Art in Hamilton – Review for the Hamilton Arts Council

Hamilton’s art community is thriving, with new galleries popping up here and there and great exhibits available year-round. Here is a recent article I wrote about the annual show on now at the Art Gallery of Hamilton featuring art by members of the Women’s Art Association of Hamilton: Women’s Art Exhibit.

Victoria BC: Some Things That Surprised Me

I did my research before I visited Victoria, of course. The huge amount of information now available online these days almost takes the fun out of exploring new places, because you see so much of your destination before you even board the plane. Still, cities like Victoria have a way of surprising you…

1. The Murals

There are several murals downtown. Here are a couple of favourites:

This one packs a politcal punch:

2. The Number of Pubs

I thought Victoria was Retirement City. What’s with all the young, hopping pubs in town? This is the Irish Times, which makes a tasty Harp Shandy, by the way.

3. The Wild Colours

Conservative? You call this conservative? Look at those colours!

4. Out in the Open

This was a bit of a shocker: right on the sidewalk in busy downtown, stuck to a post. Mind you, I didn’t see anyone dropping off their used needles here in broad daylight (this isn’t quite Vancouver).

5. The Sense of Humour

Spotted, in the front yard garden of a house used as a daycare. This was on my way to see the childhood home of Emily Carr.

First Trip to Vancouver? Don’t Miss These…

If you’re going to Vancouver for the first time, here are some attractions for your To-Do List:

1. The Waterfront

With water and mountains, how can you miss? The waterfront area, with its striking convention centre buildings and Canada Place where the cruise ships gather, is one of the main photo-op destinations in the city.

2. Vancouver Lookout

Similar to Toronto’s CN Tower, the Lookout has a revolving dining room so you can see the whole city over dinner. Or you can fork out the $15 just to go up and have a wander around. Either way you’ll see some spectacular scenes of the city, the water and Stanley Park.

Love these train tracks:

3. Sun Yat Sen Classical Chinese Garden

This is a walled garden in the Chinese style of the 15th century. Entrance includes a tour where your guide will explain the symbolism of the architecture, the various plants and landscaping features and the art and furniture in the scholar’s den. Talk about making you green with envy.

4. Granville Island

This former industrial area is now a recreational area with a huge farmers’ market, tons of art galleries and craft co-ops, a theatre, neat boutiques and a big toy store, and a wonderful water playground for kids (and for people like me with tired feet).

Warning, though: be careful when you’re eating outside. A nasty seagull divebombed me and stole the top half of my Montreal-style bagel. I’m still bitter about that…

5. Museum of Anthropology

It takes about an hour to get from downtown Vancouver out to the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology by bus (the last 15 minutes are on foot) but it’s well worth it if you’re at all interested in Northwest Coast Art. Take the one-hour guided tour; you’ll learn a lot.

Newfoundland

Have you seen those ads on tv promoting Newfoundland tourism? Did you think when you saw them that the pictures are somehow too pretty to be true? Surely there’s been some sort of touch-up in the studio to give it that other-worldly aura?

Well so did I. And it turns out, I was wrong.

I visited Newfoundland this summer — a tiny part of it anyways — and even with my cheap little point-and-shoot camera I came away with these records of its beauty. And trust me, they don’t do this amazing place any justice!

This is just a spot along the side of the road where we stopped to see the ocean. I took this on a daytrip from St. John’s, the capital, to Cape Spear (the farthest eastern point of North America):

Cape Spear is home to two lighthouses. One is the modern one, and one is the historic one which is now a museum open to the public. It’s set up to look the way it would have been in the mid-1800s when a lightkeeper and his family lived and worked here. Here’s the cozy bedroom for the parents:

St. John’s is the capital of Newfoundland and a sprawling city with suburbs like any international city, I guess, but the core of the downtown is still very traditional. The houses are painted in bright colours which must help chase away the blues when winter comes in. Here’s the view of the downtown and the harbour from the deck off “The Rooms”, which is the province’s major public museum and art gallery:

Here’s another view of the harbour, taken from up on top of Signal Hill, the highest point in downtown St. John’s. We were there for the military tattoo that runs there every summer. You get a demonstration of a skirmish and some marching bands. We noticed that most of the soldiers were young girls!

Here’s a closeup of one of the mock skirmishes:

On one of our daytrips we visited Bell Island, which is a small island in Conception Bay not far from St. John’s. We took the ferry over:

It’s a very scenic place, reminds me a lot of Ireland, and I would have liked to have stayed longer. We were just there for the day to visit the Community Museum and Mine Tour. This is an old abandoned iron ore mine that actually runs UNDER the water. You walk down this spooky cold tunnel for the tour:

The museum is small but quirky with lots of artifacts relating to the miners’ jobs and even some aspects of their family lives, plus great photos of the miners and the mining operations by the famous photographer Yousef Karsh who visited Bell Island in the 1950s.

The highlight of our trip to Newfoundland was the town of Trinity, where we spent the night in a bed and breakfast that could have been made into a museum. Here is the sitting room:

And here’s the view from our “back yard”:

Trinity is way up north, about a three hour drive from St. John’s, and is quite a tiny and remote little village, although it used to be a prosperous town in the late 1800s. Many of the buildings you see today have been preserved from that era, and either turned into museums or reused as tourist accomodation or, in one case, a theatre.We saw a great Newfoundland play here at the Rising Tide Theatre:

We also took a puffin and whale-watching tour out of Bay Bulls. Didn’t see any whales that day but saw thousands of puffins, the most hilarious-looking bird in North America, and the official bird of Newfoundland. I didn’t get any pictures with my camera but the ones in my head will last me a lifetime!

New article: Queen Street Guide

Queen Street Niagara Falls

Published in UP! Magazine (the inflight magazine of Westjet Airlines)

Three years ago, Queen Street was a sagging strip of struggling shops and boarded-up buildings. The former retail heart of Niagara Falls, Ontario, had been pummelled since the mid-1970s by two newer, customer-sucking malls that opened nearby.

Today, due to the unlikely mash-up of a large property developer and the local arts community, shoppers are back on Queen Street.

It all began when Historic Niagara Developments purchased more than 60 buildings on the street, renovated them and immediately offered the polished properties to artists for one year, rent-free. In turn, the community thrived.

To read the rest of the article, click here

For more great Ontario towns, visit my website Ontario Travel Secrets!

 

New article: OHIP – What’s NOT covered

OHIP: What’s NOT covered

Published: Canadian Newcomer Magazine, January 2010

New articles

How to Fund Your Education. Published in: Canadian Newcomer Magazine Settlement Guide

Creative Ways to Control Your Costs at School. Published in: Canadian Newcomer Magazine Settlement Guide

How to Build an Inuit Art Collection. Published in: Upper Canadian Antique Showcase, November 2009