During our stay on PEI, there’s a federal election. The televised debates were done in French and in English. Olle watched the English debates, which were quite informative, done in a moderated round-table fashion. Leaders of political parties were asked viewer questions on different areas, which led to vigorous debate. Zapping to the stiff, trench warfare style of the US vice-presidential debates was only sad. The Canadian elections seem more like the Scandinavian ones, a little more focused on real issues.

To me, the winners of the debate seemed to be the Green’s leader Elizabeth May, and the suave Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe. 

Disclaimer: This is a judgement based on one hour’s worth of watching TV.

Historical election results presented as a histogram.

This was an experience.

The car was jam-packed with the five of us. We arrived at the MacAusland’s Woolen Mills, a weaving factory that make blankets, wool yarn, and other custom weaving and spinning. 

This is the main building of the mill

Visitors really are this welcome

The main house had the spinning processes, the put-yarn-on-bobbins process, the make-the-warp process, the plying process, and much more. There was a room where the blankets hung to dry. Raw, unprocessed wool sat in its own room. 

Bobbins in a bag

Yarn cones

I have no idea what this does

Carding the wool. We think.

Drying the blankets

 

The wool room

They also dye the yarn on the site. “This machine spins the crap out of the wool” said a man in the barn-like building that housed the very loud loom, and the other bigger machines. Olle, with his single-ear hearing nervousness, protected his hearing while copping a short peek at the loom room’s contents.

The smells, the sounds, and the dusty air was overwhelming. Wooden building, rickety stairs. “A fire accident waiting to happen”, said Katherine. She told us about a New Brunswick mill that had burnt down a couple of years ago. That mill got rebuilt, only with the help of local farmers and businesses. MacAusland’s is a pocket of history. The place looks like nothing’s been changed in the last fifty years.

Bonus: Peter’s films and photos from the same trip.

Together with the organizers of the Zap Your PRAM conference, we went on a site visit to Dalvay-by-the-sea. There we met the energetic, and highly professional manager, Michelle. She toured the place with us, and sat down to do planning, in a way that opened a door to how an event manager thinks and plans. 

We got a tour of the site. Very impressive. There were a few hotel room cottages on the premises. These were drawn by Michelle’s father. It had been a tug-of-war to get to build the cottages – at all. The hotel is situated in the middle of a national park, and thus many small requirements were to be satisfied in regards to color, size, and placement.

We took no photos there, on the weird grounds that we’d come back. Take my word for it, it’s breathtaking. Breathtaking in that Chesterfield kind of way. We are very much looking forward to coming back in a few weeks.

Brain storm, originally uploaded by Luisa Carbonelli.

So much experiences already. Gotta capture them all, to paraphrase pokémon.

So, today we’ll be putting it down in writing. Weather: crisp, bright, no wind to speak of. Few tourists out today.

The city public works men took the sunflower pots from the roadside onto their truck for the season. The parking meter man emptied each meter, using a special key which dangled on a full keychain. The season’s winding up.

Being in Charlottetown. Meeting interesting people, all kinds. In case you wonder what our place of residence is like, another post will detail that. Have no fear.

The morning today began with a decision to walk to the recommended food store, which was a corner store of Copenhagen style, oddly situated in the doctors/lawyers section of the town. We walked there. We walk everywhere, as yet. Luisa, the driver in the effort, has been promised the loan of a car (but we have not needed any yet). The posh residential area: US movie establishing shot during the first 5 minutes of many films. You’ve already seen it.

The winds can be strong, so a traditional hat of the Scandinavian persuasion came in handy today. It was bought at the MEC, Mountaineer Equipment Co-op, in Halifax. Which really is a co-operative, started by people who do climb mountains, to sell affordable quality outdoors gear. A good hat, in all. With a manly tassel, bobbing in the wind.

At lunch today, when prepping a simple meal, we were whisked away to a “Gong Bao Thursday” lunch at the restaurant Interlude. Good Asian food, in friendly, unassuming atmosphere. Our table (made of many small tables huddled in a long line) had twelve people, all a-chatter. One of the diners was Paul, who quickly volunteered to lend us his computer for the workspace at Fitzroy Street. Lunch wrapping up, we paid, and Paul walked with us to his office, situated downtown, atop a brewery (“that’s what smells like French fries”). Office review: NYC loft-like feeling, doing raw-bricks-on-one-wall successfully. And the computer was not your father’s old hand-me-down Compaq, it was a brushed metal G5 Mac tower. Thanks, Paul!

Lugging the quite heavy computer and screen across downtown was challenging but it ended well. It’s now set up and runs fine.

Now, we opted to have just one workstation, since we knew that the two of us, with our very lived-in digital lifestyle, would spend inordinate amounts of time on just… the Mac itself, instead of doing stuff. So, with some rigor imposed, a “dogma” if you will, our plan is to end up with less 2.0, and more island.

My alloted typing time’s run out, and I’m due at the Confederation Court Mall, to meet Luisa, who I hope has been successful in buying an umbrella. Rain’s serious here.

On PEI, we’ll live in a fine piece of historical residence.

Hello. Olle here, ruminating. It’s a Malmö evening outside, and I can hear the neighbors move their furniture. Some cars roll by on nearby town artery Föreningsgatan. Some minor traffic even lights up my own street, Löjtnantsgatan. It’s a small stretch of road, and consists mostly of parking spaces, a café at one end and a (lousy) sushi joint at the other. Outside the café the street’s undergoing some repairs right now. Unseen workers have opened a huge hole in the asphalt, uncovering some rusted-out pipe connection. Two large sheets of thick steel now cover the stone-set “street edge” where my bicycle bumps when I cross the small park outside the café. Yes, I enjoy the luxury of biking to work. Those steel sheets probably allow heavy machinery to jostle about without breaking those stone edges, I guess.

Most of the things I have learnt begun with me being curious about something. An itch to know more. The pleasure of finding out is great in itself, but greater when you have someone to share it with.

So, on PEI, I’ll be fact-finding, and L will be taking photographs. It’ll be interesting.

Next week, I’ll be in Halifax, then sea-faring a bit to get arrive on PEI by boat. Come to think of it, I know nothing about Halifax, I wonder what it’s like. I’ll go read a bit on that.

Olle here. At breakfast I asked myself this: PEI is a fishing community. But has the Island ever had any manufacturing plants? Any Spinning Jennies, or other factory-organized machine shops? Are some or any of the older everyday objects on the Island built there?

I’m interested in this piece of history for many reasons, one being the non-standardized power schemes that factories had to use. Each factory had its own power station – a water mill, first only with its own rotary motor power, later on with an electrical generator. In Scandinavia, at least, each factory created its own electrical system (anywhere between 100 and 200 V). This meant, among other things, that they could never share power.

These guys caught my eye, or rather this bit in their ‘About’ section:

What do an arrowhead, a folksong, a Mark Butcher chair, a wooden plough, fossilized pollen and a Harris-designed church have in common? Well, at least two things: all are precious parts of the heritage of Prince Edward Island; and all will be included in a broad Island Heritage Study commissioned by the Government of Prince Edward Island.

I haven’t read through their work on the blog yet, but I get the feeling that this could be an interesting partner should we decide to go for a version the heritage-storytelling-experience walk.

I heard — and will follow up on — a rumour, that some strands of European emigrant musical tradition had been kept, more or less unadulterated, among Island folks, long after the folks back in Europe had moved on.

An effect of this might be: researchers finding excellent examples of old traditional Scottish folk music alive and well, ready for recording.

What was this possible tradition like? What remains of it ? Does this “stagnant pocket” concept carry into other areas of life? Stagnant, by the way, is a bad word for this, I’m thinking more of a fork in a road.

When I’ve dipped into this, I’ll let you know.