Nova Scotia is fish

There has been an explosion in the diversity of restaurants in this city. Lebanese,Turkish, Thai, Persian, and Japanese. When I left N.S. in '95 there were no sushi restaurant in Halifax. You don't make much sushi out of haddock, cod, and lobster, the main seafoods out here. Us Maritimers kind of have an aversion to eating raw fish. You're supposed to cook it damn it!
So, now in Halifax 2009 there are at least 11! In a city of 370,000! Within a five minute walk of my apartment:













Shit, apparently we love out raw fish after all.

Halifax

So, I'm living on Brunswick St right at the bottom of Citadel Hill (for those of you who don't know, Citadel Hill is the big hill in the middle of downtown upon which a fort was built to help defend the city...more on it later). Brunswick is the street on the foreground of the picture in the blog banner.

Beginning in the mid-1700s, Halifax was but a garrison town for His Majesty's army. New England had insisted that England establish a garrison here to offset the threat from the French who had a fort in Louisbourg in Cape Breton (http://www.louisbourg.ca/fort/).

To the right edge of the photo is the south end of the hill. Here one set of barracks was constructed for the soldiers, and still exists as Royal Artillery Park. And another barracks was erected at the north end. The path connecting them was officially called Brunswick St but was unofficially reffered to as "Barracks St". And upon the length of this little street, with soldiers moving back forth, the pimps, prostitutes, and bars set up shop. By all accounts it was a slum of filth and squalor with rowdy & horny drunken soldiers of His Majesty's army living it up.

None of that remains (un)fortunately. Anyone reading this who is familar with Halifax will recognize that it hasn't entirely disappeared, after all the bar The Palace still exists.

post number one

Ok, this is going to be much differen than my last attempt at blogging.

I'm back in N.S. to live for the first time in 14 years, something I never though I would do. So, it's with experienced eyes I return to this little pennisula that sticks out into the Atlantic Ocean, that was the 14th British Colony in North America, that holds tales of pirates and privateers, that the shadow of the past clings to with every step. A city that has changed a LOT since I lived here in the early 90s.

This will be an attempt to elucidate my experiences here in some way. Part history, part living in the present, plus whatever else I choose to throw in. A sukiyaki if you will, but made with donairs, pepperoni, and haddock....