Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Regina: The Lake, again


Squeaky says hello!

As promised, there was lots more to see around the lake. For one thing, these furry little buggers. There were prairie dogs all over the place, digging holes and running around like squirrels. In fact, they really are squirrels, just ones that run into holes instead of up trees when you chase them (not that I tried... honest...). Their holes were good places to trip and twist your ankle, so you had to be careful.

Near the lake, on U of R property, we found this neat sculpture. It was actually a big octagon made entirely of wrought iron, with a small dedication plaque in the center. This side caught my eye, especially with the moody sky we were having at the moment. I'm not certain what the story behind this nifty piece of art is, but I love campuses with actual sculptures on them -- Tech has exactly one such thing, and it's near the Humanities building of course. I suppose they make snowplowing hard.

A bit further on, we found something which I'd never seen before: a Canadian cemetery! As it turns out, Canadian cemeteries are just like US cemeteries, except that the flags tend to be different. This was the veterans' section of the cemetery.



Also in the cemetery was this little temple. It was in a section filled with Japanese names. The plaque explained that the temple was built to let Regina's (apparently large) Japanese population remember their ancestors in a more traditional way.

There were a lot of other neat parts of the lake, but unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me -- such as the artificial waterfall on Lake Wascana, which we tried to push one of the Australians under (didn't work: she grabbed our kayaks and pulled us under with her!) or the Saskatchewan Legislature Building (don't ask me how I missed that!). Regina also had some amazing sunsets. Unfortunately, there was no way to see them, because everything was so flat. I spent a lot of time running around trying to catch beautiful clouds hilighted by the setting sun, and totally failing. I did manage to get this one panoramic of the sun setting behind the lake:

No comments: