Newfoundland News

Hey! St. John's Newfoundland, essentially my hometown, got a write-up in the NY Times Travel Section today! They hit many high points, including Signal Hill, the LSPU Hall, cod tongues, Moo Moo's, Auntie Crae's, whales, icebergs and Cape Spear. They get the name of the Ship Inn wrong, probably because it's usually just called 'the Ship', so who knows if it's Inn, Pub, whatever. They do miss out a lot of great things you should catch if you're there for more than 36 hours: Cape St. Mary's (check out the caribou herd while you're down there, and don't miss the haunting eponymous song), the Fluvarium, the East Coast Trail, the Trinity Bay pageant, fish and brewis at the Classic Café (open 24 hours), fish and chips (proper chips!), traditional music, a ferry ride to Bell Island from Portugal Cove (my actual hometown), the Ediacharan fossils at Mistaken Point, the oldest multicellular fossils in the world, 560-575 million years old... you better stay for the whole summer, actually. There's lots of great events: the folk festival, of course, 30 years old this year; the Sound Symposium is usually weird and wild (dang, just missed it); the St. John's Regatta is highly traditional; the Peace-a-Chord is always a lovely event, especially in these troubled times, though apparently they've had to scale back a bit this year, wouldn'tcha know. If you're into unusual food, after the cod tongues and fish and brewis, you could try seal flipper pie or caribou steak, partridgeberry jam or bakeapple preserves, Purity molasses candies or hard tack. You can't miss the berries, everywhere in late August and early September... And there's some great linguistics available at my alma mater, MUN -- stop in and say hi, at least, if you're into that sort of thing!

Hmm. Maybe I'm feeling a little homesick. Not that the Arizona summer is without its charms. Really! But it's a bit different.