Wrap Up

 Ah Newfoundland and Labrador - how will we remember you? Your kindness and generosity, your ubiquitous crafts, your small but well looked after houses, your tiny tide (3 feet!), your sense of place with generations never considering living in another part of the province but only where your family has always been, your brown food, your potholes, your freezing wind in June, your famous dogs, your red and white lighthouses, your middle-aged women on the front lines who seem to do everything, your icebergs and puffins, your impeccable woodpiles, your well-kept and well-marked trails, and your quiet pride in being Newfoundlanders and Labradorians - no matter what.

Last Day

Our last day, in St. John's, and the city was transformed from when we saw it barely a month ago. Lush green trees, swathes of lupins in fields and parks, pots of flowers on porches and window baskets. People were sitting on their steps by the street and would always smile and greet us as we went by. We know that we are not so special. It's what Newfoundlanders to do everyone.

Almost everyone still wears masks here, and are careful in indoor places. That's why Newfoundland has weathered the COVID-19 pandemic so admirably. Everyone seems to follow rules here, especially those that show courtesy to everyone else. Again, that's what Newfoundlanders do. They are unfailingly patient and polite.

It was hot, summer hot. We broke out the shorts and bared our white legs as we repeated our first day by hiking around Signal Hill, including the spectacular North Head trail.

the North Head trail,
running down along the cliffs

watching a boat come in
from the Atlantic

rounding the trail into St. John's harbour 

there is always a hill in St. John's

We were hoping to meet with two friends who have just returned to Newfoundland after 4 years in Vancouver. One of them felt unwell, so we went out for a quick drink with the other, along famed George Street, which is full of pubs and bars. One drink turned into two as we talked together and listened to a friend of theirs play - Stephen Green - and sing an impressive repertoire - it seems every Newfoundlander can sing or play an instrument, or both, and do it well!

It was dark as we walked back to our Inn to finish packing and head home. There was a tiny bit of light in the west, and the evening was warm and scented with early summer. The next post will the the last, a wrap up photo montage if you will.

It's been a wonderful trip to a wonderful place.  

What's With The...

We've been here long enough to notice a few quirks not easily understood.

So, Newfoundland, what's with the....

....shotgun shells that litter beaches and grassy meadows everywhere? 

..the obsession with painted rocks? We know that Newfoundland is very crafty, with amazing knitted, crocheted, tatted, and quilted items in every shop. But the rocks seem to be just a thing left in gardens, on sidewalks, in the forests, beside shops and offices. they are mostly small, but these ones are the size of a large chair!

.....signage? It's great at the beginning - miles away you see a sign to a site, or a village or a restaurant, but when you get closer, there is no signage whatsoever. 

(no photo, because you can't take a photo of something that isn't there)

....old radios? We saw them everywhere, piled up in homes and shops and restaurants. Are they still being used or is it against the grain to throw anything that still works away?

...Come Home Year promotion by the Tourist Board that is fantastic, and yet, no one seems ready for visitors. Everyone we ask says tourism is only about July and August anyway, so why not a more honest Come Home Summer?

....reliance on salt for flavouring? It can't be hard to grow some herbs or get some spices to liven up the food. Especially as the salt cod is so salty to begin with. Do anyone have high blood pressure here? Maybe look at the salt and fat content.

....apostrophes? This one was Jenny's biggest buggaboo. Was no one in the entire province taught how and when to use the apostrophe? It's misused everywhere! Local signs, menus, visitor information, hotels, sites, billboards, even signage at national sites. Is it because the capital city St. John's has an apostrophe and so everyone thinks you have to put an apostrophe in every word that ends in S? 

Come to think of it, why does St. John's have an apostrophe? 

It's used for possession - describing something owned by someone, so St. John's what? What did he have? 

The apostrophe is also used for contractions, so is it short for St. John is? or St. John was?

What the apostrophe is not used for is plurals, so is St. John's really supposed to be St. Johns, more than one St. John? 

It is a mystery. 

the Fourth F - Flags

Despite being Britain's very first colony, Newfoundland was the last province to join Canada, in 1949. Its official consolidation with Labrador was not until this century, in 2001, and so the entire province can now boast of 17,000 km of coastline. 

For being independent so long, Newfoundland has had an awful lot of flags. 

If you are really going back to beginning there is the Norse Raven Flag, which was relevant in the context of Newfoundland for a few years around 1000AD.

 

Here is the Governor's flag, with Terra Nova (Portuguese for New Land) inscribed. Why Portuguese? Because they were among the first to fish in Newfoundland's waters, and there are many Portuguese,  Basque, Spanish and French names mingled with English

Then there was the Newfoundland Tricolor, one of the first and only flags that used pink. This was developed when Newfoundland went through its first dally with independence in the late 19th century. It's clearly a riff on the Irish flag, perhaps to wage peace between the English Protestants Irish Roman Catholics that predominated the Island. The green is said to represent Irish shamrock, the white represents the Scottish thistle, and the pink represents the English rose. Newfoundland didn't become a republic so the flag was never officially recognized, but it is seen everywhere, especially neat St. John's, and on tee-shirts and chocolates, mailboxes and votives. 

The Red Ensign waved the longest, having been endorsed by King Charles II in 1674. There is a blue version too, and both existed until 1931, when Britain's Union Jack represented Newfoundland until 1949, when it joined Canada.

Labrador got its own flag in 1974, and a lovely one it is too. Colours represent the snow, the sea and the land, with a sprig of black spruce, to represent the three main groups of people living there - the Inuit, Innu and European settlers.

It was not until 1980 that Newfoundland got a distinctive flag, one that waves currently. It was introduced June 24, Discovery Day, on the anniversary of John Cabot's landing on Newfoundland soil in 1497. White for snow, blue for the sea, red for "human effort" (I take that to mean blood), and the yellow arrow for self-confidence going forward into the future (is yellow really the right colour for that?) 

There is another flag associated with Newfoundland and Labrador that we never did see flying anywhere, the Franco flag, first raised in 1987. It represents France's history and presence on the Island and the sails represent the arrival of common ancestors - yellow is the colour for Acadia. The top sail includes the Labrador tamarack, and the bottom sail includes the Newfoundland pitcher plant.

There you have it. And you thought the history of flags was going to be dull.

Back in Time

There were many times when we felt we had slipped the bonds of the present day and had travelled back a few decades. This was oddly comforting. 

In cafes and diners, even those in sizable towns, we saw these

note the attached paper phone book

wifi and cell coverage has not been consistent, and many places did not have the capacity for accepting credit cards, but in one B&B we were asked to pay by cheque! Thankfully, we had been warned and spent time hunting out our old chequebook to bring with us.

Newfoundland has a very homogenous population, which seems alien to us, a cultural throwback, as Vancouver is full of faces and languages from different cultures. We saw two Asians, who stereotypically owned Chinese restaurants in two different towns, and one young Indian woman who had recently moved to St. John's.

One of our favourite nights was in a house that friends' parents had recently inherited and that would be turned into visitor accommodation. Unchanged since the original owners, we were the first ones to appreciate living back in the late 1960s

combination cocktail hutch,
display cabinet, turntable, radio
 and fireplace

two tone toilet

spare room as a waiting room?

waiting for an evening guest

kitchen chair and fab flooring

that, ladies and gentleman, is an 8 track

one of many, many ashtrays

The Three Fs - #3 Food

It is not ironic that one of Newfoundland's chicken fast food chains is called Mary Browns

That is the prevailing colour of food here - brown.

that's a lot of brown food

First among equals is cod. Fishing for cod is an indelible part of Newfoundland's history as is eating cod. You would think that the overfishing and collapse of cod stocks a few decades ago would lead to less cod. Well, cod may not be back in a big commercial way, but it is still the vast part of the culinary landscape. Every menu has cod, sometimes in multiple dishes. Sometimes not a lot else, so we ate a lot of cod.

We had cod eleven ways - deep fried, baked, pan fried, au gratin, in chowder, in pie, cod bites, cod tongues, cod burger, cod cakes, and fish and brewis. The twelfth way - cod cheeks - eluded us. A reason to return, perhaps?

Everyplace said they had the best fish and chips, famous fish and chips, world-acclaimed fish and chips. 'We'll be the judge of that' we said. Hands down the best fish and chips (in our opinion) in the entire province was in a small immaculate diner in tiny St. Bride's called Da Bird's Eye, on the way to Cape St. Mary's Ecological Reserve where we had to wait a bit because the owner's husband had just brought the cod in from the boat. That's not what made it the best (all the cod we ate everywhere was fresh). What made it the best was a light batter and perfectly cooked - not heavy, not fatty - beautiful. 

Beyond cod, we have sampled moose, lobster, crab, oysters, scallops, squid, atlantic salmon, perch, sole, trout, shrimp, prawns, mussels, and are now hankering for more of everything as long as it is not deep fried. We are getting to our saturation point of deep fried.

snow crab AND lobster in one meal!

We had classic Newfoundland fare such as seal flipper pie, jiggs dinner, and the aforementioned fish and brewis topped with scruncheons. Seal flipper pie is what it sounds like, although we had a gourmet version at the Happy Adventure Inn, which was actually very good. Jiggs dinner is a big plate full of salt beef, boiled potatoes, carrots, turnip, cabbage, and pease pudding. 

Fish and brewis is salt cod, soaked overnight, hard tack bread, also soaked overnight, cooked together and topped with fatback that has been fried. Both fatback and drippings (scruncheons) are poured on top the the cod and bread dish. Not to be ordered by anyone on a low salt or low fat diet.

fish and brewis (top left)
with cod cake, bread and baked beans

One day Martin ordered "fin and feather" because he liked the sound of it. It which turned out to be deep fried cod and a tiny deep fried wing of chicken. Plus potato of course.

Soups are excellent - they are more like stews than soups, but all were truly excellent. Of course our go-to were the seafood chowders. So good!

There is no large-scale agriculture here, so people have little plots for growing vegetables, sometimes miles away from their homes, wherever they can scratch out a level 5 metre by 5 metre plot and cultivate decent soil. Based on everything we have seen the vegetables are primarily root: potatoes, carrots, turnips predominate. Onions, but no garlic. Green is not a colour found on Newfoundlander's plates.

Scurvy was a real problem in the old days, until it was discovered that turnips are a good source of vitamin C and can be grown here quite easily. We were never fans of turnips, but they are really delicious here. 

For seasoning, salt is your friend. Or not. Or you could slather your food in gravy (which can be bought in a 1.36 litre can), or ketchup, or vinegar - malt or white. 

note the size of this can!

Getting a salad is like finding gold, but it won't be much more than iceberg lettuce and grated carrot.  Jenny had one good salad, at the Rooms Museum in St. John's, that was such an anomaly she took a photo of it. 

salad! (with cod cakes, sigh, again)

Oddly enough, coleslaw (cabbage and carrot) is generally excellent and can be found anywhere that fish and chips is served, which is everywhere. Only a tiny serving is provided, but it is good.

Pease pudding and baked beans are common. Adding more brown food to your brown food seems to be a thing.

Dessert is predictable - cheesecake. Newfoundlanders love their cheesecakes, perhaps because there is so little dairy (we have seen only 1 cow in this whole trip thus far, 1 goat, one field of sheep and 3 chickens). The cheesecake is almost always topped with one of the three local berries (partridge, blue, bakeapple) and is very good.

cheesecake with bakeapple sauce

Soft scoop ice cream is popular too, no doubt because it has no dairy and the flavours come from bottles of syrup. It never got really warm enough for us to contemplate ice cream in any form, and most of the places were still closed, so we will have to reserve judgement. 

Blueberries taste better here than at home, being smaller, wild, and a bit like a blueberry crossed with a blackcurrant. We have had the local partridge berries and bakeapples (cloudberries) in multiple forms (jam, tart, pie, crisp, sauce). Rhubarb can be grown here and is very popular. We are seeing it mixed with strawberries in jam and crumbles.

We discovered an excellent local chocolate manufacturer and loaded up the car for the journey. There are four branches in the provinces, and we found three of them. Thank you Aunt Sarah. 

The Newfoundland Chocolate Company was likewise excellent, although their specialty is a single bar, wrapped with Newfoundlandish sayings, backed by the old flag of independence (more on that in another post)

We were hoping to eat capelin (often also spelled caplin, but pronounced "cayplin"), a member of the smelt family, that runs ashore for a few frenzied weeks in June usually. People can scoop them up on the beach in buckets, as they spawn. There are less of them now, due to overfishing it seems, and they are later and later, probably due to climate change. it was only in the last few days that we saw they had come in, as we watched gannets plunging into the the ocean to grab them, and our sole humpback whale sighting was at the same beach. They are amazing little fish, an engine of Newfoundland's economy, feeding birds, whales and humans alike and excellent bait, but the only one we saw in person was this little guy, lying in the road. We assume a bird had dropped him. No doubt a local cat will enjoy the free snack.

We drank a lot of beer, always local craft offerings, of which there are many. We probably had more beer over our five weeks than in the five years before. Water was sometimes not drinkable, although Martin found Coke or Pepsi everywhere. 

Despite the hiking we have put on pounds due to our diet, and we don't even want to think about our blood pressure readings these days!