St. John’s

A lively exuberant city that stretches around a busy port, visible from my hotel window.  Great restaurants, nice hotels. French Bistro one night for dinner, a short walk from our hotel, mercifully along the waterfront; the city climbs up from the docks and the hills are steep. St John’s is an old city; its beginnings likely rooted in seasonal fishing camps in the 1500’s. It grew from there with visits from the English, Portuguese and French in the 15th and 16th centuries.  The buildings are old in the central district, but not that old because the homes were so tightly packed that fires razed the city a number of times, the final huge fire occurring in the late 19th century.

The city is famous for, among other things, JellyBean row; not an actual place, but a style of architecture-brightly colored wood-frame row houses, either Victorian or Edwardian in style.  Rules dictate that the owners can choose any color they want as long as it is different from adjacent dwellings.

But there is truly a sense of a unique culture in Newfoundland, described at length by our tour guide, tied to the place and its rhythms.  Socially there are baymen and townies with all sorts of feuds and stereotypes.  But, even more than that, you can sense when you talk with the natives that they are rooted in the natural routines dictated by the ocean and the seasons, even those who are not part of the fishing industry.

We toured the major sites around St. John one afternoon–Cape Spear (the easternmost point of Canada and North America, actually, if you don’t include Greenland.) The Cape was impressive, windswept and wild–an old lighthouse with living quarters preserved as a museum and a new lighthouse still beaming. Mist and fog added atmosphere. I discovered that Signal Hill was also visible from my hotel room window–a little boxlike structure in photos on the hilltop over the harbor, the place where Marconi received the first wireless telegraph. Quidi Vidi distills beer from glacial water thousands of years old. We also stopped at a small fishing village which, like everything else, looked as if it was colored with bright crayons.  But a huge fog bank hovered in the distance, a result of the Gulf Stream meeting the Labrador Current.

Our hotel was filled with people competing in a Power Lifting event. These guys were huge and descended on the breakfast buffet like a swarm of locusts.  I saw one young fellow balancing a stack of four freshly baked croissants in one hand while the other held a plate filled with eggs, sausage, bacon, potatoes and waffles.  I flashed back to Kalimantan, Indonesia where one of the orangutans, at feeding time, sped off with three bananas in his mouth.