Willfully ignoring the construction chaos just a few feet away, I bought some chicken stew from a local bakery/deli and ate dinner by the statue of Pope John Paul II. Afterwards I took out my camera and shot the scene around me with the 50mm f/1.8. For the past few years since I moved here, I’ve been continually impressed with how well-kept the area is around the statue. There are always flowers in front and candles are often burning into the night.
What is it about trains that make me stop and take photos? Is it the Old World charm? A nod to the power of the Industrial Revolution? The singularity of a journey on one track with no traffic or real intersections? The steadiness, the speed low enough to take in surroundings (excluding the TGV in France and bullet trains in Japan, of course)? All of the above?
Whatever it is, I sure do take a lot of train photos. These three were all shot on film in Wakefield, Quebec, last Saturday.
This is (one of) the last steam-powered train left in Canada and there are only 1-2 scenic rail departures a day, so we were very lucky to be near the tracks at all when it went by, but we were doubly lucky to have cameras at the ready. Thanks, H!
I completely forgot last week was my fourth anniversary of moving into this neighbourhood, until today when I heard the singing. I moved to Roncesvalles Village on June 1, 2007. My friend Arliin helped me move and told me that locals call it “Roncy” for short. She said I’ll really like it here, and she was right.
The first Sunday of June is when I hear the singing (if I’m around), a group of voices singing in Polish. It’s quite a large crowd that gathers, but the only sound you’ll hear is the singing, there’s no chatter. They go from one house to another in a processional. I don’t know how the houses are selected, but for the last four times I’ve observed them in my area it’s been the same houses. (Post from 2007.) This time there was a girl handing out pamphlets about Katyn, and probably also the plane crash that claimed the Polish president and nearly a hundred others a couple of months ago.
I went back to my archives and found some video clips from the 2007 I hadn’t uploaded (I don’t think Flickr had the video feature back then).
I have a category in my sidebar for ‘Local Colour’ which was originally a subcategory of ‘Expat Life’. I was writing about what it was like to live in semi-rural Pennsylvania and my observations of little eccentricities like gigantic inflatable crabs on seafood restaurants nowhere near the sea. Now that I’m not living there anymore, I wasn’t sure what to do with ‘Local Colour’, and decided recently to promote it from subcategory and expand it to include local colour from wherever I live.
I have a mental list of places I need to visit while I live here, and Communist’s Daughter is one of them. It’s a tiny bar that’s popular with the locals and within walking distance of my own neighbourhood. I haven’t been there yet because I’m not really a barfly, and the fact that it’s small and often jam-packed is somewhat of a deterrent. Apparently the only way to get a seat is to go early on a weeknight. Sometime this summer, maybe on the way home from work, I’ll wander over there and check it out myself. In the meantime I found this video online, shot by my friend Sai, that’ll give you an idea of why it’s so popular.
What made me think of this place was a conversation from last night, which turned out to be an unexpected evening with documentary filmmakers. What began as a key drop-off at a pub (I was lending my car) turned out to be seven hours of commingling with doc people, which for me is always interesting. Photography and videography are bedfellows, and the driving forces behind documentary films are the same for photojournalism: non-fiction storytelling. While I do far less story-telling here than I have in the past, in person I tell more stories than ever — mainly because as I get older there are more stories to tell. Thus the evening grew longer and longer…
The gathering at Pauper’s Pub in the Annex was a monthly meeting for doc people, and from there Jan and I went to a coffee bar a few doors down to meet another documentary filmmaker. The Green Beanery closed at 10pm (it used to be a bank — check out The Vault), so she suggested we head over to a place further west called Three Speed, which was hopping. The back patio was the only place left with seating, but it was perfect for a spring evening — spacious yet cozy.
For someone who claims not to be a barfly, last night was practically a pub crawl.
I had been in town barely a few hours, only long enough to dine at Kirin Restaurant (City Square) for a fancy dim sum, when Eliza took me to False Creek to photograph around Science World and the Olympic Village area. We needed to walk off the food coma. There was a group of people standing at the railing over the water, but we had no idea what they were looking for. Someone walked by and all I heard was “whale” but I didn’t think they were referring to one located in the water beneath us.
I saw the media choppers circling above False Creek, so no doubt they had the best views of the whale.
Then all of a sudden it appeared not more than 20 metres away from us and I was so shocked by the sight (and closeness) of it and startled by Eliza’s shrieking that by the time I tried to take a photo it had submerged. I stayed on the Olympic Village side of False Creek and watched the whale surface about five or six times. These are the best three photos I could manage with the wrong kind of lens (I needed a telephoto for this) and a bunch of cropping.
I’ve seen some rather absurd things today — a house being towed through Georgia Strait and a whale in False Creek — and the day’s not even over yet. Who knows what I’ll see next?
I have a thing for railroad tracks, although I don’t really have a collection to match (yet). More location scouting last Sunday drew me to these, near the reception venue. I’m hoping to convince the bride and groom (and the weather gods) that this is a good spot for some photos this weekend.
I was driving south along Highway 404 from Markham when I spotted spires jutting into the sky, right in the middle of a new development. Of course, we had to stop and get a closer look! The development is so new that the roads aren’t even finished yet. The whole scene looked bizarre, I had to find out the story.
The cathedral is called Cathedral of the Transfiguration, and it’s not a cathedral anymore — the last service was in 2006. It’s still incomplete!
Excerpt from Wikipedia:
The Cathedral of the Transfiguration is a Slovak Byzantine Rite Roman Catholic former cathedral located in the community of Victoria Square in Markham, Ontario, Canada. The cathedral was built in a rural area north of the city of Toronto and was built to serve Slovak Catholics throughout the Greater Toronto Area. The Cathedral was conceived and funded by Stephen B. Roman, a Slovak immigrant to Canada who had built up the Denison Mines corporation. Roman both funded and designed the building, modeling the structure on the church in Velky Ruskov, the Slovak village he was raised in. The cathedral was built on a donated portion of his Romandale estate.
Among its features is the world’s largest three bell carillon, with the French made bells weighing 32,000 pounds, and 300 cm diameter. The mosaics are reputed to contain about 5 million pieces. The cathedral was built to hold 1000 worshipers serving a community of about 5000 Byzantine Rite Catholics in the GTA and 35,000 across Canada. The central tower rises 63 metres (about 20 storeys) and is topped by a gold onion dome. The church was designed by Donald Buttress, a renowned architect whose claim to fame is overhauling Westminster Abbey.[1] It is a significant landmark east of the 404 highway.
It’s a shame this magnificent building isn’t finished (although neither is the Sagrada Familia, under construction since 1882), and off-limits to everyone.
I’ve spoken about the dialect of northeast Pennsylvania before, but now I’ve got examples! I heard about this YouTube video when I was driving to Philadelphia last weekend and listening to the radio station David and I always tuned into, besides NPR. The DJ mentioned that his friend made this video poking fun of the local dialect, and I just now remembered it and went digging for it on YouTube.
You probably won’t find it amusing unless you’ve heard it from the natives, but I can tell you it is SO SO SO true. (Helma, back me up here! You say “dooper”!) David slipped into this dialect now and again, but never for very long since he actually liked words… and not mashed up word combos. He was pretty good with accents: Yiddish (his grandmother spoke Yiddish), Boston, New York City, even Long Island (his cousins lived there), but he never failed to crack me up with the Heynabonics.
One of David’s best days during his illness was September 10, 2005, when he had enough strength to attend a model airplane fly-in and airshow in Waymart, a visit to nearby St. Tikhon’s Monastery in South Canaan, and tuck into the barbecue at Kundla’s Open Pit BBQ.
He wrote about St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Monastery, founded in 1905, but I wanted to share a video I shot of the bellringers and the ethereal sounds that surrounded us while we were on the grounds. The volume of the bells took us by surprise, but once we realised where they were, we were struck by the quality of the ringing, the echoes that reverberated through the countryside air. I filmed in a circle, to try and capture some of it.
At the end of the clip is the familiar sight of David with his bright orange 207 CAP hat. Even when it was worn and faded, he still loved to wear it.
I was fascinated by the monks and wanted to photograph the movement of the robes as they walked, but I was too shy to ask if I could take their picture. I tried following one at a distance, but he was too quick for my lens. Maybe I can find a local monastery and do a shoot there.
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