Christ Church Cathedral & UNDERGROUND

May 4th
Another sunny/cloudy day! Last night was a nightmare. One of the women in my room was snoring so freaking loud the night before that my ear plugs didn’t even work. & There were people fixing the road in the day so they left some high-decibel-producing stuff on the road that totally made the night a nightmare whenever a car passed by.

Last night, I spent the whole dinner time planning out where to go because otherwise I just don’t know where I should go. I went down rue St. Denis again (with ANOTHER map) to check out where exactly I visited. But I just couldn’t go on after I went half-way. There were no people lining up outside of the Grande Bibliotheque du Quebec.today. Don’t know why but it’s all good.

Went to take the metro to McGill right after and went to see the Christ Church Cathedral. It was an interesting place. It is in the middle of downtown, with tall office buildings surrounding it & large shopping malls beneath it. It’s incredible. The Church is an Anglican cathedral built between 1857and 1859. The neo-Gothic architecture is reminiscent of a 14th-century English church and it was modeled after an Anglican cathedral in Fredericton, N.B. The steeple was too heavy for the soft, unstable ground and had to be taken down in 1927 and replaced with one made of lighter aluminum plates.


Christ Church Cathedral in the middle of downtown.

Enter!

Stained-glass windows of the church.

The stained-glass windows behind the main alter – memorial to the dead of WWI.
Left to the altar is the Conventry Cross. It was made from nails taken from the bombed Conventry Cathedral in England in the 1940s.
The organ inside the church. There are regular organ/choral/piano concerts in here.

The costs of maintaining the cathedral was too high so the Anglican authorities decided to lease the land around and beneath the cathedral to developers. This resulted in the construction of La Maison des Cooperants (an officer tower) behind the cathedral and the Les Promenades de la Cathedrale (a huge mall) UNDER the cathedral.

Me diagonally across the street from the Christ Church Cathedral. -> where the Philips Square is.

Went out of the quiet church, it was an entirely different world. Busy traffic everywhere and big retail stores dotted here and there. This is place is really alive! Across from the cathedral was the Philips Square. It was a nice little green space in the midst of modern chaos.


Philips Square - a small green space in the middle of huge retail complexes.

The monument to Edward VII in the Philips Square.

The famous Birks jewellery store west to the Square.

The ancient building of The Baie(Bay)north to the Square.

Then there was another square right between the Cathedral and the office tower. It was dedicated to Raoul Wallenberg, a Hero of HUmanity who saved thousands of Jews from Hilter's concentration camp.

The Wallenberg Square.

The tulips are beautiful!

I walked back to the Redpath Museum after that – to take pics of the beautiful exhibits of the museum. Just to show you a few more pics of the McGill downtown campus before I show you the exhibits in the museum. See the following showcase!


A statue of the person to which the university was named after - James McGill.

The Arts building. For a university ranking the top 4 in Canada, there's certain pride even in its architecture.

The Redpath museum from rue University. It's so beautiful at sunset when the setting sun shines on the glass of the museum. It was as if it was made of gold!

The shell fossils on the first floor of the museum

Flying dinosaurs - This is what you see when you first set your foot into the museum.

More bones. The one on wall (not the flat one) is a sea lion skeleton. The huge bone at the bottom of the pic is the jaw of a whale.


The display cases full of beautiful shells on the 2nd floor.

Spiral shells! Close look at one of the shelves.

Another shelf of beautiful shells.

Another shelf of elegant shells. There are the gems of ocean!

"This shell holds a world record for size!" - A beautiful Spiny Oyster. It was found on a sunken German submarine (U-boat) off the coast of Aruba. It might had been growing on the submarine for 30 years. Crazy, eh?!

This is the first exhibition area that u'll see when you walk up the stairs to the 2nd floor. There are currently displays of 500+ shells and minerals of the world. There were some truly amazing minerals showcased there!


Entering the 2nd exhibition area of the 2nd floor of the museum. Another dinosaur welcomes us.

The fossil of traces of ancient organisms walking around.

My friend from the ancient times. No.. It's NOT a giant cockroach!
The origins of species. Amphibian?!

Another ancient friend of mine - The what? wait.. I just remember it was the fossil fish that I studied in my marine bio class.. Scientists have thought it extincted a long time ago but people still found some of these fossil fish around NOWADAYS! The living fossil fish - Coelacanths! They're not the prettist creatures but they definitely deserve respect 'cause they're ancient!

A closer look at the huge dinosaur skeleton here! There are many skeletons of dinosaurs, earliest mammals, etc etc. It's really COOL! -> well if u like this kind of stuff.


The hominid skulls! I was sooo excited to see them 'cause I actually knew what they were!!! I only saw pics of them in my archaeology texts now I could see them 3D!

Does this head seem familiar to you? It's a Limestone Portrait Head dates from the reign of Rameses II. This represents an unknown private person (because he doesn't wear royal symobls/hairdress, etc. The exact purpose of this head at the time of its construction was unknown.

Mummy sarcophagus!

Mummy displays on the 3rd floor of the museum.

Let's look at some REAL stuff here. A REAL mummy that was examined by a CT scan. This mummy is a man who died around 30-35 y/o and he's about 156cm tall. He probably died from some dental infection for his jawbone was severely eroded. This man lived about 3,000 years ago.

A replica of the famous Rosetta stone! (The real one is in the British Museum in UK)

Looking down at the 2nd floor from the 3rd floor.

SAMURAI!

ohhhh.. YOU GOTTA SEE THIS! This is the head of a REAL person MINUS the skull! The Jivaro believed that individuals possess different souls. The avenging soul was created when a person with an arutam(induced by visions & hallucinogenic drugs; believed to give people uncontrollable feelings of power and drove people to war) was killed in war. To shrink the head of the person killed is believed to capture the arutam of the person killed and to prevent the dead person from retailiating.


Went to class and befriended with a classmate, Janice, who was so kind as to take me around! We went to the Underground (The big network of shopping malls underground built for Montrealers to escape the harsh sub-Arctic weather in the winter. It's truly HUGE! WAYYYYYY bigger than the MetroTown in Vancouver!) I went to buy some dinner at the food court of the Eaton Centre with Janice. It was amazing! There were SOOOOOOOOOOO many options! It was amazing! & that was just 1 food court!

This city has so much depth. The bilingual aspect is one. The multi-cultural aspect is another. You say that Vancouver is multicultural. But I'm sorry to say but that you would not understand what TRUE multiculturalism means unless you come here. You would not see an overwhelming crowd of Asians or White or Indians here, NOT EVEN in China Town! Different ethnic groups just seem to mix and mingle here. I've seen more black (African-American) people here in one day than I've ever seen in Vancouver. It's really quite eye-opening.