The Honourable Mauril Bélanger

It is election time here in Ottawa and lots of election fliers are coming through our letter box, including one from the honourable Mauril Bélanger.

The flier includes a piece about his attendance at a fundraising cocktail reception for the Haitian Community's University of Ottawa Scholarship Fund. From where I jump to wikipedia which tells me that there is a huge Haitian diaspora spread across the Americas, with 20,000 in the Ottawa area. Had we come in July we could have done their festival (see http://www.haitienfete.ca/).

All of which explains the doctor I saw at the Rideau walk-in (see http://psmv2.blogspot.ca/2014/10/warf-warf.html). I had not realised that there was a Haitian diaspora, let alone a huge one, and I don't think that much of it has reached the UK - hence my surprise. Maybe they have made it to France.

That apart, local elections here seem to be interested in most of the same things that we are. In particular, what they call intensification and what we might call in back in Epsom back land development. That is to say, selling off most of your back garden for a nice new housing estate. Here the interest is more in new blocks of flats and offices in older, perhaps a touch shabby, areas and they have community zoning rules which say how many stories new buildings can have -  rules which developers do not seem to have too much trouble working their way around, sometimes with lollipops for the community concerned. At least that is what the 'Ottawa Citizen' says about it.

Pumpkin Inferno

So, off we went to Upper Canada Village, a live-in reconstruction built from parts of villages disturbed by works on the St. Lawrence Seaway. During the summer you can visit all kinds of rural activity, all in full period costume. They probably even do some of their ploughing with horses.

We started by visiting the chickadees at a neighbouring nature reserve, more properly the black capped chickadees. These small, pretty, woodland birds are very curious - or perhaps have evolved genes which tell them that large bipeds are apt to give food if closely approached. If one stands still on a woodland path where they are to be found, they will gather in nearby trees and if you hold a hand up they will come down to it, in the hope and expectation of edible reward. They did not stay long on my hand as I had not thought to bring anything in the way of rewards, but they did come.

We rewarded ourselves in a restaurant in Ingleside, a sort of restaurant known locally as a hole in the wall, being a unit in a strip mall. Very good it was too. I had chicken noodle, soup, spaghetti bolognese and pumpkin pie. The first of these was adequate but nothing special, but the second and third items were really good, despite the spaghetti actually being some other  kind of pasta. I don't think I would have known that the pumpkin pie, baked that morning, contained pumpkin, being so different from the sort of thing that we used to manage from the pumpkins that I used to grow, admittedly not the sort of pumpkin that any self respecting Canadian would eat. We were served by the young lady owner, who had excellent table-side manners.

And so onto pumpkin inferno, along with hundreds, if not thousands of others, fully on the scale of a Bank Holiday Monday car booter at Hook Road Arena, albeit in the dark. Cloudy, so no stars, which was a pity as out here, far from any big town, the stars would have been quite something on a clear night (the reason why Tupper Lake runs to a public observatory).

The inferno took the form of a circular path winding its way through the village, marked by ropes of small white lights and pumpkin posts, these last being posts made of three or four cut & illuminated pumpkins, one of top of the other. The main business was a sequence of large pumpkin tableaux, a lot of them the work of local artists. It did not matter than the pumpkins were actually plastic replicas; they looked and cut like pumpkins and stood the damp weather a lot better than real ones would have.

Some of the tableaux were just arrays of artfully cut pumpkins, with some of them being really clever. Some of them achieived tonal effects by cutting away varying amounts of skin and flesh. Some were enhanced with clever lighting.

Some of the tableaux were, in effects, pictures made out of pumpkins. Very clever, but I did not like them as much as the others; they were not playing to the medium, with the grain, they ran rather against the grain. Making pumpkins be something which they were not. I associate to Pugin who thoroughly disapproved of trying to make ordinary pictures out of stained glass. See http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.ca/search?q=letters+condolence for a not very helpful reference to a book on same.

The tableaux which I liked best, and one small part of which I think I have illustrated, might be called the ride of the pumpkins. There was music and the interior illumination of the pumpkins had been linked up with the music, rather as if the pumpkins were an orchestra made up of a whole lot of different instruments. The music had been well chosen and the whole thing was tremendous. The illustration is a very pale imitation indeed.

A bonus was a pond full of huge carp, some of them a yard long, apparently wild carp who have learned to come to this pond to be fed. Very striking in the half light.

At the end of the visit, before you got back to your car, there was a well stocked shop, selling all kinds of pumpkin related paraphrenalia, some of it edible and most of which would be hard to find back home.

Reference 1: http://www.butlersrestaurant.ca/. Gmap reference 44.996664, -74.989875.

Reference 2: http://www.uppercanadavillage.com/index.cfm/en/home/.

Reference 3: http://hookcarbootsale.com/.

A warming up act

Over the weekend we were taken to a place which we would not have found by ourselves. This picture can serve as a warming up act, an advertisement.

Home cooking

The first bit of home cooking over here was a pot-luck bread pudding which BH created a few days ago to use up some left over bread, a pudding which she ended up cooking in the microwave for reasons beyond her control. Pot-luck in the sense that she had neither recipe, all of the ingredients nor scales. But it tasted fine.

The second bit was a more regular stew from myself today. Start by visiting the Sausage Kitchen in Byward Market and selected what was described as garlic sausage and which I was assured was already cooked. We got three to the 500g, so rather larger than Manor Green Road sausages. They came wrapped in brown paper, something I now only come across in the UK in ITV3 period drama. Buy onions and cooking tomatoes, that is to say the big ones, more than two inches across.

Heat some (new to us) soya oil in a saucepan. Add about four medium onions, coarsely diced and fry for a bit. Add two large tomatoes, coarsely diced. Stir in maybe a level desert spoon of dried basil. Bring back to heat and simmer for about half an hour. Slice two sausages, about 0.5 cm to the slice, and add them. Simmer for a further ten minutes, to the point where there is not much loose water left.

Serve with a baguette from the Murray Street French baker and a green salad, without dressing. To drink, tap water and a Niagaran gewürztraminer, from Strewn, via the LCBO, of which more in due course, both without ice.

Very good it all was too. Garlic sausage meaty, with a good strong flavour. Not as lumpy & chewy as a kabanos, but more like one than the sort of garlic sausage one usually gets in the UK.

PS: wikipedia tells me today that kabanosy should be made from a young, male potato fed pig. Despite having eaten plenty of them in my time, I don't think I ever knew this about them.

Reference 1: http://www.sausagekitchen.ca/index.html.

Reference 2: http://bennysbistro.ca/bakery/. The baguettes which sit between the ordinary ones and the full on artisinale ones are very good, as was this morning's raisin pastry. A thin variation on the Chelsea bun theme.

Reference 3: http://www.lcbo.com/content/lcbo/en.html#.VERIR_nF_uI.

Reference 4: http://www.strewnwinery.com/english/home/default.asp.

Trolley 11

Another one that got away, not even properly inspected, never mind returned, on account of the light but cold drizzle.

Snapped at the all-important hub of the Ottawa bus system known as Lincoln Fields, so it is perhaps time to comment on said bus system.

It has taken a few rides to get the hang of things, but I think we now know enough for our holiday maker purposes.

As in London, you are encouraged to buy in bulk, either with their version of an Oyster card or with some kind of season ticket. As holiday makers, we have settled for buying tickets in sixes, which come in sheets rather like large stamps, and two of which are usually needed for a bus ride. But you get more for your two in that the driver gives you a time stamped receipt - called a transfer - for your stamps which is good for any other bus for up to 90 minutes.

An important part of the system is called the transit way which is buses mainly running on dedicated roads and which serve in much the same way as a metro does in other big towns. And including a handy for us east-west artery running from Mackenzie King downtown to Lincoln Fields in the western suburbs.

One feature of the system of which one needs to be aware is that the interchanges on which places like Lincoln Fields sit are very big places. What might look like a short walk on the map might turn out to be a long walk on the ground, working one's way across the various bridges and roads making up the interchange. Good plan to carry a compass, although in my case the compass I carefully shipped out with has been mislaid, probably in the now returned hire car.

Another is that Ottawa is in Ontario with one bus system and that Hull-Gatineau across the river is in Quebec with another. Some of the Ottawa buses just about make it across the river to serve the large federal complex there but that is about it. The two systems seems to be quite separate, although a plus of the Quebec one is that they offer a pdf version of their network which I can download onto my telephone. Haven't been able to find any such thing for Ontario yet, an issue for me as my telephone, clever though it is, is not very good at Internet, with my pay-as-you-go contract with Talkmobile being decidedly limited. Maybe I will treat myself to a proper contract with a better provider when I get back home.

On the other hand, all the bus drivers we have dealt with have been pleasant and helpful. Passers-by whom one asks directions have been pleasant, but not always helpful as they do not always know their around any better than oneself.

Reference 1: http://www.octranspo1.com/.

Reference 2: http://www.sto.ca/index.php?id=2&L=fr.

PS: the Canadians have been rather imaginative in the way that they implement the dual language requirement, with some public signage being very neat and economical (with words). I must try to take a picture of a good example of what I mean.

Daffodil?

When I first saw this, I thought daffodil. A bit out-of-season, but then there do seem to be lots of flowers having a last go before winter kicks in here in Lower Town.

But actually, BH tells me, some sort of lilly.

The power of google

Woke up this morning thinking about the way that the brain computes solid objects and shapes from edges and lines. And then got onto edges and lines which do not compute into a sensible object, from where I associated to a three pronged affair that I first came across at school.

So once up, I ask google for 'trick geometrical objects' and find out in seconds that the three pronged affair is called a devil's fork, not to be confused with the place of the same name in South Carolina. I ask google for devil's forks and come up with lots of images of same, although not the particular one that I remember from school. I include one of them left, with the offending fork being top right.

Along the way I also come across an outfit called shutterstock, who offer images of all kinds of things, at a price, and I was pleased to find that they offer a huge number of good quality images of shopping trolleys; maybe I will buy one of them one day. In the meantime, they made me think that the whole business of images must be a happy hunting ground for lawyers.

So, I, with little in the way of image manipulation skills, am able to take images from shutterstock without paying, albeit not of the quality that I might need for their inclusion in commercial grade art work, but not without ticking a box which says that I promise not to cheat. Presumably, if I went on to publish such an image under my own name, perhaps on this blog, they could send their lawyers after me, through my email address with google. Would google cooperate with them? Would any case stand up in court? In the Channel Islands perhaps?

Acknowledgement for illustration, which was not taken from shutterstock: Weisstein, Eric W. 'Impossible Fork'. From MathWorld, a Wolfram web resource.

Reference 1: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ImpossibleFork.html.

Reference 2: http://www.shutterstock.com/index-in.mhtml.