A Turtle Without Borders

Home.

      As I turned the corner onto Rue Drolet in the dark carrying eleven pounds of flour, my camera and a bag of books, I softly said to myself, “I’m almost home.”  I had to laugh as I had only been here two days.  I am beginning to feel like a turtle without borders; anywhere I am is where my shelter is.  I like that I can wake and see a new landscape and instantly know that it is my home, no element of strangeness.  That morning I woke to this view.

   






     Montreal has street after street with brick walk-up flats.  Street corners are often reserved for little stores.  I can see four large churches by walking a short distance one way or another.  My closest grocery store is of the smallest variety and is very well-stocked.  A café, bakery, brasserie, post office, pharmacy, two sushi restaurants and one French one, a shoe repair shop, laundromat, beauty saloon, bar, metro station, clothing store, shoe store and nursery are just a few of the places within a couple of blocks of me.  This is city planning at it’s best. 

 Shortly after I turned the corner of Rue Drolet, I put down the flour and the books in the snow and took a moment to photograph this Santa in the window of the only apartment that I pass. 

     Each evening a few more lights and wreaths appear.  Although I see Christmas being celebrated, the neighborhood is nicely mixed.  There are certainly Muslims.  Yesterday I attended a holiday party and program at an elementary school and rode the metro with another group of school children.  Many races and nationalities were represented.  Almost everyone speaks French and English and some know even another language. 

     Oddly enough, not knowing French doesn’t make me feel out-of-place.  The sound of it is so beautiful.  I’m finally catching a few words.  One sales lady and I bantered back and forth exchanging words.  I now know how to say, “lavable en machine" for "machine washable".  Who knows when I will need this again?

     Certainly the language of a smile is understood everywhere.

     Today is Friday.  I have been here three and a half days.  The first day I did not venture very far, but I did begin navigating the metro system.  Large areas of Montreal city proper are connected underground by metro trains and passageways.  There are even large shopping centers underground.  Yesterday as I walked through a long brick tunnel a musician began playing his horn, the sound echoing up the hall in a very melancholy way.  The beauty of it brought me to tears here in the metro.

 




    The metro trains themselves arrive amazingly regularly.  One waits only a few minutes and then must board quickly.  No lolly gagging here.  Even with all of the slush tracked in from the streets, the floors were kept fairly clean.  On board people talk, read papers or use their cell phones.  Last year in Washington D.C. it was a very different experience.  Silence often reigned and few passengers made eye-contact on metro rides.











       The Canadian Centre for Architecture was one of the first places that I visited.  On the way there I saw this huge truck hauling construction debris trying to navigate a tight corner and then plow through a snow pile.  I have been impressed with the many trucks and construction crews working in difficult weather and confined city spaces.

The truck just came from the back of this building.

Plowing on.

     

      

   
   














     The peace of the Architectural Centre was so inviting.  The current exhibit documents the planning and building of the post World War II communities of  Chandigarh, Punjab, India and an expansion of Casablanca, Morocco.

Central Hall of the Centre for Architecture

    Leaving the Centre, I retraced my steps and stopped to take photos in a Cabot park surrounding the Atwater Metro.  Most of the sculptures honored women except the one twenty-five-foot tall sculpture of a man.  (I could not read who he was due to snow, but later found out it was the Italian born English explorer, John Cabot.)

Sculptures, Oh My

John Cabot,  sculpture installed in 1935.

      The parks are not the only place one finds sculptures or beauty.  The next photos were taken a few blocks away from my home on St.Denis Street.

 

     Now my bike friends will appreciate the next photos.  Yesterday Kara pointed out a broad path for bikes that runs all the way to town.  She said that even in the winter one will see bike riders pedaling by in the snow.  The first bike in the photo had been ridden recently evidenced by one day's snow on the seat.  The next bike maybe not so recently ridden.  I did see one bike rider later negotiating the slush through traffic and counted 30 bikes chained to railings and balconies in a one block residential section!  Surely a testament to a bike culture.

      Counting bikes I spotted this red sticker on a bike chained to a fence.  The sticker actually was produced for a few years in Chicago and is no longer available.  However, if you go to this blog site, you will enjoy the blog:  http://1lesscarnews.blogspot.ca/

ONE LESS CAR (SIGN ON A BIKE)

      I was walking to the big fruit and vegetable market, Jean Talon, during the morning snowstorm.   When I arrived I noticed this quite charming sign regarding dogs.

Thank you, leave your dog outside!

     The market is large for a winter market.  There is an area for outside summer booths.  I shopped for dinner and also stopped to have a cup of coffee with milk.  I choose the booths where I shopped by which vendors smiled the most and seemed most friendly to their customers.  I bought brussels sprouts, lemons, garlic, green peppers, broccoli, mushrooms, olives, capers and pears (for dessert).  Doesn't feel like winter to find such bounty!  

Entrance

View from the entrance to the market

One of three egg vendors

Oranges... did I need that label?

Wow!

Time to prepare dinner!

First Day in Montreal

Bonjour!

   






      Surely I will learn some French here.  Few signs, newspapers or books are in English.  I stopped to get in out of the cold at a little coffee shop where I could sit and watch people.  I practiced reading French in the only paper available.  Earlier I found a bookstore with one small section in English.









     As I sat and read it began to snow large soft flakes into the - 4 degrees Fahrenheit air.

   








      I headed off to the Metro system to find my way home.  This is the block where I am staying.  Montreal is very civilized.  The city is responsible for plowing roads and plowing the sidewalks.  They also plant all of the trees to shade the roads and walkways.  We walked to a big market this morning for cheese and produce.  Walking was easy on these nicely plowed sidewalks.















 



      I am staying in what I think of as a flat with a most wonderful family.  The front room is a small yoga studio.  Below is a photo of my "home".  Notice the outside stairs.  These go to a second flat upstairs. More tomorrow!

A Mechanical Failure From Which a Moon Rose

     I suppose that I have been lucky.  No travel delays until yesterday.  I wandered about the airport, where I was stranded, and eventually found a bay with rocking chairs looking out towards the snow-dusted Green Mountains of Vermont to the east.

    I’m a sucker for rocking chairs and airports. I arrived by bus traveling from Boston to Montreal to the news that our replacement driver to take us on to Montreal from Vermont had a mechanical failure on his bus somewhere north.  We would be stranded for five or so hours at the Burlington Airport.  Off I went walking about, exploring the floors and views.

     As a child of four, I celebrated my birthday in the Sky Room Restaurant at the Denver, Colorado Airport.  I remember the day clearly as my finger got squished in-between the table and my high chair and I wept. From the corner of my memory eye, I see a plane through the tall window moving by and at precisely that moment a little cake being set in front of me.  Crossing of loves: planes and cake. Once upon a time I wanted to be a stewardess on planes.  Good thing that my family from all sides has short genes.  By all airlines I was judged too much of a short-stuff to be of use on a plane.  I doubt "pilot" would have been available to me either.

      I went to college thinking about studying marketing in the hopes of one day working for an airline.  I just wanted to travel and be around that jet-fuel smell.  In the 1980’s and again some years later there was a study asking people their favorite smells.  Over time there was a shift from natural scents, like roses and fall leaves, to the smell of chemicals like those of Playdoh and oil on rain-washed roads.  I must have been ahead of the time.  So here I am at an airport watching for planes when I got a little surprise.       

  Off above the hills a little sliver of moon rose.  And rose. 

The lights on the runway began twinkling like Christmas lights laid out for our pleasure for the holidays and the sky turned a deep satisfying blue.

 I felt quite lucky to have gotten a mechanical failure from which a moon rose.

  

Catching Up with A Few Photos

   I've loved traveling through Wisconsin and Boston on my way to Montreal.  Here are a few photos to highlight these places.

Cemetery on Lake Michigan

Old Industrial Buildings in Racine

Pup in Her Coat Checking the Route

One of Many Dairy Farms in Wisconsin

Beautiful Fieldstone Farm House, West Bend County

De-icer at Work Spraying Plane Wings (Cold Job)

View of Boston on a
Snowy Arrival

Street in South Boston, Most Friendly Neighborhood

Molly's Icy Stairs

Uh Oh.  Got a Shovel?

Chicago Museums

Self-Portrait, Vivian Maier

      Vivian Maier was a nanny with a secret life as a photographer.  Her mostly black and white photos of Chicago and its people were only recently discovered in a storage unit after her death.  She’ll never know of her fame.  Here is a link to her work and her story: http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/January-2011/Vivian-Maier-Street-Photographer/index.php?cp=3&cparticle=2&si=20&siarticle=1#galleryanc

  

This Photo Was My Screen Saver for Awhile!

       Dianne and I perused her exhibit at The Chicago History Museum.  Vivian was unafraid of taking photos of people, any age and any social status.  She took hundreds of thousands of black and white film photos.  Many she never even developed.  I was curious how she took photos.  In this era when we can take dozens of photos in a moment, she was quite careful with her resources.  She had to change the film in her Roleiflex after only twelve shots.  Vivian must have taken her time with each shot.  Only occasionally is there an obvious rapid sequence when she was trying to catch just the right juxtaposition of people or shapes.

     One of my favorite photos of this display was of an elderly exhausted newspaper vendor facing the camera sitting on a box.  Next to him back facing the camera is of a heavy-set woman, thighs overlapping her small seat on a fire hydrant.  I can’t help but wonder what words passed between Vivian and her subjects.  They couldn’t have all been pleased with her frank frames of life.

       An Ebony Fashion Show Exhibit at the same museum displayed another side of Chicago’s life.  Ebony magazine hosted fashion shows over a fifty-year period ending in 2007.  All of the models were African-American.  The Exhibit displayed some of the dresses from those groundbreaking shows.  Before I realized that I was not supposed to take photos, I took this shot:

      The outfits were stunning.  Photographic documentation conveyed the excitement of the models moving down the runway, proud, cocky and ebony.  Wonderful exhibit.  I could easily see this exhibit again. 

     Chicago museums could keep one busy for a long time.  Dianne had worked at the Field Museum on displays over a ten-year period.  We toured a new exhibit of old artifacts from the Chicago Fair of 1893.  Dianne pointed out how the museum adroitly addressed the shift from “collecting people” to the current more sensitive cultural attitudes.  The 1893 fair brought indigenous people from around the world and displayed them and their artifacts in such a way that they would intentionally appear to be less intelligent or artistic.  I think that I tended to assume that museums were static.  Proven quite wrong.

     I scurried through the animal exhibits admiring the dioramas and technical skill of the taxidermy work. 

     The Field is on my list for a museum worth visiting at a snail’s pace.  Hope to return.   

Is the Field Museum on Your List to Visit?

Baha'i House of Worship in Willamette

North American Baha'i House of Worship

     Rock, Paper and Scissors.  Choosing a religion or a branch of a religion can be like playing rock, paper and scissors.  One religion is like a solid inflexible rock; that one looks inviting on paper and another one can be cut to fit.  Growing up in America we have so many choices.  We try one religion; dabble in another, read these prayers and those meditation practices.  Pick up a little theory here, weigh this tradition there and try to think this out logically.  We are free to decide what fits us.  We are free to play rock, paper, and scissors with faith. 

     The Baha’i House of Worship in Willamette has nine sides and nine doors welcoming people of all the known nine world religions.  I visited on an excruciatingly cold day entering the warm serene hall.  I paused to say a prayer for Gary.  The space invites prayer and meditation.  Like the seven other Baha’i Houses of Worship across the world each is based on the belief of the oneness of God, hence the open invitation to all faiths.  One doesn’t have to choose which faith.  Everyone “wins”.  No game playing.  Baha’is believe in progressive revelation with one God who gave the world many messengers.

      

    The intricately carved walls of the Baha’i House of Worship include symbols from every religion.  The walls were built using forms filled with concrete and white quartz rocks.  The entire façade was renovated in the last few years, a challenging task.  

     There are currently seven Baha’i Houses of Worship around the world.  The Chilean House of Worship is the newest one being built.  (http://templo.bahai.cl/concepto_eng.htm)  Do look it up.  You will find it most striking.

Lotus Baha'i House of Worship 

      Last year as I wandered through Heathrow Airport in London, I came up short at the above mural.  The Lotus!  The Baha'i Lotus Temple in India has been visited by millions of people.

   

     When I moved to Walla Walla, I made friends with Jan.  She was a parent in a parent co-op where I taught.  She seemed to make decisions and offer comments from some well of wisdom.  As we became friends I realized that she was a Baha’i, a faith that I had not heard of.  Over the years I learned more from her and others in the Baha’i community.  Eventually I became a Baha’i.  This was my first visit to a Baha’i House of Worship.  This was a cherished day of this journey.