Edmonton

Spent the Mid-Week in Edmonton with Sarah, with plans to spend the night at the Fairmont and the following day investigating the West Edmonton Mall.

The 366km drive East was lovely, a long, lonely high-way, punctuated by Hinton and Edson and a few tiny burgs. A lot of the way the only radio we received were a country-music station and 'The Rig', a rock-station for truckers.

Sarah remarked that Edmonton made her think of the Toronto of twenty years ago, she loved the kitsch, the faded old signage still painted on the side of a lot of the buildings and the public art that dotted the downtown.

It reminded me a lot of the big cities of the UK; friendly, unassuming, working-class cities like Birmingham or Glasgow. Edmonton seems to be adjusting to Alberta's incredible wealth, and prestige-stores and corporate art is squeezed where it can be among the dated, eighties facade of a lot of the buildings. The elegant, tall windows of an Apple or Abercrombie and Fitch are wedged under a sand-colored, pebble dashed monolith, itself bedecked with a Miami-Vice pink neon script.

The Fairmont was lovely, the first time i'd stayed in a really posh hotel (four diamond!), we had what should have been an inordinately expensive dinner, with an apropriately doting and avuncular waiter. A very lovely experience.

Curiously, the Alberta Legislature Building had a Union Jack and an Alberta flag, but not a Canadian flag.
The West Edmonton Mall really does look horrible from the outside, my heart sank a little as we got near it, a giant, sand coloured building, squatting on the horizon. Inside it reminded me a lot of the mall in Milton Keynes, rows of shops seperated by long water-features and plants, its probably four times the size of the Center:MK though. Inside we browsed around, like a pair of bush-whacked country-folk, wide-eyed and gasping at all the shiny things and the massive bookstores and the three (three!) La Senza stores.

Ended the day by watching The Dark Knight at the IMAX screen there, the IMAX and the speaker system were a world apart from the quaint wee cinema we watched the film in initially.