What do you do when it's raining in St. John's? Stay indoors, of course, and today we visited the fabulous "The Rooms", a modern combination of museum, art gallery and archives for the province. We spent almost 6 hours taking in the impressive displays and artifacts. This is truly one of Canada's best museums. And we treated ourselves to a delicious lunch of the best seafood chowder we could ever hope for in the wonderful dining area, which featured floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto the magnificent natural harbour of this great city.
Essentially, The Rooms tells the story of Newfoundland and Labrador and its people. It is both a traditional and modern museum: traditional in the sense that it preserves and presents artifacts and documants; modern in the sense that there are interactive and interpretational displays that challenge the visitor to put him/herself into a situation and gets the visitor to empathize with what's being presented.
A wonderful sharing of Indigenous and European experience is also highlighted, sadly lacking in many other Canadian museums, where Euro-centric experiences are treated as being "serious" history, and Indigenous experiences are on the periphery, nice to mention, but not really significant except for some sordid or violent anecdotes. Not so here: the Indigenous nations share the stage with the so-called "Livyers", or those of European heritage.
At the end of our day, we went down to George St. for a small pub crawl. The pubs are Irish/Celtic in theme, with music and good food. Add to this the NHL preseason game between the Leafs and Senators and a couple of concerts and St. John's was really buzzing tonight. Not us: we did OK, but a full museum day and three pints of beer made us crash at 10 pm. The truth is that the road trip is naturally tiring for a couple of old geezers like us and we're just hanging in when evening comes. However, we have the next few days mapped out for the westward swing. But one more day in St. John's beckons.
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| Exterior shot of The Rooms on a rainy St. John's morning. |
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| The magnificent Catholic basilica next door to The Rooms |
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| St. John's harbour taken from The Rooms |
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| St. John's harbour with the Anglican cathedral middle ground left. |
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| One of the displays was of the colourful Newfoundlander dialect and expressions. I like this one ! |
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