Like most Chinese cities, Guangzhou is sliced up into large blocks by big streets, and each of these blocks is dissected by lots of tiny, meandering alleyways. (It’s like a more fine-grained version of American suburbia, with its arterial roads and spaghetti subdivisions.)
Montreal
We’ve always known there is a gulf between the city as experienced by tourists and the city lived in by locals. Now we have a fun visual representation of that divide. Using various types of data from Flickr, one user of the photo-sharing website, Eric Fisher, has created maps that indicate the spots photographed by tourists and those shot by locals. Local photographs are blue, tourist photos red and undetermined photos yellow.
There are some problems in the methodology. Whether a Flickr user is a local or a tourist is determined by whether they photograph a given location over a long period of time (like a local would) or in just a few days (like a tourist would). That seems fair enough, but not everyone geotags their photos, which could possibly skew the results one way or another. One person who obsessive geotags all of his or her photos could have a disproportionately large representation on the map. You can see this in Vancouver, where one person’s geotagged cycle routes are prominently displayed.
Still, just by looking at the maps you get a strong intuitive sense that they are close to reality. In the Montreal map, tourists overwhelmingly stick to Old Montreal, St. Joseph’s Oratory and the Olympic Stadium while locals take photos throughout downtown and the Plateau, with an especially notable cluster of local shots around Lafontaine Park, Maisonneuve Park and the Botanical Gardens (which, interestingly enough, are right across the street from the Olympic tourist hub).
These days, the sweet ballads of Cantopop might seem like they are smothering whatever creative spark Hong Kong’s music scene might have, but that wasn’t always the case. In the 1970s, Cantonese pop was populist, exciting and avant-garde. Until then, most of the popular music recorded in Hong Kong was in Mandarin. It was the rise of the local TV and film industry to make Cantonese music for the masses, often in the form of theme songs that ran during the opening credits (a tradition that still exists on television today).
Ask anyone who defined the sound and ethos of 1970s Cantopop and Sam Hui‘s name will invariably crop up. Raised in So Uk, a public housing estate, Hui sang humourously about everyday Hong Kong life in a vernacular language that people could easily identify with. (His song about the 1960s water shortage is a classic.) He was also an actor, appearing two dozen movies between 1973 and 2000.
The opening sequence of the 1976 comedy The Private Eyes is a great montage of Hong Kong street scenes, accompanied by a song by Hui with the usual topical references to Hong Kong life and culture. There’s a funny English version, but it’s meaningless — all of the local commentary has been removed.
The World Cup kicks off this Friday. I’m looking forward to it. No other sporting event combines sport, geography and national pride quite the way it does. Around the world, millions of people will watch their countries and their soccer heroes do battle in South Africa. Whatever you think of the game itself, it’s hard to deny the sense of exuberance it creates as people gather in cafés, bars and in other public places to watch.
In Montreal, soccer championships — either the World Cup or the Euro Cup — are all-consuming, month-long festivals. People skip out on work to watch afternoon games on café and bar terraces; they usually become so full there are people standing on the sidewalks and in the street, peering over each other to catch a glimpse of the TVs that have been specially mounted outside. When a team wins, its fans will rush into the streets with flags and horns. They leap into cars, driving up and down the city’s main streets, honking and cheering.
Street food outside 7-Eleven, Phetchaburi, Bangkok
Dépanneurs — the Montreal convenience stores that are a favourite topic of mine — are big in the news lately with the publication of a new book by Judith Lussier, Sacré dépanneur! The latest contribution to the spate of media coverage is a profile by Montreal Gazette reporter Jeff Heinrich of Joe Zhou, who owns a dep on the Plateau’s Duluth Street.
Clocking in at 2,600 words, Heinrich’s piece is the longest newspaper feature on deps I’ve ever read, and he puts the length to great effect with detailed descriptions of Zhou and his clientele. Zhou is a former electrical engineer from China who obtained a second engineering degree in Montreal, only to find himself shut out of the job market because he had no Canadian work experience. (It’s surely a common story among dep owners, many of whom left comfortable middle-class lives in China, only to work 60 hours a week running a shop in Montreal.) To get by, he ended up going into the convenience store business with a Chinese acquaintance.
Zhou’s dep is a crossroads for the entire neighbourhood. It’s the kind of romantic general store that has died out in many parts of the world. “In Quebec, a dépanneur is a kind of community,” he tells Heinrich. “People are friends here. They know you, they talk to you like you’re a member of the family. They tell you about their daughter, their son, their neighbours, their neighbourhood — you always learn something. We communicate. Around here, I know everybody. When my customers come here, I know what they want.”
For the last couple of weeks, bees have been buzzing around flowers growing wild in a former industrial space that may become an unusual urban park — or a municipal heavy machinery yard.
The land is located between de Gaspé and Henri-Julien streets, immediately south of the Canadian Pacific rail tracks, with a spur jutting west between the tracks and Bernard Avenue. Its southern boundaries are marked by big buildings put up for light manufacturing in the mid-1950s to 1970s which, for the most part, are no longer used for that purpose. The rail line also gets much less traffic: CP is getting rid of its switching yards to in nearby Outremont, where housing and a new health science campus for the Université de Montréal are scheduled to be built.
For more than 20 years, the vacant land has seen more and more people cross it to get from the Rosemont metro station to the software companies and artisan space now located in the old buildings. The land is also used for dog walking and some late night revelry. Increasingly, too, the wonders of nature in an urban setting have come to the attention of people living in the surrounding area. In the summer time, the overgrown fields are full of blue-flowered chicory, tall clover, Queen Anne’s lace, wild oats and other lovely plants that flourish on the edges of development.
