This is the year to see Iguazu, I think. But we're going to have to come back another year to see the parts we missed. Maybe then we'll experience tropical rainforest heat.

Back to Buenos Aires and a relatively quiet evening to recover from our illness. But Wednesday (yesterday) we were off and running again. First an excursion into the Parana delta, at the western end of the Rio Plata. Only 40 km or so away from BA, it's a labyrinth of streams and islands that's a summer refuge for many city-dwellers and permanent home for about 3000 people. We cruised past estates and modest homes on stilts, and even a church and a school that were accessible only by boat. I liked the floating supertiendas - supermarkets - that move from dock to dock. It would be a lovely place to live if you liked mosquito repellant (although there were none around at that time of day - we're living charmed lives on this trip).

We ended up in downtown BA, so we got ourselves to a nearby English-language used book store to replenish our stock of reading material - a day and a bit of tummy trouble meant we'd finished all our Christmas reading. Then home to rest up for the evening's show at Senor Tango.

Ron described the show far better than I could. Here's his report to Evan:

Wow! What a spectacle last night’s tango show was. We had vaguely imagined it would be an evening of flashy sexy dancing, and it was but with lots more. It started with four friendly table mates – a Brazilian couple a little younger than us, she being built about like me leading to merriment all round as we all wedged into a booth that wasn’t quite big enough, and another Brazilian woman and her teenage daughter. The daughter was the only one at the table who could really function in both languages so she had a busy time. Anyway we started off well and after a few bottles of good Argentinean wine (which turned out to be included in the price of the evening) we were all buddies.

The show itself when it finally began at 11:00 started with two horses (!) riding on to the stage as part of an enactment of a simplified Argentina creation myth (Once there were Indians, then we Spaniards came and vanquished them. And now here’s Argentina. That’s a surprising view, to these Canadian eyes, because the people here look a whole lot more mixed Spanish + native than Canadians look European + native, so I had though the myth was “we vanquished some of them and integrated the rest”).

There followed much dancing, singing, and orchestral interludes complete with random lighting and smoke effects (one admirable non-random lighting effect was to shine a bright spotlight on a guy ignoring the request not to take pictures, though he didn’t get the hint until an usher had a chat with him). The stage was cunningly arranged in three concentric circles that could turn independently, but I thought their main function was to call attention to the great skill of the women dancers who never once put a heel into one of the spaces between the circles. For most of the night the orchestra was a group of about 6 very capable, if loud, musicians of various ages. For the last half hour or so though, we got a whole new orchestra of old guys. Evidently they were well known, though we couldn’t follow the rapid Spanish introduction, and their leader was treated like a serious celebrity. They REALLY rocked. Four violins, four accordions, bass and keyboard. The distinctive sound was from the accordions as a percussion section playing very staccato ONE TWO THREE FOUR one two three four. It was wonderful.

The finale was a version of Don’t Cry for Me Argentina, complete with Argentine flag-coloured drapery flowing from the ceiling, and all of the dancers and singers and musicians playing loud, but disappointingly no horses. Everyone left smiling, probably the Argentineans to one of the bars that don’t get going until 2:00 am or so and us tourists happily home to our beds.

And now we're packing for the next stage of this adventure - a cruise around the southern tip of South America to Valparaiso, Chile. It will be good to settle into a comfy cabin, unpack all our stuff and spread out a bit. Further reports to follow.

On the way home

I'm sitting in the Air Canada passenger lounge at Heathrow (thank you, Evan!) enjoying their free coffee and internet and catching up with a bit of Flickr picture uploading (we're all the way up to the second stop in Iceland - just wait for the Greenland pictures!). We left the ship Thursday morning, not without a sense of relief. Three weeks is just a bit long to be cooped up with a couple of loud Texan war veterans. We met some thoroughly enjoyable people, too, of course: Doug and Helen, Larry and Linda (thanks for the meditation sessions), but the others begin to oppress me after a couple of weeks.

We had three days in Amsterdam in a great little hotel Ron found just a block from the Rijksmuseum and the Concertgebouw. We didn't get any museums visited, but we had our share of concerts: a youth orchestra on Thursday and the Rosenberg Trio + friends (Stephane Grappelli / Django Reinhart style jazz) on Friday at the Concertgebouw, and a Bach recital on the magnificent organ of the Westerkirk Saturday afternoon, so we did get cultured up. Friday we tried to get to a cheese market in a small town to the north, but we missed it by half an hour. Never mind, it was a pretty train trip. We also nibbled on a hemp-seed chocolate bar we picked up at the flower market Saturday, but we didn't really enjoy the effects. I got even more sleepy and stupid than usual, and Ron turned bright red. So we're not tempted to add to our list of favourite intoxicants yet. But we like Amsterdam.

So we're heading home. I for one am looking forward to a bit of utter torpitude and some catching up with email, pictures, knitting and other good stuff. Stay tuned for a knitter's view of the North Atlantic and a couple of patterns I came up with while we were away.

A Week and a Bit in England

As usual I'm days behind in updating people on our whereabouts - and almost out of minutes on BT OpenZone, which is one of my least favourite ways of getting at the internet. Anyway... We're in Exeter, in southwest England - Devon - just back from a less-than-lucrative day at the races at Newton Abbott. It was a good day nonetheless.

So far we've done plays and concerts in London (Hairspray, the Monteverdi Choir's wonderful performance of music by Schutz, Durufle and others, and Spamalot), spent much too little time exploring Penzance and the rest of Cornwall, and have poked around Exmoor with a couple of locals who run "Southwest Safari" - very much worth doing if you have a chance. I've been uploading pictures to Flickr as possible, so have a look there at some of what we've been doing. Time's almost up - over and out!