Spring has well and truly sprung. The flowering trees are spectacular and there are spring flowers in bloom in all the parks and gardens. The weather has also gotten warmer and it is truly a pleasure walking around and in my case being able to bike.
There isn’t much to regale you with so I’ll just show you a few things that caught my eye on my daily walks. We have a museum of ceramic art, the Gardner Museum, in the front of which there is a monumental, glazed ceramic head. A sculpture by an American artist of Japanese background called Jun Kaneko. He is noted for his large scale dango (Japanese for rounded form) sculptures which are mean’t to spark interaction with their immediate space as well as their architectural environment. I must say it certainly does that.
Opposite the Gardner museum is The Royal Ontario Museum and outside one of the entrances there is a row of bike racks. The racks are cleverly designed to represent pieces of the Chinese collection in the museum. I wish there had been some explanation of which pieces they represented and I couldn’t go into the museum to seek more information as it is closed right now but they are beautiful, works of art really!.
Our restaurants are faring very badly during this lockdown as they are all closed. A few are trying hard to keep going by offering take out meals. As I approached a small restaurant, I though for a moment that they were illegally open as I saw two people sitting at a table outside. On closer view, they were two dummies just placed there to make the place look less forlorn and it actually does give a bit of life to the patio. It is very sad to think of the economic and emotional damage that this pandemic has brought upon us but people are carrying on as best as they can and the better weather has brought us all more joy. Last week I unexpectedly came upon a couple of musicians playing music in the park and it was truly delightful so I will leave you with a snippet of that in the video below.
