One Great City!

It's an historic and interesting city, Winnipeg, but I'm not sure I'd want to live here. The city boomed before the turn of the century, on the back of the grain industry and other commodities, and was a central rail hub as well. Winnipeg was known as the 'Chicago of the North', and one of its neighbourhoods, the Exchange District, is considered one of the finest examples of an intact, turn of the century commercial district in North America. I loved walking around this part, and seeing the fine old warehouses overlaid with faded advertising for goods and companies.

I spent time today and yesterday at 'The Forks', another site of historic significance. Here, the slender Assiniboine river meets the Red River, at a junction where native people lived and traded, followed by fur-traders, Scottish settlers, Metis buffalo hunters and more. The site contains parks, river walks, sculptures, and, happily for me, a fabulous food market and a prairie garden. I'm learning a bit about the prairie plants, and found this little space of tall waving grasses and sweet-smelling native flowers incredibly beautiful. I put my toes in the cloudy brown waters at the junction and tried to imagine some of what had happened on these banks over time.

Winnipeg is also very multicultural, which came as bit of a surprise to me, likening it blindly as I did to our central towns back home. I've heard many languages in the last couple of days, and have eaten Carribean chicken and browsed the Chinese grocery. The streets are wide and clean and there are some great buildings and thoroughfares, but the place has a slightly faded feel. An ex-Winipegger friend of mine was a little apprehensive about where I was staying, saying that the crime rates in the prairie cities are the worst in the land. This surprised me as well, but I see what he means - the hostel is adjacent to a bad area, and the drug addiction and poverty is pretty visible. I think perhaps I'm on a strip where sex is bought and sold too, watching a very young girl weave her way along and interact with cars early this morning. Made me think twice about lounging outside waiting for the convenience store to open.

What I have enjoyed is this beautiful sense of interior space since being here, which perhaps is due in part to all the exterior space around. I've always lived in places where there are mountains or some undulation of land on the horizon, serving as natural boundaries which help us make sense of the space around us. Here there are the city towers and then nothing, no barriers, no visible ending or beginning, just endless skies. I can't help but think that in winter, this place (ave Jan temperature around minus 13 - that's maximum ave, not minimum), would be kind of frightening. I walked to the corner of Portage and Main, considered the windiest (and one of the coldest) intersections in Canada. Luckily, the wind was warm and dry and smelled of sun-soaked farmland.

*Past Winnipeg tourism slogan, and title of song by Winnipeg band, the Weakerthans.