Morning Coffee: Coffee on Demand

Coffee is a big part of the social life of Saigon, a city that somehow manages to be both languid and relentlessly energetic in nearly equal measure. Hundreds of cafés and coffee stands dot the city: relaxed neighbourhood hangouts with a few plastic seats out front to watch the city go by; leafy park cafés where middle-aged women chat and men bring birdcages; multistoried cafés with elaborate fountains and gardens, oases hidden in unremarkable lanes. But even when there isn’t a café, it’s still easy to get coffee.

On a warm afternoon earlier this week, a few friends and I found ourselves in a small park in District 1, just around the corner from the Notre-Dame Basilica and Saigon’s tourist hub. Not long after we sat down, a woman came up to us and asked us if we wanted any coffee. We ordered three cà phê sữa đá (iced coffee with condensed milk) and one black iced coffee. About five minutes later, a man on a motorbike arrived with the coffees in a wire tray and the woman brought them to us. We paid 26,000 dong (about $1.80) for the four drinks.

Somehow, the fact that the coffee woman was wearing a Parasuco t-shirt emblazoned with the words “Montréal, Québec, Canada” made the candy-sweet coffee even more delicious.

Green Lungs of Hong Kong

Watering the plants in Shatin Park

On one of those smoggy days when you’re stuck in the crowds on Nathan Road, choking on diesel fumes and looking in vain for a bit of relief, it’s pretty hard to believe that country parks, city parks and natural areas make up more than half of Hong Kong’s landmass. It certainly makes you wonder that in a city surrounded by verdant hills and dotted by leafy rest areas, why do good parks seem so far away?

“There’s a bit of debate going around about whether or not we need more urban parks, but it’s never come together in a formal sense, so that’s what we’re trying to do here,” says Paul Zimmerman, one of the founders of Designing Hong Kong, an urban development watchdog that will co-present a discussion on the topic in this year’s City Festival.

In The Green Lungs of Hong Kong, a panel of officials from the government’s Leisure and Cultural Services and Agricultural and Fisheries departments, urban planning experts, and representatives from Hong Kong’s various green groups, will discuss whether access to country parks should be limited or encouraged, if Hong Kong needs more urban parks, and whether the parks it does have are accessible and well-designed.

“There’s pressure on land resources, especially now that we’ve decided to halt further [land] reclamation,” says Zimmerman. “The reality is that we’re not going to have any new land in the core area. Even if I might want to see more green spaces, that isn’t going to be easy to achieve. I think we can do more to get some more green in various places, more grass, green roof, green walls. Face it, people spending their lives in narrow streets face a sense of pressure. When there’s open space there’s a bit of breathing room and a chance to relax your mind.”

Zimmerman promises a lively debate about the role of parks in the city. Hopefully, for the city’s leaders, it will be a chance to hear new ideas; for concrete-weary city-dwellers, it might be one step closer to a breath of fresh air.

Another version of this preview was published in the January 7th issue of Time Out Hong Kong.

Holiday Commute

Getting around in winter is a challenge wherever it snows. Montreal, after a few predictable glitches following the first couple of storms, usually does a pretty good job in making walking and, increasingly, biking possible. Skiing, too: the cross country trail on Mount Royal now takes off from the intersection of Pine and Park, and winds up to the carriage road, laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted 130 years ago. That’s part of the skyline in the background, but it doesn’t look to me like the guy on skis is going to work!

Season’s greetings to all from someone who doesn’t ski or bike but who loves to walk.

Ginkgo / Silver Maple

Jarry Park, Park Extension, November 2nd, 2008

Not Montreal’s Smallest Park, But Close

“It’s not much of a park,” said Jocelyne, a middle-aged woman sitting on a bench in St. Henri, gesturing to the small green space behind her.

“It’s okay, but you can’t call it a park because it really isn’t one. There’s no place to wander, nowhere for kids to play. It’s just two benches and a bus stop.”

Nonetheless, the small parcel of land at the corner of Notre Dame and Rose de Lima Sts. is indeed a park, and one whose name — the Parc du Bonheur d’occasion — carries far more heft than its 263-square-metre area. With a handful of trees, an attractive stone path, two benches and a bus shelter, this tiny park is one of the smallest in Montreal.

“It came into being on Nov. 30, 1994, as part of an operation by the city that gave names to a lot of other small parks in the area,” explained Dominic Duford, an urban planner for the city. “Thirteen parks were named in St. Henri on the same day, like the Parc des Hommes Forts or the Parc des Cordonniers. They’re all names that reflect the history of the area.”

Bonheur d’occasion, known as the Tin Flute in English, is the title of Gabrielle Roy’s groundbreaking 1945 novel about working-class life in St. Henri. Its stark yet compassionate realism was a revelation in a city that had long overlooked the dire conditions in which many of its citizens lived. Some even claim that Roy’s book helped inspire the social reforms of 1960s Quiet Revolution.

For such an important work, the Parc du Bonheur d’occasion might seem a somewhat underwhelming tribute. In fact, until two years ago, the park stood adjacent to a vacant lot, and the position of its sign gave the impression that the park was actually the weedy, trash-strewn terrain next door. Eventually, however, a a three-storey building with retail shops and apartments was built on the lot, giving the city the opportunity to rebuild the park.

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No Poor People Here

Every summer, Prince’s Island — a beautiful island park in the Bow River, right next to downtown Calgary — plays host to a number of large festivals, including the always-interesting folk music festival, which took place last week with some big headliners and great enthusiasm. These festivals are an asset to the cultural life of Calgary, but there’s just one problem: they’re not free. Each festival surrounds itself with fences and restricts access by charging an entry fee. Sometimes the fee is relatively small, but in the case of the folk fest, it was as much as $50 for a single-day ticket. I’m torn between wanting to support a cultural initiative like this and decrying the way it occupies and privatizes an important public space.

Somebody else was less ambivalent in their opinion. This weekend, while making my way to the festival site, I came across this message drawn into the path with chalk: “Welcome to Fantasy Island. No poor people here.” It’s an apt statement, since there really weren’t any poor people at the folk fest, simply they couldn’t possibly afford to attend. Lately, whenever I visit Calgary I detect a growing undercurrent of anger and indignation, something potentially explosive that lurks among the city’s legions of working poor and homeless, many of them victims of the economic boom that has brought great prosperity to Calgary, but also a soaring cost of living. I suspect that, in the future, we’ll see more messages like the one I saw on Prince’s Island.

Mount Royal at Night

For years, I ignored the brooding hulk of Mount Royal at night, pausing only occasionally to contemplate the shape of its silhouette or the glow of the cross atop it. It was only recently that I actually began to venture onto the mountain after dark, well after most park-goers head home, and when the woods become especially dark and spooky. Sometimes I would head up to its lower reaches, alone or with friends, to lie on the grass, drink some beer and look out over the city. On a couple of occasions, I biked all the way up to the top.

Cycling up the mountain at night is a sensual experience: the sound of gravel under my tires; the strange, damp coolness that descends upon my skin as we head deeper into the woods and higher up the hill; the darkness of the path in front of me, marked against the red glow of the city sky. My friends and I always start at the Cartier monument, taking Olmstead’s broad path, which twists its way up the mountain on a gentle slope and a series of switchbacks. It isn’t long before the darkness overwhelms our vision and we rely on sound and instinct to avoid plunging down some rocky escarpment. It’s a completely disorienting experience, travelling along the path at night, and I enjoy the unique sensation of being guided forward without actually knowing where I’m going. Except for a brief moment when the back of the Royal Victoria Hospital is visible, I never really know where we are, and the increase in ambient noise from the city is the only indication that we have come around the front of the mountain and are biking above downtown. Soon, and always rather unexpectedly, we arrive at Beaver Lake.

Beaver Lake is an interesting place at night. On weekends, there are usually groups of people sitting near the water, chatting and drinking. People often set off fireworks near the pavilion, and in the distance, I sometimes hear street racing along Remembrance Road. On the hill overlooking the lake, my friends and I like to relive our childhood by rolling sideways down the grass slope, trying and failing to get up when we come to a stop, drunk on dizziness. It’s even more fun now than when I was a kid.

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Walking Outremont’s Parks

On a warm day—or, even better, on a warm night—I like to walk through Outremont. It’s one of Montreal’s most picturesque boroughs, with streets as orderly and genteel as many of its inhabitants. Like Westmount, Outremont was conceived almost from the beginning as an enclave of the well-to-do. Building codes mandated large setbacks, abundant greenery and the use of high-quality building materials in order to keep housing costs high. Architectural features perceived as unsightly and working-class, like outdoor staircases, were banned.

One happy consequence of all this was that Outremont ended up with a collection of gorgeous city parks unrivalled by any other part of Montreal. The park system was conceived when Outremont boomed in the 1910s. In response to this massive spurt of growth, the town council embarked on a campaign to green the burgeoning suburb, investing $5,415 in tree planting and $14,456 in their maintenance, at a time when the average annual salary of a civil servant was just $1,000. Under the guidance of the engineer Émile Lacroix, landscape architect Aristide Beaugrand-Champagne and the horticulturalist Thomas Barnes, eight parks were built between 1920 and 1930.

Touring these parks is a great way to see Outremont. Since I live on Park Avenue, I usually start my walk from the east, heading down Bernard Street to St. Viateur Park, behind the Cinq Saisons supermarket and the York Apartments. Despite its small size, this is a particularly pleasant park, with some tennis courts, a wide, meandering stream and a white stucco pavilion facing a lagoon. During the day, you will often find kids from the adjacent high school hanging out; at night, when the orangey-yellow light of its interior lights are reflected on the lagoon, the pavilion is sometimes taken over by waltzing middle-aged couples.

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São Paulo: Green in an Unruly Metropolis

Parque Trianon, Avenida Paulista, early morning. One clue to judging the safety of a neighborhood is the presence of women out walking dogs. Despite São Paulo’s high crime rates, you see them in many areas.

São Paulo has the reputation of being a very dangerous city. Its murder rate is phenomenal: 36.9 per 100,000 people in 2004, while London’s rate was 2.4 that year, Los Angeles’s was 14 and Chicago’s 16. I didn’t know that when I picked Brazil’s industrial powerhouse as one of the cities to consider in my book Green City: People, Nature and Urban Places, and that’s probably a good thing because I might not have gone, and missed seeing where the rest of the world may be headed.

One of the beauties of the Internet is the ease with which you can “meet” people ahead of time to ask what to see and hear when you arrive. I had lined up appointments with city officials and academics before I left Montreal, and I’d also exchanged e-mails with two British journalists who know the city well, and who offered to meet for lunch the day I arrived to give me some tips. But I’m afraid I rather surprised these guys, because as soon as I introduced myself face-to-face I could see them swallow and consider before they spoke: obviously I was a whole lot older than the woman they were expecting.

“You can’t go there,” one of them began, when I asked about housing developments I should see.

“Don’t ride public transportation,” his friend chimed in.

“People get kidnapped at knife point in their own cars at that intersection,” the first one added.

It was enough to make me worry for a couple of hours about what I’d got myself into. But I decided I had ignore their warnings if I wanted to get a feel for this energetic place. Yes, the middle- and upper-classes are afraid, but I found that the overwhelming majority of people were extremely nice to strangers as they go about their ordinary lives. In fact, I think I stumbled on a great indicator of a neighborhood’s safety — the presence of women of a certain age walking dogs. I found them all over the city during the day, at least, taking the cachorrinho out to do his business and patrolling the street at the same time.

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Clean and Green

The first time I went to Singapore — in April, 2000 — the city state was in the middle of a “Clean and Green: That’s the Way We Like It” campaign. That was nothing unusual, I discovered later, but as I wandered around this densely populated island nation I was impressed by just how green and how clean it was.

I’d gone there to look at the Singapore Botanical Garden for my book Recreating Eden: A Natural History of Botanical Gardens, and I didn’t know what to expect. Shortly before somebody had been flogged for marijuana possession and there was much rumbling about what a police state the place was. So I was surprised when I was there for several days before I saw anyone in uniform besides a cop directing traffic. And I was amazed at what a green place this city of high-rises was. When I decided to do a book exploring the ways that people interact with nature in urban settings — Green City People, Nature and Urban Places (Véhicule Press, 2006) — Singapore was at the top of my list of cities to check out. I visited twice in 2005, and I came away even more impressed.

Singapore is an island about 250 kilometers north of the equator, and 13 hours ahead in time of the east coast of North America. It’s hot all year round, and as soon as you go outside you’ll meet the smells and the sights of a tropical paradise. Orchid and bromeliads grow on big trees shading thoroughfares, bougainvillea cascades from pedestrian walkways over roadways, well-tended gardens surround tall buildings where more almost all of the city’s 4.5 million people live.

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A Bit of Brazil on the Edge of Mount Royal

Jean-Michel Labrosse looks like the kind of guy you’d expect to meet at the tam-tams. As he crosses Park Ave. with a big drum in one hand and a saxophone case in the other, you can’t miss his long, grey beard, with two braids dangling from its tip. Maybe that’s why virtually every journalist who writes about the weekly tam-tams is drawn to him. “I’ve had reporters from the United States, from China,” he said, smiling.

The tam-tam draws him because of the freedom it represents; it’s the one place in the city you can just show up with an instrument and play along.

Labrosse has come for twelve years. He plays the sax and totes around a big plastic drum he made six years ago out of a chemical bin his neighbour sold him for five bucks. All in all, he’s been playing sax for thirty years.

“It’s a Sunday community, like a big family,” he said. “When I was young, we’d go to mass — I was raised a Catholic — and now, this is my mass. It’s a way to meet people and celebrate.”

It has been twenty-five years since the first modern drum beats echoed out over the city from the Sir George-Etienne Cartier monument at the foot of the east side of Mount Royal. In 1978, a group of percussionists chose the site for their Sunday drumming workshops. Inadvertently, they founded a Montreal institution.

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Confrontation

Dog walking, Crescent Heights, Calgary