Winnipeg’s Millenium Centre- Haunted By Ghosts

” At night a woman’s ghost walks back and forth between the five front windows”, said our guide as he led us on a tour of Winnipeg’s Millenium Centre, formerly the Canadian Bank of Commerce on Main Street.  The tour was part of Winnipeg’s Doors Open event last weekend.

 The ghost who supposedly floats by these five tall windows is that of a bank secretary who died in the building. Her story was just one of the interesting things I learned when I joined a tour of the Millenium Centre led by Mitch Rouire.  Mitch’s company Storm Catering is in charge of all the events that happen in this former bank building. 

I was interested in touring the Millenium Centre because many years ago there was an art installation there by artist Wanda Koop about a trip she and her mother made to her mother’s birthplace in Ukraine. I found the installation very moving and meaningful. The story of the exhibition was made into a movie In Her Eyes which I often showed to my high school students. 

The 14 foot high ceiling in the main part of the Millenium Centre features this impressive lit dome. 

The cavernous main lobby of the former bank has Corinthian columns and marble walls and floors. 

The day I visited, the main floor of the Millenium Centre also featured a display of historical wedding attire courtesy of the Costume Museum of Canada. The Millenium Centre has become a popular venue for Winnipeg weddings. The Costume Museum which is temporarily closed, houses many of its artifacts at the Millenium Centre. 

We got to peek into the vault. We learned that in the basement under this section of the building there was a stable for the horses and wagons that transported money to the bank from all across Western Canada. 

I went into the opulent bank manager’s office with its walnut woodwork and leather chairs. 

The manager even had his own sitting area and fireplace. 

We saw the office where the ghostly secretary probably met her demise. Women spent the night here bringing the bank’s  accounts up to date, recording the amounts of  every cheque cashed in individual ledger books for each banking patron. These ledgers were moved up and down from the vaults many floors below with a hydraulic elevator. 

The bank superintendent’s office had an ornately carved ceiling, a fireplace and a private bathroom all done in marble.  An X on the floor in the centre of the room marks the spot where the second last superintendent of the bank committed suicide. 

They say the superintendent’s ghost haunts the stairwells during social functions at the Millenium Centre. The story may just be a ploy to prevent guests from wandering around the dark corridors of the building on their own.  

Mitch took us up above the dome and we were surprised to find it was lit by flourescent and not natural light. The dome was very dusty and dirty. Mitch said they cleaned it once but then it was much too bright down on the main floor. 

We learned that many Hollywood movies have used the Millenium Centre for a set, including Shall We Dance, The Assassination of Jesse James, The Divide and The Arrow.

On either side of the lobby as I exited the Millenium Centre were these intricate engravings. This one is titled Banking and shows a banker receiving funds from two citizens. 

This one titled Commerce shows a banker accepting sheaves of wheat from merchants. This is very appropriate since Winnipeg’s Exchange District where the old bank building stands, was the site of the Winnipeg Grain Exchange. Grain drove the economy of Winnipeg for many decades. 

I was glad I had a chance to take a tour inside this magnificent building just two blocks away from my home. I am looking forward to going there again at the end of June when I am invited to a wedding reception at the Millenium Centre.  I wonder if I’ll see any ghosts? 

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A Bizarre Museum in Florence Italy

“Ooooooooooooo!”   I heard a chorus of horrified exclamations as a group of Italian school children entered the Zoological Museum in Florence.  It housed one of the most interesting and bizarre assortments of artifacts I’ve ever seen.

Of the museum’s three collections the most fascinating and eerie was one of anatomic waxes created by artists in the 1600’s to help medical students study the human body and learn anatomy without having to actually touch a cadaver. There are ten rooms lined with case after case that display wax bodies and body parts. The bodies have been split open and all the veins, blood vessels and fat are detailed.

Perhaps most intriguing are 38 models showing how a baby develops in a mother’s uterus during each stage of pregnancy. Modern day medical experts are amazed at the accuracy and detail of these models that were made over four hundred years ago.

The nearly two thousand wax pieces painted in bright reds, greens and yellows have a sort of macabre beauty about them. Whether you are walking by a bony hand, its skin torn back so you can see the tendons, muscles and blood vessels; or a model showing in minute detail what a fallopian pregnancy looks like; you can’t help but admire the skillful artist who created these wax works.

It is clear Clemente Susini; the sculptor who molded and painted all the figures is still admired by artists today. On our visit to the Zoological Museum in 2009 we saw numerous art students sitting in front of the various displays of human body parts and trying to do sketches of what they saw. One young artist sat perfectly still staring at a human head. It had been titled sideways and the skin pulled off the skull so all the brain matter spilled out on the table for examination. There were moments in the Zoological Museum when I felt like I was in the middle of a Frankenstein movie set.        

  The second collection of the museum contains thousands of mammals, reptiles, birds, insects, fish and amphibians. The Medicis, Florence’s ruling family in the period between 1360 and 1737 sent explorers all over the world to collect items for this nature museum. Some specimens are stored in formaldehyde but many have been stuffed using what are obviously very old-fashioned and primitive methods of taxidermy. You can see literally every animal species here from the smallest butterfly to a huge sharp toothed grinning hippopotamus.

  The last collection in the museum houses display boxes of fairly gruesome scenes created in the late 1600’s by a wax artist named Gaetano Zumbo. One is entitled The Effects of Syphilis and another The Plague. Each features a multitude of decaying and dismembered corpses. Little babies lie dead beside their mothers whose bodies rest on piles of human skulls. Toothless, white-haired, naked elderly are splayed on the rocks outside a cave. It’s a graphic reminder of the devastation brought about by disease in the time before modern medical technology.          

Twins-  by Sato Akira from Anatomia Barocca

As I made my way out of the Zoological Museum a busy, bustling crowd of middle school students entered one of the rooms filled with eviscerated wax cadavers.  Oooooooooooo they screamed almost in unison horror. Even though I don’t speak Italian it wasn’t hard to guess what they were probably talking about as they walked beside the display cases.

         The Zoological Museum in Florence isn’t the easiest place to find. It’s on a narrow winding street and you have to walk up four flights of stone stairs to reach the floor where the displays are housed. It’s worth the steep climb!

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Grain Is King

There’s  a steel sculpture painted in psychedelic colors just two blocks from our home in the Exchange District called Grain Is King.  It is actually a very appropriate art work to have in the Exchange District since our area of the city gets its name from the fact that the Winnipeg Grain Exchange was thriving here at the turn of the century. 

I’ve gone by the sculpture hundreds of times but I think what made me take notice of it on Saturday was the smell!  The lilac bushes all around the art piece were in full bloom and full fragrance. I stopped just to inhale deep breaths of the lovely aroma and then I decided to take some photos of the sculpture. 

Sheaves of grain are cut into the art work’s body and apparently if you crouch down and look through them from the back you can see the corner of Portage and Main streets which is the busy central hub of Winnipeg. The plaque on the sculpture’s base says, “Grain has built this town and has driven the economy of Winnipeg for many years.” 

The man responsible for the sculpture is Jordan Van Sewell.  He’s been working as an artist for thirty years and cites musician Frank Zappa and comic book creator Charles Schultz as influences. 

Unfortunately there is a bit of graffiti on the back of the sculpture but luckily Van Sewell’s multi-colored exterior provides great camouflage so the graffiti is hardly noticeable. 

The sculpture Grain is King made me think of this photo my Aunt Mary took of my grandfather, Diedrich Peters, who was a grain farmer in southern Manitoba. The grain he grew no doubt passed through Winnipeg many times on railway cars. 

Grain is King is a good reminder of the agricultural products that were the foundation of the economy of the city of Winnipeg for so many years. 

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Fair Trade Coffee and Hope For Laos

“Breaking the cycle of poverty in Laos one family at a time.”  That’s the mission of Bolaven Farms.  Last May my husband Dave spent a week on a fair trade coffee plantation located on 410 acres of fertile land on the Bolaven Plateau in southern Laos. 

Child on Bolaven Coffee Plantation Laos

He traveled there with twenty- four of his Hong Kong students to work at digging holes for coffee trees, building sheds and helping care for livestock.

Dave with children on the Bolaven Coffee Plantation

Bolaven Farms is a cooperative that uses farming methods designed to sustain rather than deplete the rich nutrients in the Laotian soil. About 100 acres of the farm are devoted to grasses and legumes to restore nitrogen to the soil and provide fodder for livestock. The remainder is used for coffee growing.    

Bolaven families welcome Dave and his students to the coffee plantation in Laos

Up to fifty families at a time live on the Bolaven Farms coffee plantation and are taught how to grow coffee profitably and organically. They are given housing and earn a fair wage for the work they do.  Medical care is provided and there is a school for the children.  If they ‘graduate’ from the agriculture program at Bolaven, families are eligible for a loan to buy a seven acre coffee farm of their own and can sell their coffee to Bolaven. Workers hand sort the coffee to ensure its quality before the beans are roasted, packaged, shipped and marketed as a fair trade product in other countries. 

Sam Say founder of Bolaven Farms

Sam Say is the founder of Bolaven Farms. He was born in Laos. He and his family fled the country in 1977 after a decade of heavy bombing by the United States and repeated invasions by the Vietnamese.  The Say family spent two years in a refugee camp before a Mennonite Church in Calgary sponsored their immigration to Canada. Sam eventually moved to Hong Kong and made a fortune as a commodities trader.  He decided he wanted to use his wealth to help his fellow countrymen and women and so Bolaven Farms was born.

The Hong Kong students made friends with the coffee plantation workers

     Sam Say’s son Christian used to be a student at the international school in Hong Kong where Dave and I were teachers.  Christian played on the basketball team Dave coached. 

Riding out to the plantation

Sam approached our school wondering if a group of our students would like to come to Bolaven Farms to work alongside the people there, befriend them, teach them some English and once they returned to Hong Kong spread the word about the project. Dave agreed to lead the trip.       

Building a shed on the coffee plantation

The work on the farm was very hard, and not at all what our well-to-do students are used to.  But they tackled their tasks with determination and energy.

Student housing on the coffee plantation

The students stayed in army barrack type housing and slept on air mattresses under mosquito netting.  They showered communally with the Laotian workers. Every evening they performed plays, dances and songs for the plantation workers and their families. They tried to teach the children English.

Making friends with children on the coffee plantation

Despite the language barrier the high school students developed a warm relationship with the Laotian farm families and Dave said some of the Hong Kong teens were in tears when it came time to say good-bye at the end of the week.  

Students with Bolaven families

Dave found it inspiring to be at Bolaven Farms.  Unlike many places we have visited in the third world where people living in desperate circumstances seem resigned to their lot in life, the people at Bolaven Farms are filled with optimism.  They really believe they have an opportunity to create a better future for their families. 

My thanks to the International Christian school students on the Laos trip who provided the photos for this post. 

A Roof With A View

I got a chance for a bird’s-eye view of the heart of the city on Saturday!

As part of the Doors Open Winnipeg event the Arts Space venue at 100 Arthur Street allowed access to their roof top. Visitors were free to walk around and take photos of the Exchange District from a very unique point of view. 

This is the Crocus Building which houses the Crocus Investment Company, the Manitoba Conservatory of Music and the Winnipeg Contemporary Dancers. It used to belong to the Ashdown Hardware Company as you can see from the white letters still etched on the brick near the roof top.  Mr. James Ashdown, a former Winnipeg mayor built it in 1905 to use as a hardware store. It replaced an earlier building erected in 1870 which burned down in 1904. 

I live in a condo in the Ashdown Warehouse where Mr. Ashdown stored the goods he sold, not only in Winnipeg but all across western Canada. Here is my building tucked in between two other buildings. 

The Cube is the focal point of the park in Old Market Square a popular venue for outdoor summer concerts in the Exchange District. The Cube is a performance stage that opened in 2010 and was built at a cost of $1.2 million. During the Winnipeg Jazz Festival and the Fringe Festival the park is alive with performers and people. 

The distinctive Confederation Building was built in 1912 in the Chicago style of architecture and was occupied by the Confederation Life Association for over 50 years. 

The popular Kings Head Pub and Eatery is housed in a building erected in 1896 as a trading centre for hides, wool and furs. In 1906 it became home to a German language press which published 20,000 copies of the paper Der Nordwestern weekly. After serving as offices for an airline and a radio and television wholesaler it became a restaurant in 1983.

The new Red River Community College Paterson Global Foods Institute will be housed in the old Union Tower Building which is currently being renovated and added on to. The new facilities will have a student residence and be home to the college’s hospitality and culinary programs. I am looking forward to having the students living in the Exchange District and adding to our resident population. The facility will also house a restaurant that will be open to the public. 

The Travelers Building was constructed in 1907 as a headquarters for a union of traveling salesmen that was founded in 1882.  It housed offices, meeting rooms, lounges and recreation facilities including a Turkish bath. In 1954 it became the home of federal government offices and in 1976 was redeveloped into a shopping center with specialty shops, galleries and a restaurant currently housing the Peasant Cookery. 

I have been doing lots of walking in the Exchange District since moving here in July and have seen much of it from on the ground. Thanks to Arts Space I was able to get a view from above on Saturday that gave me a different perspective on the neighborhood I now call home. 

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Lessons From the Sydney Opera House

“I like to be on the edge of the impossible”, said John Utzon, the Danish architect who was responsible for designing the Sydney Opera House. On my visit to Australia I toured the world- renowned landmark. I learned its construction and design was indeed a story of someone achieving ‘the impossible’, but it is also a story of dreams and relationships broken and restored.

The Sydney Opera House is a World Heritage Site because so many of the architectural methods and engineering techniques used to build it were completely new and were created expressly for its construction. Utzon’s design for the building was chosen from 233 submitted, but no one, including Utzon, was really sure a structure of its kind could be built. The tiles on the outside are just one example of the innovation required. They change color depending on the amount of daylight and the temperature, so they rarely look the same. Most importantly they are self -cleaning. It took Utzon three years to design just the tiles.

Utzon devised and tested sixteen different schemes for making the famous white sails on the building’s roof before he figured out how to cut them from circles of steel. 16,000 workers were required to be on site during the construction of the signature ‘sails’. Utzon by the way did not call them sails. He wanted them to be abstract so each visitor to the opera house could have their own idea what they looked like. Some people say they remind them of waves, a dragon’s back, seashells, or dishes in a dishwasher. I thought they looked like Marilyn Munroe’s white dress in the movie Some Like It Hot when a blast of air from the subway grate blows her skirt up into the air. Whatever they remind you of, those ‘sails’ on the opera house roof took eight years to build.

Ten years after Utzon started work on the opera house a newly elected Australian government gave him an ultimatum. He either had to make concessions in his design and collaborate with government architects so the building could be finished more quickly, or he had to quit. Utzon resigned and the government hired others to complete his work. Utzon never went back to Sydney to see the finished opera house even though he won many of architecture’s most prestigious awards for designing it.

Thirty- three years after he’d resigned someone from the opera house staff approached Utzon to apologize to him and ask for an interview. Would he be willing to let them see all his notes and drawings and would he explain his original ideas so they could be kept for posterity? Utzon accepted the apology and agreed to the interview. Now the Australian government is slowly making changes to the Opera House so that eventually it will look exactly as Utzon planned. They have already replaced concrete outer walls with banks of windows and repainted interior walls with new colors following Utzon’s original plans. Utzon’s son has flown to Sydney to supervise these changes. John Utzon died in 2008 at age 90 but he died knowing that his original ‘dream’ for the Opera House would become a reality in the future.

Seven million people from all over the world visit the opera house each year and 350,000 take a guided tour. They learn all about how the one of kind architectural masterpiece was built. They also hear the story of how the relationship between the opera house designer and the country of Australia was broken and restored because each party was willing to be gracious and forgiving. Both of the stories are inspiring and important.

A Baby Shower for My Grandson

My grandson Henri is looking pretty calm despite the fact he just spent two hours in a room filled with twenty-four excited chatting women who all had eyes only for him. 

I felt so lucky to be able to attend a baby shower in honor of my grandson Henri and his mother in Saskatoon on Thursday. It was a great chance for me to meet the other pediatricians who are my daughter-in-law Karen’s colleagues, to meet people from Karen and Joel’s church, and to reconnect with their friends and family members. 

The shower was hosted by these three young women. Marlie on the far left is married to Karen’s brother Ben. Marina is Karen’s sister and Nicole is a good friend of Karen’s. 

The hostesses had gone to so much work to make everything look beautiful. There was a mobile hanging from the ceiling which had sections with various artistic patterns that matched the invitations’ background. Karen’s friend Nicole is an interior designer and her decorating talents were in clear evidence. 

There was a special banner on the wall with Henri’s name. 

The three hostesses had made decandently delicious chocolate cupcakes and fluffy macaroons embedded in circles of dark, smooth rich chocolate. Each of the food platters was decorated with a stylized letter H in honor of Henri. 

There was a special welcome banner featuring beautiful black and white pictures of Henri, Joel and Karen taken by their friend Emma Love who is a professional photographer. The message on the banner said……… Welcome to the world Henri Joel….. Just when you think you know love, something little comes along to remind you just how big it really is

Henri spent the shower being passed from one guest to another. He slept contentedly through most of the evening. He loves to be held. 

Here he is with his Aunt Marina, who just got married last weekend, but still found time to organize a celebration for her nephew. 

Aunt Marlie had a chance to hold Henri too. She was a bridesmaid at last weekend’s wedding and has a job as a nurse at a Saskatoon hospital.

It was so nice Anita could be there. She is one of the pastors at Joel and Karen’s church and she performed their wedding ceremony almost six years ago. 

Because Karen and her siblings grew up living far away from both sets of their grandparents, a warm and generous woman from their church, Miriam, became a kind of ‘adopted’ Grandma to them and a member of their family.  Now Henri is lucky to have Miriam as an extra great grandma too. 

I was so glad my Aunt Vi could be there. She is my Mom’s older sister and Henri’s great, great-aunt. She lives in Saskatoon and it was nice to have someone representing the other side of Henri’s family at the shower with me. 

Henri got a host of gifts–lots of clothes, bibs, little shoes, blankets, books, dishes, wash clothes, a puzzle, puppets and even a basketball. 

The shower was held at the home of Henri’s Leis grandparents, Tim and Anne. Earlier in the week we had posed for a photo with Henri, Joel, Karen and both sets of grandparents. 

I think my grandson is very lucky to have so many people who care about him and his parents. 

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