Lepod's Blog

We had a very nice 2 hour flight from Montreal, and the slower pace of life was apparent as soon as we left the plane.  St John’s is a famous port, and reminds me of Lyttleton except quite a bit bigger. The houses are mostly wooden Victorian terraced houses painted in quite bright colours, and the streets are  steep. Yesterday we walked around the centre city and I purchased an excellent Vespa of Newfoundland tee shirt like this:

I’m rather pleased with it! Then we walked to the museum, as it is free on Wednesdays, and admired the stuffed animals that we just don’t get, like beavers, moles, otters, cougars, silver foxes, also they had an exhibition of ice age mammals with models of hairy mammoths and giant beavers, which were enormous!

Today Pauline and Simon were at the Newfoundland Labrador Centre for Health Information all day, and I walked along the waterfront up to the Signal Hill national historic site, which overlooks the harbour entrance and the town, and was used for military signalling. There are also several cannons guarding the narrow entrance to the port. The views were great, and I also saw a whale’s tail out to sea. Apparently there’s a lot of Minke whales about at the moment. There’s all sorts of interesting animals here and we are determined to see some live ones in the weekend. Tonight we went to a vegetarian restaurant called The Sprout, as Simon is a vegetarian and he had a rough deal last night when we had fish and chips and he had to have a burger minus the meat which was a bit boring. The food at The Sprout was excellent. There are some great restaurants here.  One of the local delicacies is cod tongue, which we haven’t tried yet but I will.

I’ve posted some pictures of the town and the Signal Hill area. Incidentally there’s also a George Street! Will write more later.