Finally Summer

Tags

Beach, heat, life, Me

Well Summer arrived on the 4th July, yesterday and last night was still cold around 16C and cloudy, wet. We had a cold, very wet April, May and June.

In 24 hours, so Canadian, we are now into hot and muggy, we have, in Island speak, the muggies, 25C hot and humid with a small breeze. We have a hear warning for the coming days, with the humidity factor temperatures could soar to 31C. I am not complaining, I will take it.

I am not complaining, it is now warm enough to go to the Beach and just enjoy the sunshine, a nice lobster and some fresh oysters.

Here are some shots of today, it is also Lupin time, they are everywhere you look, on the road in rural area and in gardens, they grow wild here.

Lavender in the garden of the Confederation Centre.

Wild Lupins in my neighbours yard.

Price Flag on the marquis of the Holman Grand Hotel, downtown Charlottetown. Despite the 100 year old facade this is a modern hotel with a very good restaurant.

Road kill by Gerald Beaulieu, on the terrace of the Art gallery of the Confederation Centre. Was created 2 years ago make entirely of recycled tires.

Lupins in the wild at French River in PEI with potato field of course in the background.

 

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Things in life

Tags

AGCC, art., artists, Charlottetown, life, PEI, Summer

The old song says “The best things in life are free”, I wonder if many today still think this way in our hyper consumer society. This song was very popular back in the XXth century written by the songwriting team of Buddy DeSylva and Lew Brown (lyrics) and Ray Henderson (music) and published in 1927 but it continued to be popular up to the 1960’s and you can still hear it today on some radio stations, a classic you could say.

This week was the opening of the Summer show at the Art Gallery of the Confederation Centre and since I am a guide there, as always I make a point of attending all the lectures with the curators and artists.

This year the theme is about life and its transitions from birth to death. The artists are all emerging young artists funded by the Royal Bank Of Canada (RBC) for the last 10 years. This program in cooperation with the Curator of the Art Gallery gives an opportunity to young artists to work with a gallery and curators in a professional setting, organize an exhibit and get exposure. In PEI  the Art Gallery is the only venue offering such an opportunity. All the art is Canadian as per the mandate of the Gallery.

The funny thing is that people are not always comfortable with the idea that we all die one day, it is the human condition can’t escape it. We have two solo shows one by Philippa Jones (Perpetual) of St-John’s, NFLD. Perpetual brings together a selection of recent work by Philippa Jones that explores ways of dealing with loss and mortality through the neutralizing effects of preservation, aesthetic arrangement, immersive ritual, and ultimately recognition of a natural continuum, the temporal cycle that encompasses all being. Catalyzed by the untimely death of close friend and collaborator, Newfoundland curator Mary MacDonald, the artist’s explorations of the processes of extraction from the everyday world, common to art and science, take on a heightened resonance.

The other solo show by Inuit artist Shuvinai Ashoona (Mapping Worlds) from Kinngait (Cape Dorset) Nunavut which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year as an Inuit territory in Canada. This gigantic area of Arctic Canada is 1500 miles North of PEI with a population of 33,000 mostly young people.

The other shows are group exhibits and explore the transitory aspect of life, Split Images: Truth and Fiction,  something that also disturbs a lot of people.  

In the concourse of the Centre is the exhibit of Ian Funke-Mackay: Serpentine Signs, an artist from Halifax, produces images and signs for a new visual field in which past energies resonate within the present. His colourful and faceted arrays and forms echo the worlds of computer-generated imaging and video-game animations, aspiring to fuse the future-oriented legacies of abstract painting.

 

I do like Philippa Jones work because it is challenging and offers a chance to listen to what our visitors have to say and see their reaction. So this is the show for this wet and cold Summer so far in Charlottetown. Let’s hope it warms up!

In closing I have added this video of a favourite singer of mine Peggy Lee with Benny Goodman sextet and the famous song On the Sunny Side of the Street. Right now we have no Sun in PEI.

 

 

As advertised

Tags

#Fake, Charlottetown, life, Montague, PEI, rural, Stratford, villages

The internet is a strange thing and you will find just about anything and everything on it. Living on a small Island, you can drive across, East to West in 6 hours top and go from South to North in 30 minutes, with the total population of one neighbourhood at 150K. PEI is mostly very rural with 2 big towns, Charlottetown 36K and Summerside at 15K, so you can imagine that we do not have the sort of development seen in larger cities in Canada.

So on the internet when I read news items  at the bottom of the page there will be advertisement disguised as more news or general interests stories. The picture will show you an exciting urban development for seniors or top rated lawyers for affordable rates or a dating site for singles in PEI, alluring pictures with promises of varied sexual encounters literally next door. The pictures, for anyone living in PEI, are dead give away, you know this is a scam, none of what is featured would exist so blatantly.

Take the accommodations for seniors said to be very affordable. First the housing situation on the Island at the moment is at 0 (zero) vacancy. Rents on average for a 2 bedroom is $1650 CDN. which is not much in a large city like Halifax or Moncton in the Maritimes or even Montreal or Toronto, but in PEI for many this is near unaffordable. We have the lowest wages in all of Canada coupled with a high cost of living.

Houses for sale average about $450K and this is a huge increase from 3 years ago when houses were half that price. Laundered money from Asia changed that picture all across Canada including here in PEI and has created a real crisis in housing which our governments are struggling to address.

So photos like these appear in ads and will say that this is Montague a small town of 2000 persons 25 minutes from Charlottetown, such buildings simply do not exist anywhere on the Island. Wonder to who this is appealing and what is the message here.

Here we have advertisement for high powered lawyers in Charlottetown at reasonable rates. No one appearing in these photos practice law in PEI. Just generic ads and in fact these actors are Americans. Again who is the target population? The legal profession in PEI is very close knit and like the rest of this little island most lawyers are related to each other in some fashion.

The dating site for singles in Stratford PEI a suburb of Charlottetown, 9000 population is hilarious. Stratford is a mix of suburban and rural setting only 5 minutes across the river from Charlottetown. None of the people appearing in such ads are from the Island, not difficult to figure out. In fact having an affairs in PEI is quite possible and frequent if one goes by the high divorce rate, but keeping it a secret is the real hard part. The joke is that PEI is a lot like the American soap opera Peyton Place.

ACTUAL PICTURE OF MONTAGUE PEI

ACTUAL PICTURE OF STRATFORD PEI under the wing

What do these strange and misleading advertisements say about the people publishing them. They are obviously misinformed about this Island and its place in the Maritime, but do they care? They are promoting a globalist view of PEI, it is not different it is just like any large metropolitan area. We are not rural as a Province but appear in photo as just like any other place in North America, PEI could be Southern Ontario. Whoever creates those is interested only in selling a concept which is unrecognizable from its reality.

 

Setting Day in PEI

Tags

life, lobster, PEI, traps

Today May 3, 2019 is Setting Day in all ports in PEI, everyone really is talking about it and it is annually a very big affair. This year due to poor weather and very high winds the captains of the Lobster boats and the Canadian Dept of Fisheries delayed Setting Day by several days. But finally the weather has improved and the wind died down and off they go to start setting their lobster traps, this means that by Saturday people in PEI will eat PEI Lobster. The job of setting traps and catching lobster is dangerous and difficult, anyone who has ever work on a lobster boat will tell you so, but it is also exciting. No where else in Canada do we have such a tradition which is so typical of the life on PEI.

To work on a lobster boat you need good sea legs and a good amount of physical strenght. You go to sea early in the morning just at dawn and return during the afternoon. The traps must be numbered and set according to an exact pattern, no haphazard work here, it is very important that each captain know which traps are his and in what designated area he is setting them. Each trap comes also with a buoy, in the photo you can see the buoy in blue with red tips.

Everyone wishes them luck and happy Setting Day, friends, families and onlookers line the dock and the wharfs to see them off. Now let’s see what the price per pound will be this year. Of course the best prices are set at the dock, so if you go down to the dock chances are you will pay a lot less than what you would pay in a grocery store or at the Fish store or worse what the tourists pay in restaurants, but the tourists are all rich so hey they can pay.

Canadian Painter

Tags

Art Gallery, art., Halifax, life, Maud Lewis, Nova Scotia

We were in Halifax about 3 weeks ago, an easy drive of 3 hours from Charlottetown across the Sea Bridge down to Truro and a hop and a skip to Halifax. This time around I wanted to visit the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia to see the collection.

The Art gallery is housed in 2 buildings next to each other, one is an old government building facing the Legislature and the other is an Italianate style stone building called the Dominion building which has a statue of Britannia sitting on the roof.

The two building have an underground passageway connecting them. The collection of Canadian art is of good quality and interesting featuring many artists. The one in particular I wanted to see  was the works of Maud Lewis (1903-1970) born in Yarmouth and died in Digby, Nova Scotia. She married in 1938 Everett Lewis. Prior to being married Maud had a daughter out of wedlock named Catherine Dowley. Maud never acknowledged her daughter who moved to Ontario and had a family of her own.

I had heard much about Maud Lewis and she is one of those painters discovered late in life by the art world and the public and became a celebrity, though that did not enrich her at all. Today she is an icon in the Canadian art world for her simple ”naif” or folk art style of painting. Maud (Dowley) Lewis came from a simple background, her family were tradespeople, her father John was well known in Yarmouth for making good quality leather harness and other leather goods.  Maud was born suffering from juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and for the rest of her life suffered from this crippling disease. She was a very small women described as gnome like and her hands were severely deformed.

Her interest in art came from her mother Agnes who would paint Christmas cards and sell them to supplement the family’s income.  After her parents death Maud lived as a recluse and her only brother grew distant and rarely saw her.

At the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia a section of the museum is dedicated to her and her tiny little house in which she lived with her husband Everett Lewis, it has been transported from its original site and reconstructed for visitors to see.  It is as it was during her life, quite small, basically a one room house, with all the furniture, paint brushes and other items one finds in a house. What is so special about this little tiny house, is that Maud Lewis painted and decorated every inch of the place inside and out including the glass windows.

 

The house as it appears re-installed inside the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia today.

Her paintings are joyful and full of vibrant colours, showing life and scenes around her and what she saw.

Though I was not particularly interested in Maud Lewis as a painter despite having heard of her, coming to the gallery and seeing her tiny house and several of her paintings, I was enchanted by her work. It was I think the simple beauty of it all, childlike quality and the joy which radiated from her work. She has no agenda, no ideology, no philosophy or trying to pass a message. It is simply art for the beauty of it.

 

 

Memories of

Tags

Anniversaries, Apollo, Arachova, Greece, lamb, life, Travel

It seems that in my life time anniversaries for both me and Will have always been in a city or place around the world. Will just wrote about Moussaka, The recipe he gives on his blog is very good, it’s from our friend Akis Petretzikis who is a famous TV chef in Greece  https://willyorwonthe.wordpress.com/2019/01/22/not-moussaka-its-moossakka/  and he included in his blog post photos of our anniversary trip to Greece when I was accredited to the Hellenic Republic.

Akis 

We travelled in Greece not as much as I wish we had but nonetheless it was always memorable.

For our 30th Anniversary in 2008, we travelled by car from Athens to Arachova which is a famous ski resort. The mountain dominating the region is Mount Parnassos, elevation 2457 meters home of the god Apollo and his aunt the Muses. The village of Arachova is above the Gulf of Corinth and about 10 minutes by car from the ancient site of Delphi.

Arachova being a mountain town, you can walk everywhere but a lot of streets are in fact stone staircases, so you do get a good workout. The food is grilled lamb and other Greek dishes. Most people speak only Greek. Being so close to Delphi we visited the ancient site with its wonderful temples and other religious sites dedicated to the gods of ancient Greece. Delphi is a magical site hanging over the cliff with the Gulf of Corinth far below. Mount Parnassos during our visit was hidden in the clouds, certainly lending an air of mystery.

Delphi is known as the Omphalos or Navel of the World with its vegetation of olive and pine trees. Of course the famous Oracle of Delphi is dedicated to Apollo, the god of light, harmony, music and prophecy, was the most visited oracle in Greece and people from all over the Mediterranean would come to ask for help. It needs some climbing up to get to the actual site, which stands on top of a rocky hill.

In 2018 for our 40th we were in Lisbon, one of the best 10 days in Europe and we would love to return to Portugal.  In 1998 our anniversary was in Poland, we travelled from our home in Warsaw to a small resort about 40 minutes to the West of Gdansk. In 1988 we were then living in Mexico, I don’t recall what we did, it seems we spent the weekend in Cuernavaca or San Miguel Allende. No anniversaries are the same and all carry wonderful memories.

Birthdays for Will and I are also special and each decade saw a special trip to commemorate. Vietnam, Ireland, Egypt, Poland, Mexico, Istanbul, Hong Kong, Beijing, Italy, etc.

 

 

In the cards this year

Tags

2019, life, Me, predictions, Radical Faeries, Tarot cards, year

The great Karnak the diviner par excellence of Arizona AKA Dr. Spo read my Tarot cards for 2019. He is a delightful fellow for doing so. He put out his planet table cloth and let me choose the deck of tarot cards I would like. He has a collection of tarot card decks. I chose the Radical Faeries card deck.

So here month by month is what the cards say;  January would be a month of decisions on projects, February a month of inaction or vacation, March, April, May months of lots of action open to new ideas.  June could bring conflict, July could be a month of worries or a month where I overcome difficulties. August and September are months to apply knowledge or lessons learned, October is the best month of the year. November new worries and December could bring some lost or bereavement of some kind.

Overall 2019 the cards say is a good year busy, happy, going forward, self-growth. I can live with that.

Towards Xmas

Tags

Canada., Christmas, Food, French, life, Montreal, Music, Quebec

This week listening to Radio-Canada in the morning I heard some old Christmas favourites from my childhood. One was Mon Beau Sapin, Roi des Forêts known in English as O Tannenbaum. This was the song the second wife of my maternal grandfather, we called Tante Fernande would sing each Christmas at lunch at my grandfather’s house when all his children and spouses and us grandkids would gather for the traditional meal, gifts and benediction. It was an old, I dare say a very old tradition going back several generations, the family patriarch would bless is family for the New Year. Tante Fernande would have cooked a turkey it was always an excellent birds and very juicy, serving peas and mash potatoes and cranberries which she called Atoka, dessert would be a mix of chocolates, Bûche de Noël and other sweets. I always thought that Atoka was the real name for cranberries but it turn out that Atoka is a Quebec recipe for processing cranberries after they are harvested. It gives a much sweeter fruit and has none of the tartness found in canned cranberries. Tante Fernande was a cook who did everything from scratch including her cranberries. You could not buy canned cranberries back then or if you could it was not done on good homes.

The dishes used to serve the Christmas meal was on two dinner sets, one was white with a dark blue and gold rim, the other set was their wedding dinner set which I have now.

There were other songs and my aunts knew one each, a favourite, one was Petit Papa Noël, my Mom use to sing that one. It is not an old song, the melody is taken from an old Ukrainian song and the words written in 1944 were about a child asking Santa to bring his father home for Xmas from the POW camp in Germany. After the war the words were changed erasing any reference to the war to what we hear today. It is a song that you would learn in school and my mother knew it well.  It was part of every Christmas music recital at school in French Canada. Tino Rossi premiered this song in 1946 and it became his Christmas signature song. Radio-Canada played it today as part of their weekend Christmas show it brought back a tidal wave of memories.

On this score the French service Radio-Canada is doing a much better job with their Christmas programming than the CBC who is playing a mix of commercial music. Tomorrow 23 December, the CBC will have an all day Christmas concert as they do every year from the European Union broadcasted live starting at 9am. Radio-Canada will have its programming, vintage shows from the 1940 to 1970. Despite the fact that such programming might be speaking to an older generation, it is still enormously popular.

Maybe it speaks about a time when Christmas was not about shopping and stress. The Media today puts a heavy emphasis on how stressful and unpleasant it is, with those awful relatives. I wonder why it has to be this way, not to mention the trove of bad news. It sounds almost perverse.

Gifts use to be in my mother’s childhood an orange which was a luxury then, books, clothing like a scarf or a sweater. For us it was books, sweets or the dreaded Fentex slippers your gradma knitted for you, some small amount of money like a $5. bill new and crisp or a board game. The adults were not stressed, no one was driving around shopping in malls, it was a nice holiday with a focus in Roman Catholic Quebec on religion and midnight mass recalling the traditions of Old Canada and France.

The other popular song and remains so to this day is J’ai vu maman embrassé le Père Noël sung by Line Renaud who is 90 years old. This 1956 version is one you will hear on the radio. Renaud was and remains one of the great French singer of her time.

Well we avoided the stress of Christmas and it is something I never quite understood why so many people whipped themselves into a frenzy.  I think that a lot of the stress is made up on false notions about gifts and having to please other people, it is somewhat artificial. I hope you all have lots of fun and enjoyment out of the Holiday Season.

My Best Wishes to You!

 

Have you made your list?

Tags

Canada., Christmas, home, life, Music, Santa, Travel

Have you made your list for Santa?

What do you want for Xmas? I would like a BMW convertible or better still a Bentley Convertible, lots of Bulgari stuff and some nice cases of Bollinger Champagne. like in this photo in Lisbon.

 

Today 87 years ago, on 11 December 1931 Canada became a fully independent Country with the proclamation of the Statute of Westminster, George V was proclaimed King of the Dominion of Canada. These important changes were enshrined into our Constitution and Canada adopted its own Law on Royal Succession.  We were also able to finally make our own Foreign Policy independent from Britain and open our own Canadian Embassies around the world. The first one was in Tokyo, Japan and Sir Herbert Marler was our first Canadian Ambassador to the Empire of Japan.

 

Our trip to Portugal

Tags

art., life, Politics, Portugal, Travel, vacation

Well this trip had been planned half way through my campaign for municipal Office and we had decided that whatever the outcome, we would be off on a vacation away from PEI afterwards and somewhere in Europe.

So we departed on 19 November on Rouge, a division of Air Canada. We flew business class of premium I think it is called and despite all the negative press, I found it to be quite nice a flight, regular airliner and all the usual trimmings, can’t see what all the naysaying is about.

We found an Air B&B in Mouraria, one of the oldest neighbourhoods of Lisbon just below the thousand year old castle fortress of San Jorge formerly a Moorish Palace and citadel.

Lisbon airport is very close to the city centre, we were only 15 minutes away from our apartment. The joke is that Lisbon comes as a free gym, there about 12 hills and the city is small but everything is up or down hill some of them at a 40 degree angle.

this photo was taken from the Castle looking down on Mouraria where we lived, our building is in the middle of the photo.

From inside the Castle, the flag of the City of Lisbon and the flag of Portugal.

looking up to the castle walls.

Again from the Castle parapet looking towards the parish of San Vincente O Fora with the beautiful maritime pines providing the greenery. This church is the Royal Mausoleum to the Kings of Portugal. The monarchy was abolished in 1910 in a coup and the royal family of Braganza, retired quietly.

Some dates about Portuguese history you will here a lot about if you visit. In Lisbon 1147 Martin Moniz and a group of knights from England, Spain, France and elsewhere capture the Citadel and Castle from the Moors and expel them. Today a metro station is named after Martin Moniz who apparently according to the story wedged himself in a door of the castle allowing his companions to enter, he died in the process. The age of the Portuguese Empire starts with Prince Henry the Navigator and in 1497 Vasco de Gama,Count of Vidigueira travels to India and then to various points in Africa establishing colonies along the way. The Portuguese Empire spanned the globe and led to a Papal bull dividing the world between the Spanish and Portuguese Empires.

In 1644 the sovereignty of Portugal was restored and the Spanish Hapsburgs were forced to give up their control of the country. The Braganza dynasty becomes the Royal house in Portugal until 1910. Another metro station is named after the Restauradores (restorer). Another important date is 1834 when all monasteries are closed and confiscated and religious orders are dissolved. This happened because of a movement to liberalize society and give it a parliamentary and constitutional monarchy, the church chose to be on the side of the ultra conservative and fought the movement. In 1908 the king and the crown Prince were assassinated while crossing the Plaza de Comercio upon their return to Lisbon. This assassination shocked Europe, led to political paralysis in Portugal and two years later finally a republic was proclaimed. What is not much mentioned nowadays is the almost 50 years of dictatorship from 1932 to 1968 by the Estado Novo party and its leader Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, he died in 1970 but his government kept going, finally on 25 April 1974 the army ousted the party from power in what is called the Carnation Revolution and Portugal returned to democracy.

Plaza de Comercio, rebuilt in 1755 after the great earthquake destroyed much of Lisbon. What we see today is the work of the Marquis of Pombal. In this square facing the river Tegus, the King and his son the heir to the throne were assassinated in 1908.

We walked all over Lisbon, there is so much to see and do, it can be exhausting. Also many wonderful restaurants, good wines and lots of Port.

In the fashionable Chiado neighbourhood with the new Christmas lights. Love the sidewalks in stone mosaic pattern all over the city.