Wow it’s hard to believe that this is the last blog. The term really flew by, although at the moment, with all the assignments due and everything, it feels like it can’t be over fast enough.
I really enjoyed today’s class and I think the panel with the authors was a really great way to end the course (I know we have one more class, but I doubt that we’ll do anything big) and all of our guests were very articulate and thoughtful and said some really interesting things about Edmonton. I wish the penal could have gone on longer.

I’m really glad that I took this course and I now know a lot more about Edmonton than I would have if I hadn’t taken this class. That’s a good thing, because now I can say more than “Edmonton is nice”, when I get asked what it was like abroad. Also due to our discussion about cities and Canada, I got to reflect on my own home and the city and the other cities I have lived in and compare them to a North American city. I found both similarities and differences, not only in the city itself, but also how people think about the city they live in and consider this a valuable lesson.

I think I will really miss Edmonton when I get back to Germany (especially the snow, since all it does in Germany is rain) and I’m certain that I will be back.

Too much detail?

Today’s discussion on ‘the effect of too much detail’ was very interesting. It’s true that the details help determine the characters in the book (and all books for that matter), for example we know what a character likes, if we read about the details he notices in his daily life. If he notices litter lying around or complains about messiness, we pretty much can deduct that he is a very neat and orderly person.

However, when a book contains a lot of detail about a certain place the effect is different depending on who reads it. As we saw in our class today, since The Garneau Block has a lot of details about places in Edmonton (not always correct as was pointed out in-class), Edmontonians (or others like me, who have been to Edmonton and know some of the places) will establish a much closer emotional connection to the book. Everyone likes to reads books that are situated in the place you feel at home in. I know that I am always delighted when my hometown is mentioned in a book.

That however doesn’t mean that people who don’t know the city cannot enjoy this. Some people have some really great imagination (sadly not me, at least when it comes to places) and they would get a really good sense of what Edmonton is like from the book. Others might think it’s too much information on one place that you didn’t know, but the level of detail you like, is pretty much a matter of what you like personally. If one likes long descriptions of landscapes in books, than one likes details. If you don’t like those, than you probably won’t like all those details in The Garneau Block.

It might also be a matter of frequency. There are not that many books taking place in Edmonton, so it is ‘more’ special if you read one. On the other hands there are tons of books that take place in London, New York…etc. and if you live in those places you might be fed up with reading about your own city. You would prefer to read about another (perhaps more exotic?) place.

All in all, the question of too much detail and how that works for you, is matter of you own personal perspective and preference.

Ok , this blog is going to be very short. Maybe it’s the stress of the upcoming papers/exams, but this is the very first week that I don’t know what to write about in my blog. Or maybe I just really don’t like poetry.

I mean I get that the poems we’ve read and discussed in-class are another way “in” to the city, or rather another way of portraying the city, but why can’t the author simply write an article or essay expressing her ideas, instead of hiding what she wants to say about the city behind big mythical metaphors that anyone without lots of time for research simply doesn’t get?

I’m not saying that the poems we’ve read weren’t good. In fact, I’d say they pretty brilliant, especially in the way the poems work together as a collection and how the poems refer back to one another. I know they’re literary and aesthetic and all that, but that really isn’t for me. I don’t get poetry. Even if had had the time to look up all the words and images in the poems that I didn’t know, I still wouldn’t have gotten half the things we’ve discussed in-class. Now I see all the metaphors and references we have unraveled in our discussions, but only because they were explained to me.

All I can say is that I’m glad we’re done with the poetry and and can move on to a “real” story.

A Tourist's Guide to Strathcona

For any visitor to Edmonton, Canada’s northernmost metropolis, Strathcona on the Southside is a lovely neighborhood to start for any exploration of the city. Situated between Edmonton’s “famous” Whyte Avenue, where one goes to have some fun, and Southgate, one of Edmonton’s many, many shopping malls, it is an area that has schools and playgrounds, small cafés and grocery shops along 104th street and is inhabited by many friendly, but ordinary Canadians. Let’s have a look around.

Our tour begins at the home of the six, lovely students in their early 20s that share one side of a duplex on 67th Avenue. Their house is right next to the Roadrunner Motel, which makes for a not so pleasant view, and is across the street from Staples and The Home Depot. The back alley behind the house is dominated by the rusting carcass of an old pick-up truck, which means that it is not a nice alley for children to play in.

Proceeding north from the student’s front door we cross a small parking lot till we reach the Calgary Trail, which is one of Edmonton’s busiest streets, especially between 4 and 6pm, when all Edmontonian’s leave their jobs to return to the suburbs. Continuing north along the Calgary Trail, we soon pass the Southside Athletic Grounds followed by the Rollie Mills Athletic Fields, which make for a nice contrast to the small business and train tracks along the other side of the street.

As we continue towards Whyte Avenue, we pass the University Avenue, which as the name suggest leads us, after a 30-minute walk, to University of Alberta’s North Campus. The university is home to over 36000 students, offers a large variety of different programs and just last year turned 100 years old.

Further north we come across the Old Strathcona Shopping Center, which lies across the street from Strathcona Chinatown Mall, and which next to a post office and the Dollarama, houses a fabulous place called the Dream Tea House, where one can get some delicious bubble tea.
From there it is only a short walk to Whyte Avenue, which is lined at both sides by small shops and bars. Turning east we come across the Elephant & Castle, which is a nice, quiet pub where every two weeks, young Edmontonians meet for beer and knitting.

Once you have enough from exploring Whyte Avenue (don’t forget to check out the K&K, where you can get all kinds of German food and Saturday’s Farmer’s market), you can easily catch a bus to Downtown Edmonton, West Edmonton Mall or pretty much any other part the city.

We could go on, but the exploration of Edmonton could fill an entire book! Why not visit Edmonton on your next holiday? The land is flat, the weather is not that cold most of the time and Edmontonians are always welcoming visitors.

Edmonton in our own words

I like this book. I really do. I think it’s the best book we have read so far in the course. I like its structure and the fact that includes so many different voices. How much of the stories are true or not we don’t know, but the author at least gives a pretty decent impression of giving voice to a variety of people and presenting us with various points of views. We also get different accounts of how historic events were preserved: the author offer his reader diary entries, letters, accounts of eye-witnesses, recorded oral history, stories of descendants...etc.

I like how the book his chronologically organized and how each chapter ends with the personal stories. The author tries to include as many different voices as possible: telling us stories of everyday life, many immigrant experiences and trouble of the women during the wars. And those stories that can’t be told, because they were not recorded, are also acknowledged by the author.

It gives the most all-around picture of Edmonton that I have seen (not that I have read much about Edmonton outside this course, of course) and in my opinion it’s fitting an Edmonton centennial.

Nature

The first part of the article „Dead Cities“, where the author discusses all the novelists, who have imagined the destruction of cities, reminded me of a documentary that I saw a couple of years ago. This documentary dealt exactly with what is described in these books: what happens to our cities in 50, in 100, in 500, in 1000 …etc. years, after humans have suddenly become extinct? It showed how nature slowly returned to the cities and took over. After 50 years there wasn’t too much damage to the building (humans had died of some kind of disease, so all the buildings and infrastructure were intact), but when time went on the wildlife took over and slowly the buildings turned into ruins. What surprised me back then, was that they showed that skyscrapers would be the first buildings to go (cause they’re largely made out of glass) and that the brick buildings would stand the longest. In the last sequence one could hardly see that there had been a city at all, all that was left were a few brick ruins.
So whether we humans survive or not, life continues even without us. To quote a famous movie scientist: “Life finds a way.”

Free Education

I’m now going back to the previous Solnit text here, but there is one point, that was mentioned in-class when we discussed the text, which I think is fundamentally true:
I think that, like someone said in class, that we only really protest or participate in demonstrations, when the cause for the demonstration affects us directly. If it affects our lives, we’re more likely to go out onto the streets and do something about it.

I have a relatively recent (meaning last year) experience with demonstrations myself, when the government introduces tuitions fees (we don’t have these in Germany) of about 500€ at my home university in Germany. Thousands of students of my home university (me included) came to together to demonstrate for a FREE EDUCATION. We blocked the streets of the city center by walking and sitting on them for hours, we took over one of the university buildings and even walked onto the Autobahn to disrupt the traffic there (which was quite dangerous and some students were arrested for that, so we stopped doing that). All the students signed a petition and consequently sued the government and when the term came along, where you actually had pay for the first time, many simply DID NOT pay (which could have gotten you expelled).
And this happened not just in my own university, but all over the state (and the other states, where they introduced tuition fees, which not all German states did). There were big demonstration in all major cities and the students from various universities all got together at one point to demonstrate in front of the parliament building in the state capital. And the students were not alone, but joined by professors, teachers, parents of future students…etc. This went on for months and months.

Now you may ask, was the demonstration successful? Well, we got a lot of national media attention and caused a lot of disruptions, which made sure that we were being taken seriously. However, the real reason why I would say, it was a successful demonstration, is that we actually achieved what we set out to do. After two terms the tuition fees were abolished and our universities are once again free. Unfortunately, it looks like the government will try to introduce the tuition fees again next year, so it may only have been a temporary success. However, if they do, the whole process is likely to start all over again, so I don’t know what is going to happen. As the saying goes: We’ll cross that bridge when we get there (or something like that).

The sentence that I remember most of all, from Rebecca Sonit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking, is on page 216, where she writes: “The past becomes the foundation on which the future will be built, and those who honor no past may never make a future.”
I was struck by how much truth is behind this statement. How everything we do, all the places we visit and all the events that happen have a past, whether one know about it or not. The past matters, which is obviously when one considers how much time and effort people put into discovering the past. Not just historians or archeologists, but even ordinary people that want to find out about the family tree. People care so much about the past, because it helps us understand the present. The question of where we come from (meaning evolution and family history) helps us figure out, who we are and perhaps also what we want. And only when we have found a satisfactory answer (satisfactory for oneself), can we make plans for the future.
Also, a very important aspect is that people should, or at least try to, learn from their mistakes. If we know the reasons behind a dreadful event, we can try to avoid it. Basically, don’t do the same mistake twice, which is only possible, if we remember that a mistake has been made.