Archive for the Category ◊ Urban Life ◊
The focus isn’t bad considering I’m on a cruising boat and it’s windy. I should’ve brought the monopod, but I haven’t gotten used to carting it around yet — it lives in the back of my car. [View Larger]
As with any large city, New York has different sides and I like to explore them all. From the gritty urban landscape to the oases of green spaces to the tight-knit communities and neighbourhoods, I think of large cities in the developed world as having more in common than those cities compared with the small towns within the same political border. For example, the city of Quesnel, BC (pop. 10,000) has more in common with the small towns of Australia than it does with Vancouver, 7.5 hours to the south. Unlike in Quesnel, people in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and Calgary are accustomed to seeing homeless people, paying for parking, and expecting to never see again the umbrella left behind in a coffee shop two days before. Such are the urban realities.
In terms of size, New York City, comprised of five boroughs, has 8.3 million people compared to 5.55 million in the Greater Toronto Area, comprised of six former municipalities. Both are the most populated cities in the country. In the USA and Canada, this is as urban as it gets.
Yesterday it was a train ride, and today it was a long and leisurely brunch followed by a parade of zombies through the streets of Toronto. (We like to mix things up here at gailatlarge.com!)
http://www.torontozombiewalk.ca
The Toronto Zombie Walk is in its sixth year of parading zombies through the streets of the city in search of brains, and apparently every year the numbers grow. This was my first Zombie Walk — last year Arliin and I had brunch together that day and I was all set to photograph the zombies but by the time we finished brunch I was feeling like a zombie myself and I chose to go home for a nap instead.
This year I decided to walk with our little group of zombies and zombie support staff (makeup people, photographers, videographers, bag handlers) and capture some of the creative costumes milling around. You can get an idea of the size of the crowd gathered at Trinity Bellwoods Park from my cameraphone picture in the previous post — it’s difficult to estimate the numbers, but I’m guessing there must’ve been at least 1,000 people at the beginning of the walk.
I missed the zombies at Nuit Blanche, but Jan says today there was a lot more creativity and variety. Here’s what comes up in a Flickr tag search.
Some articles:
JPG Magazine: Photo Essay: Toronto Zombie Walk
Toronto Sun: Zombies take to the streets
Toronto Star: Afternoon of the (nerdy) undead
For the sake of those amongst us without the stomach for blood and guts and gore, I’m only going to post this one group pic and direct you to the rest of them via links. If you click, don’t say I didn’t warn you!
While Birds was hunched over a computer monitor at home working (Columbus Day isn’t a statutory holiday in the USA), Fleecie and I spent some time around Central Park yesterday and stalked animals and butterflies from the human side of the fencing. The sky was a bit overcast, but the temperature was just right for strolling around the Reservoir and pointing the camera at spots of autumn colour.
Interesting financial times we’re in, I must say. It’s not what I was thinking when I shot the famous Honest Ed’s sign at Bathurst and Bloor last night, but maybe the concept of honesty in business sat at the subconscious level when I chose to shoot only part of the sign. I happened to be around the Annex because I was selling my October metropass to an Italian couchsurfer who’s here on a working visa, and when I met up with him at Starbucks I recognised another CSer there and we got to chatting about the Naomi Klein talk they’d just attended on her latest book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
Tonight I joked about the markets over dinner (because it’s otherwise rather depressing) and how it’s a good time to be too poor to hold any stocks and too young to worry overly much about the state of one’s pension.
(And would you believe I was joking about it over a flaming grill filled with meat… yes, I was at the Korean Grill House for the second time in TWO DAYS! The waiter even recognised me! Vegetarians can skewer me now.)
If the thought of market upheavals and the retreat of summer has got you down and feeling grey, here’s a bit of colour I found around along Bathurst Street across from the Honest Ed’s sign:
And if you’re still feeling rather lacklustre, here’s a dose of kitty love, or at least kitty sucking-up:
Scramble from Sam Javanrouh on Vimeo.
A time-lapse video by Sam Javanrouh (Top Left Pixel) of the launch day of Toronto’s first scramble intersection at Yonge and Dundas. Or check out the HD version on Vimeo.
On Friday night Eliza took me to a small place in Kerrisdale with excellent sushi and more than your average sushi menu choices. For example, these tofu rolls come in various flavours including miso and spicy. I like the way they do their rice — it doesn’t overpower the rolls and lets the flavours of the fish and vegetables stand out.
Highly recommended, if you’re all about the food rather than ambience and service. Get there before the dinner rush or you’ll wait a long time.
Melissa, Kermit, and I lost track of the run route and ended up circling the entire perimeter of Stanley Park. We even double-backed a few times, so we did much more than 10k. Yay for us!
Just a quick post to say the longer version (with a video) is coming up, but here we wanted to thank all of our fantastic sponsors who helped us raise over $700 towards cancer research (final count to be announced), far exceeding my goal of $500. THANK YOU! The sponsor list will be posted later, too, with links for those who have websites.
Saturday: wedding at Jericho Beach
Sunday: Terry Fox Run
Looks like a perfect weekend for a wedding and walking around Stanley Park to raise money for cancer research.
Just a friendly reminder that it’s not too late to sponsor me! I’m very nearly to my goal!
For those who’ve never been to Vancouver, here’s an aerial shot I took nine days ago that’ll give you an idea of the lay of the (so-called Lotus-)land. This is one of the better aerials I have of Vancouver — you can see the surrounding areas quite clearly and its location in relation to the nearest mountain ranges.
Click for some notes in Flash, and if you’re in Flickr, feel free to add your own notes.
images & text © 2008 All Rights Reserved by Gail Edwin-Fielding.
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