A Movable Feast

Indulge me for a second as I jump from May/ June (trip to Saskatchewan) back to March/April and the Easter weekend. If you remember, I tried my feet at both skiing and snowboarding at Sunshine over the Good Friday and Easter Saturday. My weekend kept improving with Easter Sunday and the arrival of Giles, which I neglected to report on earlier.

Giles, you will remember being one of the brilliant people, one of my best friends from university with an equally brilliant girlfriend Kirsten, who I visited with in Montreal early this year. Giles had a conference in Banff to attend the week after Easter so on Easter Sunday it was quite the treat to spend the afternoon together. I met him at the airport with a little chocolate from Bernard Callebaut http://www.bernardcallebaut.com/users/folder.asp. This is some of the finer Canadian chocolate, bringing to mind a small nearsighted Belgian man in a white coat. You can always rely on Calgary airport to flog the finest Canadian products to departing Americans eager to part with the last of their colourful Canadian money.

On Easter this year, Bernards were making chocolate cowboy hats for Calgary rather than eggs, which I thought was very clever. I gave one to Giles and told him he could go tell his New Yorker friends he had come to Calgary and indeed, had eaten his hat.

We went into town by bus/train and I took Giles for lunch at Chinatown. Due to my 8 years on a gluten- free diet I had never tried Yum Cha, known as Dim Sum here. It was quite good, but for the lack of vegetables. Though I ate some mystery meat, I did have to pass on the chicken feet, which were quite obviously... chicken feet.

We went for a walk around town and a sneaky peek at the view of the city from a particularly tall building before heading down to the Eau Clair market area. Eau Clair being French for "Clear Water" is right by the riverfront of the Bow, where the old Barley Mill and the Lumbar Mill still stand and are now a pub and a tea shop respectively. After a pint at the Barley Mill and a hello telephone call to Kirsten in Montreal, we went on for afternoon tea at the River Cafe http://www.river-cafe.com/index.php

The River Cafe deserves it's reputation. We split two perfectly lovely desserts at a window table at this charming place, half-hidden by trees in Princes Island Park, in the middle of the Bow river. Though it is outside my price range for dinner, it is my favourite restaurant in Calgary and I would happily go back for a weekend afternoon tea or special occasion brunch.

Basically, it was an afternoon that was very "Hemingway", a Movable Feast of chatter, eating and catching up. Also, I bullied Giles into appearing in some photos for me as an excuse to take a few about Calgary. Coming soon...