February 12th, 2010
The Three Little Pigs
A modern play on the fairy tale with three homes from Calgary’s Sunnyside and Crescent Heights area.
comments See also in
Architecture, Canada
Archive for February, 2010
February 11th, 2010
Relative Stillness
After a long hiatus from photography, today I dove into the vault to share some moments from 2004.
Queen and Spadina is a pedestrian hub abuzz with shoppers and wanderers, delighting in everything from mainstream shopping, the fashion district, and good eats and affordable everything in Chinatown.
At night the bars fill up, cars scoot around, and clusters of smokers can be spotted as readily as the lineups for street meat. Ce soir, we note relative stillness.
February 11th, 2010
Street Food in Bangkok
It’s a familiar scene across Asia: a small cart bright with fluorescent light and flanked by rickety fold-up tables and plastic stools. Simple, inexpensive dishes are served on brightly-coloured melamine plates.
If it’s in a Taipei back alley, it could be beef noodle soup; in a Hong Kong dai pai dong, French toast with a glass of milk tea. In this particular case, it was pad thai on an uneven sidewalk in Bangkok, inches from the roaring traffic of Asoke Road.
I placed my order (which wasn’t hard — most stalls only specialize in a few dishes) and sat down on a bright blue stool at a table with bottles of fish sauce, vinegar and chili. A few minutes later, the cook handed me the pad thai. It struck a nice balance between the full-mouthed savouriness of the fish sauce and dried shrimp and the tang of lime and tamarind. All told, it was probably one of the better attempts at the dish I’ve had. I paid when I left: 30 baht, just under one Canadian dollar.
1 comments See also in
Asia Pacific, Food, Public Space, Society and Culture, United States
February 10th, 2010
On the Khlong Boat
When the afternoon traffic snarls and the SkyTrain is packed full of expats, tourists and shoppers, the best way to get across Bangkok is to jump into a noisy wooden boat as it storms through the waters of the fetid Saen Saep canal.
Riverine transport was once the main way of getting around in the Thai capital, but most of its khlongs, or canals, have been abandoned in favour of roads and rail. (In many cases, the city’s notoriously clogged thoroughfares were built atop canals.) The Khlong Saen Saep is the last canal with a functioning water taxi line, but it’s in no danger of disappearing — 40,000 people still ride the boats every day, because they’re fast and cheap. It costs the same to ride the entire line as it does to go just a few stations on the city’s clean but overpriced metro.
Of course, there’s a risk that you’ll get some nasty canal water sprayed in your face, but you’ll also get a glimpse of a more rustic side of Bangkok, one of wooden houses and waterside markets, though the Saen Saep is generally less picturesque than some of the other, quieter khlongs.
comments See also in
Asia Pacific, Public Space, Transportation, Video
February 8th, 2010
My Old Rooftop
Before I moved from the Flower Market to Homantin last year, I went up to my building’s rooftop for a few last photos of the view, which gave out onto the towers of Mongkok on one side and the mountains north of Kowloon on the other.
comments See also in
Asia Pacific
February 7th, 2010
The Slow Death of Hawker Stalls
Mr. and Mrs. Wong have sold electrical appliances — lightbulbs, wiring, batteries and that sort of thing — from a green wooden stall on Aberdeen Street for more than 50 years. I met then when I was working on a CNNGo story about the gentrifying neighbourhood in Central now known as Noho, which is short for “North of Hollywood Road.”
Over the past five years, Noho has become a destination for art galleries, wine bars and trendy restaurants. In 2007, it was featured in the New York Times’ “Surfacing” column, which declared it a “cooler alternative to the nearby, expatriate-dominated Soho,” the trendy neighbourhood just up the hill. For Noho’s old restaurants, the neighbourhood’s sudden popularity has been a boon. People line up around the block to eat at the 90-year-old Kau Kee beef brisket noodle shop and Sing Heung Yuen, a classic dai pai dong.
But for the Wongs, business is terrible. “We’re lucky to make a few hundred dollars a day,” Mrs. Wong told me. She complained about the incessant traffic on Aberdeen Street, which is just two lanes wide but has become, over the years, a funnel for northbound traffic. The neighbourhood’s gentrification hasn’t helped, either: a few years ago, the block of apartments across the street from the Wongs was razed and replaced by a boutique hotel full of tourists who are certainly not interested in buying lightbulbs.
February 3rd, 2010
The 80 North, a Bitter Cold and Clichés
Croisement sur Park Avenue, 2009
C’est mon premier hiver. Si j’y survis, je fêterai ma première année passée à Montréal.
22h30. Bus 80, direction Nord. Il est là, je l’attend. Place des Arts. Froid intense : trente-cinq degrés sous zéro, avec un vent qui fouette à faire tomber les larmes.
L’engin reste sur place, adossé à cette promenade des festivals dont je ne comprends ni le sens, ni la dimension. Ses lampadaires galactiques imposent leurs courbatures lourdes sur la ville, éclairant railleusement un tas de neige géant. Un no man’s land. C’est bien. Et puis le MACM, chapeauté par un cube imposant et sombre, qui tiraille les lumières rouges dans un mouvement apaisant.
comments See also in
Fiction, Society and Culture
