halifax

Dates traveled: August 1-3, 2016

I think when most people think of the east coast, they’re really thinking about Halifax. The boardwalk harbour, the live music, the drinking, the wind, the boats. It’s also easily the biggest city in Canada east of Quebec. I was excited.

Welcome to Nova Scotia indeed.

Part of the excitement was because we were sick of driving. As much as I like road trips, enough highways and it feels like you’re not really going anywhere. So when finally arriving in Halifax, it felt like we were in a big place.

Halifax was more touristy than I expected. It made me realize that the time of year you visit a city has a huge impact on how you perceive it. Summer means fewer students and more families. Also in order to have urban non-touristy neighborhoods, you need to have a city population pushing a million.

There were cute spots, like this veggie cafe with floor ceiling can attest to. Whenever I see seating like that, I’m not totally sure if we’re actually supposed to sit there, or if it’s more like installation art. With no clear signage, how do I know?

Something that was more clearly art were these murals painted in a series of alleys on the Dartmouth side near the harbour. Dartmouth is technically its own city, but because you can take a very short and cheap ferry ride between Dartmouth and Halifax, it felt more like a suburb of Halifax, or even an extension, to me.

Without looking it up, I’m going to go ahead and guess that it’s been traditionally poorer and is currently getting gentrified and cost of living is escalating etc etc etc.

The harbour was gorgeous but very high traffic. It’s lined with restaurants and just off the main downtown streets. It brought back flashes of unpleasant forced family vacations where we always seemed to be in a hurry without me ever really knowing why.

That being said, walking around at 2am was a hugely different experience from the middle of the day. When it was serene the lamp lights mixed with the boardwalk and water was very postcard-like.

For the rest of the city, I was expecting more in the north end, in the non-tourist urban strip, but again it was mid-week in summer and the neighbourhood wasn’t that big. Like a lot of places, it’s kind of jarring how only a few blocks from the up-scale restaurants trying to sell an idealized version of place the obvious signs of poverty are. Climb up a hill and it’s like a different city.

I don’t think I got a great read on Halifax, but such is the nature of a short trip. I think I was expecting an almost fairy tale amount of drinking and typical east coast music blaring from every bar, so in that sense I felt unfulfilled.

Sometimes when driving along a beautiful coastline, I get mesmerized by nature and become almost annoyed at the cities in those areas. Like Halifax would be nicer if all the new buildings just weren’t there. If the stink of saltwater and rotting sea life could permeate a little bit farther.

So much of a place is the people you meet there.

I wasn’t hooked but I’m happy to have seen it.