(Message sent Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:54:09 -0700)
Of all the things I thought I might find in Sydney, a 17m tall violin was not high on the list. It's actually quite well done, with knowledgeable touches such as the varnish being worn completely off the neck, and different weights of strings.
They say that Nova Scotia in general, and Cape Bretton in particular, is very beautiful. I'll have to take their word for it, as I've not seen much of it due to the weather. The mornings have been given over to freezing Atlantic fogs so thick that you can see nothing but white beyond a few metres, the afternoons to thunderous downpours.
I've certainly had glimpses of the beauty - the land is lush and green (and I know why!), and dotted with lakes and waterways. The communities are small and themselves consist of small but well-tended weatherboard cottages.
My original plan for Cape Bretton was to do lots of cycling and hiking, but the weather coupled with the difficulty of getting around without a car has required a change in thinking. No matter. I shall just have to come back sometime when they're having a summer. And by then, no-one else will have a car either :-) .
Sydney is a nice enough place. It has a grid layout of wide streets lined with mature trees and nice little cottages. It has a short harbour boardwalk complete with not one but two spectacularly bad buskers who both feel their talents in need of amplification. And it has an eclectic taste in statuary. On one walk I spotted the previously-mentioned violin (which is at N 46 08.495 W 060 11.979 btw), a very fine lion rescued from some old bank building, and a demon guarding somebody's lawn.
One day I went out to a neighbouring town to visit a mine museum. Cape Bretton has vast coal reserves, mostly just off-shore, and so the coal mines - most long since abandoned - tend to be on the coasts, with tunnels going down and out under the ocean. This mining museum wouldn't be particularly noteworthy, except for the fact that it sits on a disused mine, and you can take tours down into the tunnels that run under the sea. The tours are led by retired miners. The guy who took our group down sure likes his work, and could talk for hours about the bad old days. During his longer speeches the children would get fidgety, but then so would the grown-ups. But he did have a great cache of stories. Although I don't doubt that he was once a miner, all his stories were from a generation he couldn't have been part of, the pickaxe-and-candle generation, the canary in a cage generation, the permanently in debt to the Company Store generation.
The mine itself was quite interesting. You walk down a concrete shaft until you get into the coal seam, which has been dug out using the room-and-pillar technique, which takes 40% of the coal by leaving 60% behind to stop the ocean from caving the roof in. This results in a grid of corridors. In this particular case the seam isn't very high, and so when down the mine you spend most of your time unable to stand up fully.
It's very hard to say anything nice about the town that hosts the mine museum, Glace Bay. It's a scrappy little town, and the locals treat their beautiful stretch of Atlantic coastline like it's an embarrassment. It should be the heart of the town, but instead it's littered with fishing detritus and fast food wrappers.
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