June 12 for real: Toronto on foot

In the morning, I met Bruce Bell, who is, seriously, Mr. Toronto. He has had himself declared unpaid curator of so many historic hotels and other buildings that he has a different badge to put on every time he crosses a threshhold. Not to mention the plaques around town that have his name on them because he got them placed.

Why? What's so great about him? My God, Martha, he knows everything.

A walking tour of Toronto with Bruce is a kaleidoscope of history, architecture, pop culture, politics, folklore, survival skills, trivia, gossip, eulogy, design, esthetics and ice cream. He'll point out the biggies, like the CN Tower and the Rogers Centre next door, where I once watched a baseball game through the Rogers' open roof from the transparent floor of the CN's observation deck, but he'll make sure you see the whimsical sculpture and tell you the artist's name. He'll explain where the lake shore used to be before it was filled in, and where the train yards have been reclaimed for more amusing venues.

And he'll remind you when to look up. Anyone who's learned anything about urban architecture knows that most of the coolest stuff is way above eye level.

Like the Ontario College of Art & Design building that looks like some kind of weird gift package on stilts. It is, quite simply, a box (with windows) way up in the air, held up by brightly colored supports and reached by a sloping tunnel presumably containing stairs. It could only be an art school, am I right?

And then Bruce pops us into Malabar costume shop. It's truly overwhelming. You have never seen so many costumes in one place. They're grouped on racks with labels like a bookstore's or library's: Clowns, roaring '20s, can-can girls, military ... and on and on and on. Rent or buy. "This place is CRAZY at Halloween," Bruce confirms.

After taking in the grand twin arcs of the newest City Hall and the massive mall called Eaton Centre, we enter a former Toronto Dominion bank that's now a hotel, the Suites at One King West. It's grand and ornate (Bruce says, "They wanted you to look at all this and think, 'My money is SAFE here'") and still delightfully bank-y inside, with what was once the largest vault in Canada still staring sternly up at visitors from its showcase at the bottom of a flight of steps.




Another gorgeous and grand old edifice is nearby: the Bank of Commerce building, once referred to as Canada's Empire State building for its magnificence. It's opulent and gilded and massive, and Bruce says even Europeans crane their necks and goggle at the faraway, palatial ceiling.

It had an equally gorgeous sibling, but that one was knocked down to make way for Canada Trust Bank. It's hard to resent a sleek black skyscraper created by Mies van der Rohe, who also did the Seagram's building in New York. Whether you like the starkly clean lines and shiny surfaces or not, you have to concede that the effect is slick, sophisticated and heavy in the way expensive and well-made things are always heavy.

(Even lightweight top-end electronic gadgets will always hark back to that, when you close a compartment or press a button and get that solid, dense, satisfying click.)



It's also not without grace. Round glass bowls of yellow daisies sit at every corner of the ponderous marble teller counter. Bruce points them out and explains that that is not decoration -- it is design. Mies dictated their specific color and placement. ("Listen, the building's done, but only if you remember that every day you have to get bunches of daisies -- yellow daisies -- and put them in fishbowls at every corner of the counter." "I'm sorry, Hoskins, did our world-famous architect just demand that we bring the bank flowers every day? In fishbowls?" He did, and to this day, it gets them. The have a standing order with a grower. Maybe with fish, too.)

The old CEO's office, now used as a meeting space, is very "Mad Men," with its posh, '50s-looking furnishings (they're so good, no one dares change them), stunning view of the city and largest single-piece wooden table in the world (sez Bruce). It's a conference table so massive it had to be helicoptered into place and the roof of the building assembled over it. All I could think was that it must have come from one hell of a tree.



Bruce pointed out the King Edward Hotel, scene of many celebrity bivouacs. Windows in a suite at the top of the building were once looked out of by the Beatles on their first trip to Toronto, and what they saw below them was a surging mob of fans in the street. John Lennon returned there with Yoko years later for the famed Bed-In for Peace. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor scandalized the city by shacking up at the King Edward before they were married, though the far corner of the Sovereign dining room downstairs is where Burton popped the question and brought the ring bling to dazzle Liz.

OK, I'm starting to go all tabloid. It's truly frightening how easily that comes. I should also mention that we saw, I think, three out of four or possibly even four out of five Toronto city halls, only one of which is still used as City Hall (you can't fight it, but you can move it), many other distinguished old buildings and the St. Lawrence Market -- which incorporates the facade of the first city hall as an inward-facing wall. All the while, Bruce was dropping in tidbits like, "Queen Street is blocks and blocks of trendy shopping. It's well-known and an icon. If you say to friends, 'Let's do Queen Street tonight,' everyone knows what you're suggesting and what that'll be like. And it's descriptive too, in a way everyone immediately recognizes. As in, 'Oh, she's very Queen Street.'"

And, as we passed an unfortunate, ragged woman sitting against a building babbling to herself and banging two rocks together, "She's an heiress. Her family has a fortune, but they don't care, just let her sit here and bang her rocks."

There are a lot of ragged people in Toronto. The city has the same homelessness/panhandling/mental health issues most major American cities have. I find this both reassuring and profoundly depressing. If Toronto has this problem, we're not alone, and it must be a hard nut to crack. On the other hand, if Toronto has this problem, that means even the Canadians can't solve it, with their well-developed social saftey net and generally more inclusive, less Darwinian attitude toward the impaired. Maybe there is no way to solve it.

I also glimpsed the famed PATH, the network of passages and stairs that links most big downtown buildings to most others, so that Torontonians can get all over the place without having to go outside. You make your way down to big pedestrian concourses -- their retail makes them look like sunken shopping malls --and move from building to building to stay out of the cold and snow. The weather may be bad here in the winter, but Toronto has gone a long way toward making weather optional.

For dinner, I went right to the top: 360, the spinning (verrrrrry slowly) restaurant up the CN Tower. The food was good; the view was outstanding. You just sit there with your wine and your girlled salmon, and you watch Toronto rotate slowly beneath you. You can pick out your hotel or the theater you've gone to, admire the lake, watch planes take off and land at the little city airport and watch the sun sink and the lights come on. Unfortunately, my visit coincided with a train-wreck evening that left people standing and waiting for their tables for over half an hour. Getting into the tower is like getting into Ft. Knox, so it seemed a bit much for people with reservations to have to wait so long with nary a bench or chair to take a load off. The maitre d' assured the cranky that this was absolutely not normal.

But that view ... makes you forget ... and a little fruit crumble helps too ...

June 12: Toronto on foot

I arrived in Toronto and spent the afternoon on an absolutely fascinating walking tour with Bruce Bell, historian, author, plaque propagator, guide and fellow "South Park" fan. I hope to get time to write about it later today -- maybe if it rains, as promised. The one thing my schedule doesn't allow for is actually writing about what I've seen.

But I'll tease it now by telling you that Bruce knows Toronto inside-out, forwards and backwards, and if I can convey to you a tenth of what he showed me, you'll hardly be able to stand NOT being in Toronto for another minute. I always knew this city was cool, and now that is a much more educated judgment.

So for now I'm off to do some biking ... oh -- more photos coming soon too, as soon as I get some time ...

June 11: Freedom Canadians?

You think of French-Canadians as being in Quebec; that's their turf, and the rest of Canada is historically British in origin.

Wrong.

Think about the analogous territory and settlement of it farther south, when everything north and west of, say, Philadelphia was wild frontier, disputed, thinly populated, the land of Indians and fur traders, missionary priests and isolated forts. Think about the French and Indian War. I'll wait.
Winnipeg is pretty far from Quebec, but it has one of the largest francophone communities west of the Great Lakes. You drive out of town toward the east just a few miles, and you could swear you've leapfrogged Ontario and materialized in La Belle Province. In fact, cross the Esplanade Riel bridge in the middle of Winnipeg and you are in St. Boniface, where you will get a friendly "bonjour." It used to be a separate city, and not wildly keen on its big anglophone neighbor, until it was swallowed in the early '70s and became part of Winnipeg. (Not without a fair amount of grumbling.) Its magnificent former hotel de ville (city hall) is now the home of Tourisme Riel, the tourism and heritage organization for St. Boniface, final resting place of the (in)famous patriot/traitor and founder of Manitoba, Louis Riel.



The St. Boniface Museum, which houses a vast collection of Riel artifacts, is housed in the oldest building in Winnipeg and oldest log structure in North America, and St. Boniface Cathedral is actually a basilica. The wooden roof of the original building burned, but the stone walls remain next to a modern replacement next door. The skeleton reminded me of England's Coventry Cathedral, the stone ruins of which are now a kind of war memorial (it was bombed and burned during World War II) next to a modern replacement. My enthusiastic student tour guide, Michelle, told me that all the windows, including a huge rose window, exploded to smithereens in the blaze, so, unlike Coventry, St. Boniface doesn't have any evocative bits of colored glass clinging to the edges of the holes in its walls.

It does have a historic cemetery in which Riel and most of his immediate family are buried. He was hanged in Vancouver for essentially making a career out of fighting British hegemony in what was evolving into Canada and carving out a place and rights for those of French and Indian descent -- particularly mixed French and Indian descent, which is designated Metis and has special legal standing in Canada. Riel himself had a French father and Indian mother. It was quite common for French voyageurs -- 18th- and early 19th-century traders in furs and other goods between the frontier and Quebec -- to have a wife at home in, say, Montreal and an Indian "country wife" and kids in Manitoba. Boys will be boys, if they can get away with it.

Anyway, Riel is a very controversial figure, being a freedom-fighting hero in French and a pernicious rebel in English. They definitely dig him in St. Boniface. His name and likeness are everywhere. He's a big part of the francophone heritage here, along with the voyageurs. The Festival du Voyageur is Western Canada's biggest winter blowout, second only to the marquee Winter Carnival in Quebec.

Michelle also showed me some of St. Boniface's other treasures, like the firehouse and the train station -- Winnipeg's first and only for many years until Union Station was built. The firehouse is a particularly charming old building, with a couple of vintage fire engines displayed in it and a tower used for drying hoses in the old days. As with a lot of Winnipeg, St. Boniface's funky old structures have ducked the wrecking ball -- and a very good thing, too.

After lunch, I tried to find the Royal Canadian Mint and largely failed. It's on the outskirts of town and not overly signed. It's almost like they don't want too many people to know where it is, which is understandable. I didn't have time for a tour, so I just stared through the glass at the rows of machines stamping out jillions of Canadian coins and hefted the giant gold bar held in place by a chain and a security guard. It was fascinating -- I wish I'd had more time.


But I needed to get back to Fort Gibraltar, a reconstructed version of the fort at the forks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers that kept trade safe for the North West Company, competitor of the Hudson's Bay Company. A boatload of voyageur re-enactors had landed earlier in the day, and the fort was full of men, women and children dressed as period fur traders, bourgeois company men, Indians and Metis. I was invited to share tea provided by a bourgeois gentleman, and it was a real treat and authentic as possible. There was tea in ceramic mugs or tin cups -- without the luxury of sugar -- wedges of scone with double cream and lemon curd, slices of cake, candied ginger, small dark squares of chocolate and crustless sandwiches. I joined a table of mostly rough characters in the men's quarters (I think they lured the kerchiefed Metis women in with the chocolate) and enjoyed the easy bilingual fluctuations of the conversation.

Afterward, there was an archery demonstration. In what had to be nearly a full gale. (It didn't rain till evening, but the wind was fierce.)

I had dinner at a cafe/bakery called Baked Expectations on trendy Osborne Street. Something for everyone: decadent pastry AND beer and wine. A place like this would be a truly dangerous addition to any neighborhood.


Tomorrow: Toronto. Let me remind you to scroll down now and then to look for new pictures in old posts. I'm catching up more every day.

June 10: That ball of flame in the sky -- what can it be??

Mr. Sun finally graced Winnipeg with his presence. And even a bit of warmth. It made a world of difference.

Started the day with an improved attitude and a walking tour of the Exchange District, beginning and ending at Old Market Square, a revitalized brick-paved source of concern and site of funky gatherings and concerts in the middle of downtown ...

(Pittsburghers will find this eerily familiar. In fact, Pittsburghers will find Winnipeg eerily familiar: the architecture, the once-mighty economy that deflated fairly suddenly in the 20th century, the preservation of old stuff, the constant efforts toward revitalization, the name that unfairly makes a great punchline, the green buildings, the strange street "grid." Note to Neil Young fans: I've been to Portage and Main.)

My guide, Veronica, was extremely knowledgeable and genuinely excited about what she was telling us. She pointed out a couple of dry-goods stores that had gone on to unforeseeable new lives (one is green condos, the other houses a co-op of groovy businesses where each employee buys a share and no one is in charge -- I kept hearing Terry Jones saying, "I didn't know we 'ad a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective"), Winnipeg's first auto showroom and a block of old storefronts that's been absorbed into Red River College. That was really amazing. The old exteriors and alleys have been enclosed but mostly left intact. Stairways are made to look like fire escapes. It's all been rehabbed to be green and clean and safe and modern, but there are big patches of old brick walls, woodwork, windows. I've never seen anything like it.

Veronica also showed us the old newspaper row, where Winnipeg once had three competing newspapers in the same block. The conservative paper and the liberal paper were cattycorner across a small intersection. Can you IMAGINE? The local pubs must have hosted some awkward and tension-filled lunch hours, even before the editors came in to haul AWOL reporters away from their libations.

Finally, she took us inside Winnipeg's Pantages theater, a spectacular old burlesque house that's returned to its original lush, slightly gaudy glory. Among the popular acts in the burly-q days were Wilbur the Man Who Grows (with the aid of a trap door in the stage) and Felix the Mind-Reading Duck.

I kid you not.

After the tour, I had a delightful cross-cultural chat with Veronica and her colleague Neil (hey, Veronica, did I spell that right?) aboot dialects, shibboleths and how everyone but yourself talks, no disrespect, kind of funny. Note to Canada: On this trip, I've been hearing less "eh" and more "hey," as in, "You were glad to leave the umbrella home today, hey?" Putting an h in front of "eh" is not fooling anyone, hey?

A short drive took me to the Costume Museum of Canada, which has a really splendid exhibit of wedding dresses through the centuries. The gowns are extremely well-preserved and have interesting explanations of who wore them when and where. You forget that the white wedding dress is a relatively recent custom, and the collection has some really lovely and/or odd frocks in pink, blue and even browns. There's also a very enlightening history of the high heel, which may sound like a visual root canal to men, but you know what I learned? Men used to wear high heels too, and not just in France. Men rode horses in high heels. Again, I kid you not.


I ate lunch at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, whose restaurant, Brio, opens onto the rooftop sculpture garden and makes a mean Caesar salad. The gallery is notable for its extensive collection of Inuit art, something you don't see a lot of down in the States.

I ended my day in Assiniboine Park, a large and beautiful park on the outskirts of town. It has gardens and a cricket ground and a little train and even a zoo, which I took a stroll through. It's a small zoo and a little behind the curve in terms of getting animals out of cages and into realistic habitats, but there's a lot of evidence of vigorous fund-raising, so I'm sure efforts are under way.

The zoo has wandering peacocks making that peculiar meowing sound you always hear in the background of English costume dramas. I've seen loose peacocks before, but today I saw males in full-on fan-erecting mating display mode up close and in person for the first time, and I can only describe it as terrifying. I don't know how the peahens remain calm. The guys snap all those tailfeathers up, and if the female gets at all close to them, they vibrate all the quills simultaneously. The males are literally quivering all over with lust. The quills make a rapid rattling noise that sounds almost exactly like a tabletop electric fan. It's impressive, perhaps beautiful, but somehow profoundly unseemly.

Wouldn't have missed it for the world.

June 9: "That's it! We're all going back to Winnipeg!"

That quote is a Simpsons reference.

Before we say goodbye to Regina, which I did at 5:30 this morning so as not to miss a single drop of rain in Winnipeg, I want to say that I had low expectations for that modest little city, but it really grew on me in the short time I was there. It looks and seems like exactly the sort of place that young people flee in droves -- a bit down on its luck, wholesome and neighborly in a way restless youth might find corny or constraining or dull -- but I ate brunch on Sunday before heading out to Moose Jaw in a joint called La Bodega that seemed to be the happening spot for a vibrant young demographic. The place was absolutely ringing with the giggles and lively chatter of the pierced, the pigtailed, the natural-fibered, the goateed and couples joined at the hip as only the very young care to be. There is a university in town, of course. Let's hope Regina can keep at least some of those unkempt heads before they all run off to Toronto, Vancouver or Montreal. Surprisingly, unlike Pittsburgh, Regina can't offer them cheap housing. Ordinary 3-bedroom ranch houses or similar are going for a good $300K there. In Regina! Where the weather is doing its best to KILL people 7 months of the year! Go figure. Well, the parks are nice.

Anyway: Winnipeg. So far, it's extraordinarily wet. Relentless rain. I'm going to be here for another two days, so I hope to God it quits.

Today, after a desperately needed nap, I hit the Manitoba Museum, a massive, thorough, well-conceived survey of Manitoba's history beginning with ... I kid you not ... the cooling of the Earth's crust! Again! Boy, when these prairie provinces do history, they don't walk in in the middle of the movie.

Kidding aside, there's lots of stuff here, and a surprise around every corner. For example, an entire sailing ship. It's a replica, but it was seaworthy and did some ceremonial travel in the late '60s. The original Nonsuch sailed into Hudson's Bay in 1668, opening Western Canada to trade; you can climb on the replica, which is full of beautifully carved wood, tiny bunks, not a lot of closet space or cupholders and a steady stream of excited children.

There's also pretty much anything and everything else that has ever gone on in Manitoba, from the polar bears and Inuit to the dioramas of people, native and otherwise, and critters of all sizes, extinct and otherwise. There's a whole gallery devoted to the Hudson's Bay Company, a reckoning of the wave of immigration in the late 19th century that added some spice to the predominantly British settlement that came before, and an extensive and detailed evocation of '20s-era Winnipeg as a bustling boomtown, in which museum walls are replaced by realistic storefronts, some of which you can enter.

The biggest surprise at the Manitoba Museum found me in the lobby before I even entered the galleries. Someone called my name, I turned around and it was Joff! The Return of the Kiwi! I knew he was bound for Winnipeg to visit friends, but who'd have thought we'd be in the same museum at the same time mere hours after my arrival in town? He was on his way to see the planetarium show, but it was good to see a familiar friendly face.

The one thing I never imagined this blog would develop is a recurring character. Besides me and, you know, Dudley Do-Right. I'm so pleased. This makes it literary.

After I left the museum I went to a place for lunch on a recommendation (not Joff's) and have to admit it was the first truly disappointing meal I've had since I cleared customs. It was in kind of a health-food place that had a juice bar. (Note to self: Never trust a menu that includes the phrase "liver cleanse" or trumpets the availability of "organic hemp and almond milk.") I ordered a salad with the optional shaved bison, just because I wondered what they look like naked.

(Rim shot.)

Who knew bison was so fatty? I can't remember the last time I walked away from a $12 salad, but at least there was a 7-11 next door. I squished around the neighborhood for a while under my umbrella while I ate some nuts, but there weren't many people out and most of the shops seem to be closed Mondays, so I went back to the hotel to try to dry out.

Tomorrow is another day, however, and I have a beautiful view from my window at the Hotel Fort Garry that promises grand architecture, bridges and parklands. And by golly, I am going to get out there tomorrow and see it even if I have to wear a wetsuit.

June 8: Away to Moose Jaw

You have to go. It's such a great name.

I drove from Regina to Moose Jaw, and for the first time since I got to Saskatchewan, I realized I am really on the prairies. Miles and miles of miles and miles, flat as a pancake. It's not a long trip; it took me about 45 minutes, because the speed limit is about 70 mph for most of the way. And why not? You could see an obstacle miles away.

Moose Jaw is a Western town right off the studio lot: wide, perpendicular main drags, blocky storefronts crowding them, an impressive train station smack at the end of Main Street like Dad at the head of the table. And you have to give the city fathers and mothers credit: The town could have faded into nothingness when its heyday had passed, like so many others, but thanks to its name, a few lucky breaks and some tireless marketing, it remains a destination.

The Tunnels of Moose Jaw is a tour into a labyrinth of steam tunnels that were (re)discovered only in 1985, reportedly by a truck that fell into them. They're still not completely excavated, and one of the guides said they're actually owned by a guy in Vancouver. (How does a person come to purchase an abandoned network of tunnels under a town hundreds of miles away?)

There are two tours, the "Chicago Connection" and the "Passage to Fortune"; each is 50 minutes, takes you to different cleaned-up and elaborately decorated (with historical settings and artifacts, not wallpaper) sections of the tunnels and is highly theatrical, with costumed guides involving visitors in a storyline. I personally have been a bootlegger, a coolie, an artist and a doorstop. The Chicago tour is based on the theory that Al Capone was running a smuggling operation from Moose Jaw during Prohibition -- despite the fact that there is no historical evidence he ever set foot in the town. Kind of odd, but good fun, if you can remember that it's historical speculation rather than a re-enactment of any sort.

"Passage to Fortune," though, while based on fictional/composite characters, is packed with factual information about the mistreatment of Chinese immigrants in turn-of-the-20th-century Canada. Things were so dire in China after the Opium War that people were willing to pay exorbitant fees to coolie brokers to get to Canada to make their fortunes -- only to discover they were essentially indentured slaves with no hope of returning to China or bringing family members over for years, if ever. The Canadian government, which didn't really want them except that they were cheap labor for the railroads, extracted an increasingly outrageous "head tax" on Chinese immigrants, and white Canadians treated them with vicious racism. They worked ridiculously long hours for the railroad or in laundries, doing dangerous, injurious work with no medical attention, crap food and little sleep. It's a really ugly chapter in Canada's history.

So I felt kind of arrogant and disrespectful going over to the Temple Gardens Mineral Spa for a long soak in the hot pool and a body wrap. For a little while, anyway. The huge, shallow pool is a wonderful place to forget your problems and everyone else's, too, and relax. You can boil yourself in the whirlpool area, or bob through a passage into the open air (without getting out of the water), where the water is hotter and the cool air and occasional kisses of rain on your shoulders remind you how extraordinarily good it is to be alive.

The body wrap was supposed to do all kinds of nutritive things to my skin with vitamins and detoxifying botanical elixirs, but the whole point, ultimately, is that it feels fantastic to get scrubbed down, slathered with fragrant herbaceous goo, wrapped up like a leftover taco and left to bake in a darkened room. Then comes a refreshing shower, another slicking of moisturizer and it's time to remember what your name is and how to drive. Oh, and put your clothes on. Do that first.

In my wanderings around town I spotted several of the Murals of Moose Jaw, which are just what the name says. Forty-six murals by different artists depict aspects of local history and culture, and they really brighten up the blank sides of those utilitarian 19th-century buildings.

The show wasn't over when I left to drive back to Regina. I wanted to get back before it got dark, because that highway is unlit and I saw elk crossing signs. Enough said.

Saskatchewan calls itself the "Land of Living Skies," and driving east on the Trans-Canada at sundown, I found out why. As is the case where the land is flat, the sky is HUGE, and this sky was a surging lava lamp of activity. Behind me, the sun was going all molten in a crucible of ragged dark clouds. To the right was a slate wall of storm clouds and distant rain. To the left and overhead was a slow-motion churn of shapes in shades of gray. The bottom layer was so low, it couldn't have been more than a few hundred feet, but it was broken and showing higher clouds in lighter colors. It's a good thing the road is almost entirely flat, die-straight and free of sudden hazards, because my eyes kept turning upwards. I think that drive put something into me that the Chinese laundry had taken out.

Finished the day with a luscious meal at the Cathedral Free House in Regina, then repacked and enjoyed a brief nap before dropping the car at the airport and boarding a flight to Winnipeg.

June 7: Regina in the rain

I have been informed that it is hotter than the hinges of hell right now in Pittsburgh and even in Toronto. Huh. When I left Pittsburgh, it had been cold and raining for like a week, and guess what! I brought it out here with me! I have now not seen more than about five minutes of sun since I left British Columbia, which would bother me less if it weren't so cold. To be fair, these temperatures (highs that don't crack 60, or single and low double digits Celsius) are below normal for this time and place.

Still, the Regina Farmers Market was slightly forlorn in the morning. I got in from the airport, having flown in from Calgary, a little after 9 a.m. and discovered that the weekly farmers market was conveniently across the street from my hotel, the elegant Victorian Hotel Saskatchewan Radisson Plaza. (Queen Victoria is very much present here, as you'd expect in a city named for her title. Pronunciation tip: The i is long, unlike the girl's name. One of the main intersections in town is the corner of Victoria and Albert.)

ANyway, the forlornness of the market was mostly superficial and visual; the 10 or so vendors huddled under dripping awnings while a handful of shoppers wandered by under umbrellas. The wares were plants -- mostly flowers -- and baked goods, homemade preserves, honey, beeswax. And sushi. Yep.

But the more time I spent there, the less forlorn it became. People seemed to know each other and the vendors, and there were friendly greetings and chat and warm smiles despite the damp chill. One of the flowering-plant vendors seemed particularly popular, and people were strolling away from his stall carrying geraniums and other blooms in pots. I stopped at a stall with bread and rice crispy treats and purchased a cookie. Or tried to. When I handed the vendor a $20, she said, in a vaguely European accent, "You got no change?" I didn't. "It's OK," she said, with a dismissive wave of her hand. "You take the cookie, you pay me later when you walk by again."

So I got some coffee, broke the $20, and that's exactly what I did. It was worth the extra walking in the drizzle to watch her face light up.

Regina reminds of Pittsburgh. It has a steelmaking past, an immigrant population (I see a lot of Eastern European churches in the phone book and names on signs and businesses) and a friendly, unpretentious vibe. People smile and say "hi" and joke about the rain as you pass on the sidewalk. An older couple stopped me from feeding a parking meter and explained that Saturdays are free.

Fortified with my coffee and cookie, I took a spin around the imposing Saskatchewan provincial parliament building and then drove out to the RCMP Heritage Center, excuse me, Centre to see what the story is with the Mounties. Now, it's easy to poke fun, and I've done it, with the whole Dudley Do-Right, Jeannette MacDonald-and-Nelson Eddy, bright red tunics and funny hats thing, but I came away from the Heritage Centre with a greater understanding and new respect for the RCMP and what they stand for. Even though the first thing I thought when I drove onto the campus (it's also a training center, excuse me, centre) and spotted an RCMP cruiser was, "Wait -- they have CARS? What a gyp!"

PM John A. MacDonald founded the North West Mounted Police in 1873 because as trading and settlement extended westward, there were clashes with the Indians and general lawlessness, and MacDonald specifically wanted to avoid the kind of war and carnage that had been happening in the American West. So yeah, they have the word "police" in the name, but they weren't meant to be ordinary cops going out there to enforce laws and arrest people. The Mounties were also meant to be diplomats, peacekeepers and social workers who strove to maintain fair and friendly relations with the Indians and order among the rough characters streaming westward to work on railroads, trade, mine or whatever. They were trained to be creative and resourceful and flexible, not just the toughest guys in town or ruthless enforcers. Though they were pretty implacable about chasing down bad guys, which is how they got that "always get their man" rep. They chased some miscreant all the way down to Nevada, where I bet those red wool tops were pretty damn uncomfortable.

The RCMP was all about community policing before that was hip. MacDonald (Sir John, not Jeannette) borrowed the idea from Sir Robert Peel, for whom English "bobbies" are named. There was a great quote in the multimedia show, which I recommend -- it has hokey moments, but it's fun to watch and really gives you a sense of the more modern work the RCMP is doing, in the CSI line -- and I'm sorry I missed who said it, but the idea was so insightful coming from someone in the 19th century dealing with a frontier that I scribbled it down in the dark: "It is not law we want in this country, but justice."

That right there, I think, is the essence of what makes the RCMP different from a standard police force. Not so much the horsies.

After lunch I went to the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, which starts its look at Saskatchewan's history with the cooling of the Earth's crust. Actually, the geological and paleontological stuff is quite interesting and well-presented, as are the displays about native culture. It's a very worthwhile museum at a bargain rate (suggested donation for adults: $2).

I went for a walk in Wascana Centre, an enormous park with a small lake in it, but the weather got punitive and I couldn't do much besides walk. The rain didn't deter the many rowing crews who had been having some kind of competition and were thronging down at the marina (you can rent canoes and kayaks when it's not a pouring race day), or the ducks, geese and pelicans (no kidding! was NOT expecting pelicans), and, inspired by them, I walked around the lake. I saw the Willow Island ferry, which can be booked on weekends to take people out to a small island in the lake for picnics. I can see the lake from my 10th-floor hotel room, the amazingly spacious Grosvenor Suite. Yes, I have at last realized my dream of staying in a hotel room fine enough to have a name.

The waitress who brought my dinner asked me if I was going to Mosaic afterward. Mosaic is an annual cultural festival, in which Regina celebrates its many ethnic groups with pavilions all over town. I had heard bagpipes and glimpsed a tent through the trees in the park but was too chilled and soggy to do anything about it. For a moment I toyed with the idea of going back there and seeing what the Scots were up to. "What happens in the pavilions besides music?" I asked the waitress. "Oh, food -- that's mostly what I go for, great food -- and people drink and party and have a good time."

Alas, I had photos to import, so I had to go back to the hotel.

Program note: I'm going to Moose Jaw to see the tunnels and sample the delights of the spa, but I won't be able to write about it until Monday because I'll get back late and have to be at the airport at 5:30 a.m. (!) Until then, here's hoping for better weather.