War! What is it good for?

An afternoon at the War Museum, says I.

Two or so weeks ago me'n'M embarked on the second stretch of our cultural crusade and visited the new and improved War Museum, which on account of it's almost nautical architectural profile seems to have risen whole from underdeveloped eyesore that is Landsdown park. Up close the structure is more evocative of a bunker than a submarine; it's an intriguingly thematic building in and of itself.

I've found composing this post to be difficult; even if my personal distance from the events recounted and memorialized in the Museum 'liberates' me from the solemnity with which some might survey these violent chapters in our history, I still feel as though I am walking through the graveyards of my ancestors and countrymen. In the presence of their ghosts I am accordingly restrained.

The Museum itself is almost cavernous; one best apprehends it's size in those parts of the building that are the least adorned or decorated. We were greeted first by a cheerfully colored mock-tank plastered with hand-made camouflage, an extension of the well-executed camouflage exhibit. The exhibit itself was informative and visually arresting at times, with an interesting history of the art of camouflage patterns and the evolution of their design, from hand drawn to digitally determined. There was also a selection of uniforms from various nations and historical periods, as well as several examples of civilian appropriations of camouflage for the sake of fashion or merchandising.

The main exhibit, an architecturally uninterrupted tour through Canada's wars(from Aboriginal conflicts to UN Peacekeeping) is balanced(in terms of the depth of the material and diversity of media) and interesting, though I confess I wasn't able to muster much attention for the WWII displays on account of having read/watched so much on that subject previously. The displays I most enjoyed were those of antique pistols and colonial era weaponry; they possess a certain romance in design and appearance that cooled considerably as firearms advanced over the centuries.

The hall of vehicles(it really is just a huge hall filled with...vehicles), while certainly interesting, seemed a little uninspired to me; the various tanks and trucks and old-style cannons(once again my favorite little corner in the vast mechanical managrie) were just laid out in rows as if they were just temporaily parked rather than on display.

The gift shop had some fantasically overpriced DVD's and a couple of cool 'seals' for imprinting your initials in wax; unfortunatly there were no J's or M's, just alot of X's. Apparently the shop was expecting a rush of Xaviers with a fondness for wax sealed messages that week. To conclude the visit me and M took in the view from the roof, which provided a good vantage over Bluesfest preperations.

I'll probobly have some more reflections on the experience later, but as it stands it was a lovely afternoon and well worth the price of admission. ^_^