I’m a very easily satisfied tourist. Give me a map, and I’ll find things to do for several days. With my free of charge tourist map I walked around downtown Edmonton, visited museums and checked out the most prominent landmarks. No guide needed. I’m a true geographer that way.
The architecture in Edmonton isn’t like anything I’ve seen before. In my opinion, it’s a strange combination of tastelessness and a rough kind of charm that I can’t decide if I like or dislike. But, as with anything new and unexpected, it intrigues me.
Imagine, they have Manpower in Canada too. I still get the text messages from my old employer. It feels homey, somehow, but I guess I should e-mail them and ask them to take me off the texting list.
The city center is made up of skyskrapers, but only a ten-twenty minute walk in either direction, the residential houses start. And this is where the strange begins. It’s as if they couldn’t decide. Either build high, colossal apartment buildings, or keep the small, quaint single family houses. Instead, there is a little bit of both and in a way, it makes a walk through central Edmonton a lot more interesting.
Otherwise, there are the typical important buildings, the Legislature, City Hall, the Art Gallery and the Public Library. Nothing really exceptional, but kind of nice all the same.
The impressive Legislature building, with both the Canadian and the UK flag waving from the roof.
City Hall.
The recently built Art Gallery of Alberta. The one crazy building in the city.
The Public Library of Edmonton was nothing special, the outside mostly looking lika a box and the inside being mostly brown and gray and with a ceiling so low it felt as if the books could crash down on you at any time.
The Royal Alberta Museum was also quite small, with an exhibition of Albertan animals, one of the history of the aboriginals of Alberta and a few stones and skeletons in a tiny natural history section. But they also had a feature exhibit with photos of moths. Such beautiful, hairy creatures. Wonderful pictures. Great show.
My love for public transport, especially subway trains, didn’t really get to flourish in Edmonton. The LTR consists of one line with 15 stations – not much room for adventure.
One of all the bridges crossing the North Saskatchewan River, the beautifully meandering river that separates downton Edmonton in the north from the University and Old Strathcona in the south.
Already before I arrived in Edmonton, Frida had warned me that there wasn’t very much to do there. But I had no problem finding things to occupy my time with during my eight day stay in Edmonton.
Katja Malmborg 