Top Six about the Rock -- Part One

I'm back from Newfoundland (just in time for cankerworm season... way to welcome me home, Regina) and despite the weather being pretty awful the whole time we were there, I had a great time.

Now I must confess, I'm biased. I've wanted to go to Newfoundland for, basically, ever. I don't know if I could live there -- it's waaaaay too far from friends and family, for one --- but boy-howdy did I ever frickin' love it.

And as awesome and stunning as it was to see the ocean again and scramble about rocks and hills, it was St John's that really left an impression. I think all these city hall meetings and downtown plan sessions are starting to get to me.

With that in mind, here are my Top Six Things Regina Should Import From St John’s NFLD....

1. COLOUR: Seems here, whenever a new house goes up, it gets painted beige. Oh, they’ll tell you its Sandalwood or Wheatsheaf. Khaki, Oatmeal, Buff or Miami Sand. Café au Lait. They’re lying to you. It’s beige. Which is really just brown washed out to the point where even the brown almost disappears. And you know how they make brown, don’t you? They mix the sludge left over from all the good colours.

Beige is the garbage colour. It’s pandering neutrality. They paint houses beige because they say it’s the best way to maintain property value. A prospective buyer sees it and there’s no risk they’ll see a colour they don’t like. They see... no colour. A non-colour. It’s the shade of the lowest common denominator. And while each individual house, by not standing out in any way, may benefit from being beige, as a city we are reduced by beige. We are brought low by it.

St John’s is not beige. Not within the downtown and a few neighbourhoods out, at least. I don't know what they're doing bylaw-wise to enforce it, but even new condos going up near the core are painted in vibrant hues.

For pedestrians, it means you get to walk through streets textured by warm and cool shades. It makes residential neighbourhoods more interesting to wander through. And as a result, even very simple, plain architecture -- a wooden box with a peaked roof, say -- becomes part of the tourist attraction that's downtown St John's.

I wasn't the only person taking pictures of row houses.

(Cathedral, for the record, if you ignore the infill housing, is similarly not beige. It's part of the reason I chose to live here. And the reason the streets of Cathedral are regularly featured in those glossy brochures promoting Regina to tourists. We need more neighbourhoods like Cathedral is all I'm saying.)

I've heard the reason St John's is so brightly hued is because the fishermen would come home tired of the drab colours of the Atlantic and paint up their houses in cheerful colours.

Regina is on the prairies for christssake. You'd think we'd be sick to death of beige. And you'd think the last thing we'd want to do is camouflage our city so it'd blend into the grasses.

Okaaaay....

Seems my hatred of beige got a little out of hand there. Sorry about that. I need a breather now. And this post is long enough. I'll finish up items two through six later.

Blog from the Rock

That's me in St John's, Newfoundland. Not a great pic, I know. I've nearly filled a digital camera with craggy beauty but forgot to bring a USB cable and can't share any of it for the time being. I took this with my laptop standing outside a café near where we're staying. It's a residential strip just on the edge of downtown. Got to love the way they paint houses here. Pink, blue, green, yellow, orange. Gray or black occasionally. Everything except beige. Joy!

Anyway, I've only been here a couple days, so maybe I'm making too much out of this, but I'm surprised by how much Regina and St John's have in common. Here's a sampling:

• Both are small cities. Regina hovering around 200,000. Metro St John's at 182,000.
• Both are provincial capitals. (And both have humorously named rivals who jealously covet that honor. The hilarious "Saskatoon" in our case. Here they have... um... "Dildo".)
  
• Both are purportedly experiencing periods of economic prosperity when compared to their own recent histories and to the rest of the country.
• In both I keep running into people who talk about how they're hearing there's a boom on but it's not making their lives any easier.
• Both have urban sprawl problems. (Where in Canada doesn't though?)
• Both have roads so cracked and pitted they've become a kind of comedy.
• Both are pretty isolated geographically which means their arts and culture scenes have a goodly homegrown component.
• The weather here is exactly the same unseasonably cold temperature I left behind in Saskatchewan (although here the humidity is something like 310 percent).
• Both have independent alternative news and culture papers that are put out bi-weekly. (The prairie dog's Newfoundlander doppleganger is called The Scope.)

Seriously, if it weren't for one or two little things (the hills, the rocks, the lush foliage, the salt air, the ocean, the ships, the Screech, the scrunchions, the Danny Williams, the accent) I'd think I'd never left home.

Music discovery since arriving: local gypsy jazz guitarist Duane Andrews. Wow. Just wow.