On Mon, 26 Jun 2000 08:05:32 GMT, kibo@world.std.com (James "Kibo"
Parry) wrote:
Otherwise, what do I need to see, photograph, and/or do in
these four Canadian cities?
CW: Well, since no fellow Edmontonians seem to have replied to Kibo's query, I'll try and share some details about the more interesting areas/objects/events that I've encountered here. Keep in mind that I haven't been to a lot of these places in a while, even though I live in the fershlugginer city, so some details may not be entirely accurate. I'll divide my travel-guide into three parts: the City, the Mall, and the University.
The City of Edmonton
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The most popular event in July, as everybody is no doubt aware of, is Klondike Days. Klondike Days is entertaining, but only in small doses; once you've eaten your fifth bag of those little-tiny-sugar-donuts, heard Gowan sing "Criminal Mind" while browsing the Ukrainian Sausage Exhibition, and hopped over innumerable puddles of vomit ejected from "The Rainbow" at high velocity, you begin to long for respite, however temporary, from the Rabelaisian nightmare that is Klondike Days. So here goes.
While not being quite as cow-oriented as Calgary, Edmonton is the home of one of the wonders of the world -- The Largest Cowboy Boot in Canada can be found outside the Western Boot Factory (10007 - 167 Street). It's about four stories high, and during Christmas time they hang lights on it. Frankly, I think it's a more important landmark than the Mall, so no tourist should miss the opportunity to gaze upon it and ask themselves the truly important question: how hard would it be to climb to the top of that hideous thing?
Speaking of wonders, the High-Level bridge that connects the effete
south and gritty north of Edmonton is also the home of The Great
Divide Waterfall. I'm not sure when it goes off (I think it has
something to do with venting excess waste water), and I've never seen
it in action, but hey! It's 7.3 metres (24 feet) higher than Niagara
Falls 
INFO, which
automatically makes it worthwhile. A picture of the waterfall in
action can be seen at FALLS.
Maybe City Hall or EPCOR could tell you when they shall activate the
waterfall next.
While you're walking across the High-Level bridge, trying to figure out how the The Great Divide Waterfall works, you'll have the perfect opportunity to see the North Saskatchewan river beneath you. It is brown. And, to quote an Edmonton Journal article of a few years back, "Those Aren't Muskrats" you see bobbing along in the river's current.
And speaking of the wonders of Mother Nature, The Muttart Conservatory (9626 96A Street) is also a sight to behold. It's a quartet (maybe a trio, I forget) of glass pyramids, each pyramid having its own unique ecosystem; one is full of desert plants, one full of jungle foliage, &c, &c. The best part is that you can imagine you're Bruce Dern in "Silent Running" as you wander along the pathways within the pyramids. The Conservatory doesn't let you drive little carts around inside the pyramids, though, and there weren't any helpful robots as far as I could see, so you have to use your imagination. Also, little birds constantly scuttle around in the underbrush just out of sight, providing a constant sense of Vietnam vet paranoia. Resist the urge to touch the koi in their ponds.
If you have the time, I recommend taking a brief venture out of Edmonton to nearby Vegreville, because it has both the world's largest Pysanky (one of those complicated little Ukranian Easter eggs) AND the world's largest Pyrohy (AKA Perogy). The Pyrohy, which is speared on a giant fork, isn't a real dough-and-cheese Perogy. Neither is the Pysanky a real egg. But you can buy great souvenirs, such as a snow-globe with a Ukrainian Easter Egg in it just like the one seen in that episode of X-Files where Scully gets treatment for her nose-cancer and Mulder has to break into the genetics database.
Everybody loves science! Everybody loves the CanadArm! So, naturally enough, everybody loves the Space and Science Center (11211 - 142 Street). Inside, it's a fun collection of interactive exhibits, such as scales that tell you how much you'd weigh on Mars, a drum full of iron filings to teach you about magnetism, a moon-rock in a plexi-glass cube, and an actual CanadArm that was never actually on a space shuttle. In the center of the Center is a big auditorium used for putting on multimedia events, wherein they play Pink Floyd and use lasers to draw squirrels on the ceiling of the dome. And they have lectures about stars, as well, but I only really remember the squirrels. But the outside is even more important, because the Space and Science Center looks like a Gigantic Air Ecologizer. Maybe Jehovah will jam His Holy Unfiltered Winston into it one of these days, maybe.
And speaking of Winstons: if one were to explore the wonders of the LRT, then one should definitely explore Jasper Avenue and its environs. Disembarking the LRT at Churchill Station will drop you off right beside the Stanley Milner library, the largest public library in Edmonton, where they have bronze busts of Joseph Conrad and Dante on display. Conrad had a wad of gum jammed in his nostril for over a decade. Across from the library is where the true excitement begins -- the small park-like area dotted with bums and skateboarders is Sir Winston Churchill Square, and it is dominated by a hideous metal statue of, naturally enough, Winston Churchill. The exciting part is that the statue of Winston LOOKS EXACTLY LIKE "THE KINGPIN" FROM SPIDER-MAN. It has been my lifelong dream to set-up a Spider-Man figure in front of Winston's statue and have his webs wrapped around Mr. Churchill.
Thwip! Thwip! "Curse you, Spider-Man!" howled Winston Churchill as he struggled to free himself. "Thanks to you, Hitler will make us goose-step ALL THE TIME! Even when we're going to the bathroom. And he's going to marry your Aunt May!"
The City Hall is on the other side of Churchill square. It is ugly. Oh, and a warning: if you're going to go to Winston Churchill square, don't wander the streets during July 7th-16th or you'll be thronged by mimes -- it's the "Street Performer's Festival", which is doubletalk for mimes, mimes, and MORE GODDAMNED MIMES. Carry pepper-spray accordingly.
JP: As I've mentioned before, I'm going to Edmonton just to see the Alberta Telephone Museum
CW: This means you'll be just off Whyte Avenue, the "hip" strip of Edmonton: bums, bikers, teenage misfits and yuppie scum as far as the eye can see, interspersed with the odd hacky-sack-kicking hippies waiting in Gazebo Park for the next Marijuana Legalization smoke-in. Most of the interesting stores have been driven out of business by the influx of SUV-driving suburbanites, but you can buy hemp jeans, hemp candy, hemp pretty-much-anything at "The True North Hemp Company", near the corner of Whyte Avenue and 109 street. There are a few more stores of note near there, so some exploration is necessary. If you like pizza, may I suggest Royal Pizza near Whyte and Calgary Trail South. It not only has great pizza, but you can be assured of a healthy contingent of RCMP hanging around in there, drinking coffee and growing their enormous moustaches. It's right beside a good Vietnamese Noodle House, which has lots of peculiar seafood and none of the gunplay common to other Edmonton noodle-houses thanks to the constant swarms of RCMP.
The other best pizza in Edmonton is at the Rosebowl Pizza and Pub, along Jasper Avenue, where the cream of the Edmontonian music scene conglomerate. Or maybe coagulate.
West Edmonton Mall
------------------
If there is one thing that most everbody knows about Edmonton, it is that we have a really, really, really big shopping mall. That much is true. However, the mall is not a static, unchanging entity; WEM changes its themes on a regular basis. Yet whenever they decide to take a new direction, the remnants of the previous theme aren't destroyed, but are instead shoved into an less-travelled area of the mall to slowly decay. For instance, at some point in the olden days there was a big emphasis on animals in WEM: fish and birds and dolphins and sharks and bears and penguins and more could all be found inside the mall. The last of the zoo-like displays, a plexiglass enclosure full of shrieking peacocks, was sadly removed just a few years back. There is still a tank of full-sized piranhas extant, I believe on the second floor overlooking the Ice Palace. And there are still penguins somewhere, but you have to pay to see them.
The end result of all this is a lot of odd, seemingly incongruous stuff scattered throughout WEM, which waits to award the diligent explorer. Anyways, here's some of the more notable sights of the Mall:
1) A big metal statue of a Right Whale. You can go into it, entering through the mouth, and once inside you can almost imagine that you've been swallowed by a whale whose gullet is only 5 feet deep and lit by a little red lightbulb. This seems to be the highlight of the Mall for Japanese tourists.
2) Monstrously Huge Cockroaches. If you can arrange to be at the mall long, long after the stores are closed, you may have the chance to see these majestic creatures as they venture out to forage. They are born and raised in the warm tropical environment of the Water-Park, which gives them healthy appetites and enormous bulk. Look for them in the areas near the entrance to the Water-Park, across from one of the food-courts. They are, I should note, not indigenous -- our native cockroaches are tiny and rarely encountered.
3) Hooker statues. At the inside entrance to Bourbon Street, you can find a brace of prostitute statues, caught forever in the act of being arrested by a statue of a policeman. I believe they are supposed to be dressed in period clothing. There are a few more on the second level, somewhere.
4) The Water-Park. Eh. There's indoor bungy jumping, but other than the fact that the GIANT COCKROACHES breed there, and a scuba-diver got caught in the wave-machine mechanism and died, it's pretty ho-hum. After the stores close and the Water Park closes down you can sometimes see the giant roaches on the shoreline.
5) Galaxyland. Back before Disney sued, when it was called Fantasyland, the big indoor roller-coaster (The MindBender) went off its rails and smushed several people into a concrete pillar. I don't know if you can still see the dent in the pillar. Still, this is a must-see area, as long as you don't go during the nightmarish "teen nights" that happen occasionally. The arcade used to have working Defender and Space Invaders machines well into the mid-nineties, but they have probably been removed by now.
6) The Ball Machine. I think this is still in the mall. It was a bunch of Rube Goldbergesque mechanisms that kept billiard balls rolling and clattering around unceasingly. I could stare at that thing for hours, and often did.
University of Alberta:
----------------------------
If you go to the Telephone Museum, then you're just a few blocks east of the U of A campus. While the University lacks the full-scale oddness of the Mall, it's still a big place with some odd touches.
Strangest of the buildings is the Biological Sciences building -- legend has it that it was designed simultaneously by three or four architects who never actually communicated or even looked at the other's work. While that's rather apocryphal, there are some architectural peculiarities: there is a laboratory that was walled up and only discovered in the late 1960s; there is a lecture hall that is only accessible through the back of a display case; there is a gopher-farm on the top of some of the lower outcroppings that can be seen from the higher windows.
In the hall near the Department of Science office, still in the Bio-Sci building, there are a few display cases worth observing. One contains a collection of old biology samples, including a set of stuffed and labelled mice arrayed in a leather case like so many fur-covered darts, with little tufts of cotton peeping out from their eye-sockets. If someone were to steal those for me, I'd be very happy.
Elsewhere on campus, the Law building has a sculpture in front of it that resembles A Giant Screw. No more needs to be said.
And, of course, the University has a actual, functioning nuclear
reactor somewhere on campus (deep, deep below the Physics building, I
believe, behind a door covered with radiation symbols). If you're
lucky, you might get to see a vessel excursion, albeit a very slow one
(it's a Slowpoke reactor). Or maybe they're making some manner of
Ultimate Weapon at the Physics Milling Machine -- you can go and watch
it in action and inaction at PMM
I think I saw somebody cleaning the machine once.
That's the end of my travelogue -- I hope that I have succeeded in providing some useful useless information about my fair burg.
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