Winnipeg - Bus tour continues

Thursday May 28, 2009

Continuing the tour we were taken down part of Wellington Street to see the expensive homes. It looked a bit like our Uplands. Moving buses are not are not ideal for taking photos but the pictures above give an idea of the area. Even the less expensive neighbourhoods had attractive treed boulevards.

We saw an area of town where movies are filmed because the old buildings can be made to look like other cities as they were years ago. We zipped around the corner of Portage and Main, famous for its extremely cold wind. I was surprised, shocked really, that you can no longer stand on the corner because the passageway is all underground now. Imagine that - the most well-known street corner in the country is inaccessible to tourists. I was also surprised that the Eaton's store building no longer exists, which was where my Mom worked before she and Dad moved to Victoria after the great flood of 1950.

An interesting bridge

We were taken to the French neighbourhood of St. Boniface and the Catholic Church there. St. Boniface is not a separate town but we heard about how the residents fought to keep their post office by making a point of addressing mail to St. Boniface rather than Winnipeg. And they were striving to get shop and restaurant owners, even if they were Italian or Korean, to make building fronts to look French.

Louis Riel's tombstone at the St. Boniface Cemetery

St. Boniface Cathedral

The interior of the building had burned so they built a new modern one inside the remaining walls.

Different views of the front wall of the original building. I like the sort of Santa Fe, southwest look of it.

Side view.

Detail.

A model of what it used to look like.

An unusual interior.

There were many scenes in the windows. Apparently one appears to be missing but it shows up on a wall when the sun shines through at a certain angle.

Our tour guide was French-Canadian with a family going back several generations in this country, so she's more Canadian than I am. But inside the church she went on and on and on about the French for so long that people became bored and started wandering off. To hear her talk, Winnipeg is all about the French and I thought it was too bad that some foreigners may have gone away with that impression. I would have if I didn't know better. For fun, I looked up Winnipeg's ethic origins on the internet and found that the French ranked 6th. English, Scottish and German are the top three.

It was a little disappointing that we didn't get to see the huge rail yard in Winnipeg either from the train or on this tour.