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There’s something different going on next to Saint Joseph Cathedral in Hanoi. This is a popular gathering place for middle-class youth, but they’re not sitting around drinking beer like the kids in the old city. Nor are these western-influenced young Vietnamese sitting around drinking tall mochachino lattés.
While railways are the nerves and sinews of India, rivers are the lifelines linking the cities and towns in neighbouring Bangladesh.
Last spring, I was in Dhaka, the congested capital, with my brother. The city of 14 million people lies on the banks of the Buriganga. After getting lost in the atmospheric narrow warren of streets in the old city for a few hours, our perspective eventually opened up upon reaching the wide, pitch-black river. Dozens of small canoes were parked on the trash-strewn riverbank. Skinny boatmen in lungis beckoned out for business with raised hands, offering to take people across. A one hour cruise can be had for a little over a dollar, probably less if you’re a miserly jerk who wants to argue over pennies.
Dubai feels like it was designed by a five-year-old boy. What kid doesn’t get excited about the BIGGEST BUILDING EVER, or the WORLD’S BIGGEST MALL? And then there’s the idea of a SEVEN STAR HOTEL. Wow!
A real kid’s drawing would have these elements laid out side-by-side, in two dimensions. Drawings by five-year-olds generally don’t have much perspective or depth. Dubai’s recent urban planning efforts seem to lack them as well. Where else can you visit a city that actually implemented all those dumb ideas you thought were cool in kindergarten? And that laid them all out as ineptly as you would have when you were five?
My award for the most underlooked gem in Montreal goes to the Jacques Cartier Bridge Building. Built around 1930, it looks like an art deco take on a Moroccan kasbah. The windows are laid out under arches, in straight lines of narrow arrow slits, and some in diagonals. There are even traditional rub el hizb, or Islamic eight-pointed stars, around the circular windows at the top of the four corner towers. All of this is enlivened by the fact that building supports the bridge itself and twisting flyovers jut out from all sides, creating some dramatic panoramas at its base.
Drinking fountains are everywhere in Rome, quite useful in a city where temperatures hover above 35C in the summer. These cast-iron fountains are known affectionately as nasoni, or “big noses,” due to the Pinocchio-esque appearance of their spouts. The design dates back to 1872, when the first twenty fountains were installed. Today, there are over 2,000 in the city, most of them emblazoned with the ancient Roman motto SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus).
Gateway to Quebec’s smallest municipality
For most people in Quebec City, Notre Dame des Anges refers to the ironically-named street where you could pick up prostitutes in the days before Saint Roch was cleaned up and gentrified. Few locals realize there’s another place of the same name in their midst.
Notre Dame des Anges is the smallest municipality in the province (0.06 km2), with a mere 456 residents. It’s right in the heart of Quebec’s urban core but has managed to escape the recent municipal mergers that swallowed up most suburbs within a 10km radius. It was created in 1855 to protect its main occupant from taxes, the 300+ year old General Hospital. It survives today as a tax haven run by the mother superior of the Augustines.
Groundhog Day, one of the more bizarre American holidays, is a major industry in the town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. This is where the legendary Punxsutawney Phil makes his annual prediction on how much longer winter will last. Every year, ten to forty thousand people crowd the inappropriately named “Gobbler’s Knob” to see men in top hats yank a rodent from a tree stump and share its predictions with the crowd. This scene will be familiar to anyone who has seen the movie Groundhog Day. Although allegedly set in Punxsutawney, most of it was actually filmed in the quaint town of Woodstock, Illinois.
Ugly building on the main street of Saint Georges de Beauce
Many of Quebec’s smaller cities are grim, depressing places. Like most cities in North America, they witnessed a period of downtown decline during the suburban explosion of the fifties and sixties. People moved out, shops closed, and buildings were razed and replaced by parking lots. Many places reached their nadir of ugliness in the seventies and eighties with the proliferation of cheap corrugated cladding and other experimental building materials.
Since then, cities like Quebec, Montreal, and Trois-Rivières took stock of the situation and invested in revitalization. But many smaller cities have continued to deteriorate. They’re fascinating to walk through-they feel like a time-warp-but I wouldn’t want to live there.
In some cities, like Dolbeau-Mistassini on Lac Saint-Jean, the decay is the result of the general industrial decline in the area. Other cases are harder to explain, like Sherbrooke, Saint-Georges de Beauce, Alma, and Gatineau – growing regional cities with unemployment rates that are considerably lower than the provincial average. Why are they so ugly?
Main Street, Saint Georges de Beauce
New buildings in Saint Roch, Quebec City
A decade before the psychedelic euphoria of Montreal’s Expo ’67 was another emblematic World Fair, Brussels’ Expo 58. Celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year, the fair’s symbolic centrepiece, The Atomium, was restored for the occasion.
The Atomium was intended to represent a giant iron molecule magnified billions of times. As cheesy as this may sound, it is actually a striking piece of architecture that is historic and avant-garde all at once. The interior is full of Expo ’58 paraphernalia and gives an idea of a World Fair that was part “The Jetsons,” and part “Father Knows Best.” Like Expo ’67, the archives that remain from the period exude a similar spirit of naive optimism fronted by the paste-on smiles of Expo hostesses. Whereas the Brussels fair celebrated the dawn of a prosperous post-war era, there was still a zoo of “Live Africans” at the Belgian Congo pavillion, and some USA-USSR Cold War tensions in the air.
