Remember Gusto, the obscurely-located Charlottetown pâtisserie that I mentioned back in October? Well I’m happy to report that they’re still going strong, despite the location (Pownal Street at the corner of King).

They now have an outdoor patio, which is very pleasant as it’s under the shade of some large trees and right next door to the burbling fountain at Technomedia:

My current favourite from the dessert case is their Mosaik Cake, a very nice mixture of chocolate and apricots the likes of which you won’t find anywhere else on the Island:

Gusto also does custom cakes and catering, and the quality and flair that you’ll see in their products is excellent: a few months ago I saw a mermaid-themed cake they’d built to order, and it was fantastic.

If you’re looking for a cool oasis in downtown Charlottetown, away from the touristic Victoria Row hubbub, Gusto’s a good place to wile away an hour.

It had never occurred to me that today’s national holiday in Quebec, Saint-Jean-Baptiste, references the same “John” as Sankt Hans in Denmark, celebrated yesterday. I’ve no idea why Saint John the Baptist deserves our veneration, but he was obviously famous enough to transcend language and culture.

For the last few months Oliver and I have been in the habit of going for a walk every night after dinner. Our house is only a few blocks from the waterfront, and our walks usually take us through Confederation Landing Park either coming or going.

Earlier this week we headed out as usual, down Prince Street toward the park, until we were stopped by this sign:

Confederation Landing Park, it seemed, was closed. And not just closed for the day, or for a weekend, but for 19 days in a row.

Regular readers will know that there’s no love lost between me and the various rock festivals that happen yearly on Charlottetown’s waterfront: over the years we’ve become used to a July 1st weekend full of very loud music and neighbourhood disruption.

While I remain unconvinced that sacrificing the quiet enjoyment of the neighbourhood at the alter of tourism is prudent public policy, at least these interruptions have been restricted to a weekend and the day or two before or after the events for setup and teardown.

But 19 days in a row?

Summer is short in Charlottetown. Confederation Landing Park, especially for we downtown residents, is a pleasant waterfront oasis, and we’ve only a short time to enjoy it: there are basically 10 weeks – 70 days – of summer in Charlottetown, and this closure means that the park is closed to the public for almost 30% of that time.

The City of Charlottetown is rightly proud of its city parks system: parks are a vital resource for quality of life. They are important. They’re an integral part of our daily lives as citizens. They aren’t a “frill” that we dip in and out of, they are part of civic infrastructure, like roads, water, and policing.

When a large public park like Confederation Land gets closed for almost a third of the summer, the message that citizens are sent from the City is “public parks are important, but only some of the time.”

It seems the activities we’re encouraged to engage in when the park is open – walking, running, enjoying the view, playing catch, whatever – are suddenly downgraded in civic importance when something better comes along: “sorry, Billy, you can’t play ball this month, the rich tourists from away need the space.”

This is clearly unacceptable, and it violates the fragile covenant between Charlottetown-for-those-who-live-here and Charlottetown-for-those-who-visit.

Our friend G. was cleaning up the other day and came across his Borrower’s Card from the Prince Street School Library. G. was a Prince Street student in the 1950s (in the old school). The library was described as follows in Mabel Matheson’s History of Prince Street School:

And our most recent and most ambitious project - the establishment of the Prince Street School Library. This is a unique project - conceived by the principal, undertaken by the staff, originally financed entirely out of school funds, and still largely supported in the same way, although the Board now makes an annual grant; and contributions have been received from organizations end Individuals especially to “The E. Lillian McKenzie Memorial Section” dedicated December 8, 1960. Although still in its infancy, it costs a great deal to feed it. Our brain-child has a voracious appetite!

Here’s G.’s Borrower’s Card; as you can see, he had an appetite for adventure:

It would be an interesting experiment to look to see which of these books, if any, remains in the school’s collection.

When we were in Montreal earlier in the month, we spent a very pleasant hour browsing through the Drawn & Quarterly Store in Mile End. One the books I bought was the illustrated edition of the Elements of Style. It’s a beautiful book, and it’s also very useful: I hope it will, in time, cure me of my that/which issues.

In the spirit of the book, here’s a brief guide to elements of style more locally:

1. Rukavina is pronounced with a long u. Think duty, not duck. Like it says here, roo-ka-VEEN-a. Or, if you like, roo-KA-veen-a.
2. When speaking, I refer to this blog as “r - u - k dot c - a”, spelled out, like “check out my blog at r - u - k dot c - a”. If it must be pronounced, it’s also with a long u.
3. While this blog is based on a nickname applied to me by my 9th grade gym teacher, ruk is the name of the blog, it’s not my name. So proper usage is “Peter said…” and not “ruk said…”
4. Like ee cummings, silverorange and the fifth estate, it’s always all lowercase: ruk, not Ruk or RUK. This is sometimes inconvenient, and I’m not sure what to tell you about how to start sentences.
5. While my last name does start with an R, that’s the only thing that it has in common with the last name Roggeveen. As such, I cannot sell you a Christmas tree.

Most Saturday mornings before we head off to the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market, Catherine hands me and Oliver a list of things she wants us to pick up there for her.

Usually we do this shop together after we’ve fortified ourselves with smoked salmon on a bagel, but this weekend Oliver was quicker to finish his bagel and so, from our position sitting on the loading dock stoop, I sent him on missions into the market to do the shopping by himself.

The market is one of the public places where Oliver feels really comfortable (we’ve been going there every Saturday morning for almost a decade), so he knows the terrain well, and knows a lot of the people there. So these missions were in friendly territory.

It took him about 20 minutes to gather up everything on our list – potatoes, carrots, mushrooms, eggs, rhubarb – and he learned a lot in the process that he wouldn’t have learned had I been doing the shopping and he tagging along:

1. He learned how to ask one trusted vendor what other vendors they recommended for things they didn’t sell themselves. He asked Paul Offer, for example, from whom he bought mushrooms, where he could buy carrots. I didn’t tell him to do this, he just figured it out on his own; it’s a pretty good skill to have.
2. Math became concrete. They’ve been studying fractions in grade 3 at school this year; when I told Oliver we needed “half a pound of mushrooms” he knew exactly what I meant, and all of a sudden math became a useful tool instead of an abstract concept. Same thing with money: he had to figure out whether $5 was enough to buy rhubarb and potatoes (it was).
3. He learned about vegetables. The potato man asked him “what kind of potatoes?” I don’t think Oliver ever knew there were different kinds. They worked this out amongst themselves. Same thing for “how much rhubarb?” (answer: “enough to make a pie”).
4. He became an actor. Usually Oliver’s in the audience at the Farmers’ Market; this week he was in the driver’s seat. His sense of accomplishment was palpable when he’d acquired everything on the list.

It’s not like we need more reasons to shop at the Farmers’ Market – there are already plenty – but it’s worth considering how this exercise was something that Oliver could really only do at a place like the Market. If I’d sent him into the Atlantic Superstore on the same missions he’d have been overwhelmed, without anyone to call on for help, and wouldn’t have learned anything at all (with the exception, perhaps, that supermarkets are large and faceless).

Thank you to all the vendors who made this possible; Oliver will be back next week for more.

In the normal course of affairs, at least for the past 5 years, this week would find me soaking up the sun in Copenhagen: visiting friends, preparing for the reboot conference (in stasis this year), drinking good coffee and riding a bicycle.

It’s no exaggeration to say that my first visit to the city, for reboot 7, changed my life for the better: I met a host of people who I still call good friends, I saw Plazes demonstrated for the first time, I started to get more deeply involved in open source, and, perhaps most importantly, I started a journey toward seeing Europe as something everyday (albeit a rather more interesting and exotic everyday than I’m used to) – a place I could comfortably visit often, and perhaps relocate to.

Over the 5 years I went to reboot I gradually migrated from visiting for the conference, and happening to see friends, to visiting friends and happening to go to the conference. Who would have thought?

So yesterday Penny turned six years old without me (I was there when she turned four). And this week my Danish friends will celebrate Sankt Hans without me (perhaps we’ll have to light a bonfire in our Charlottetown back yard on June 23?).

And I’ll be forced to come up with my own paradigm-shifting ideas instead of letting reboot come up with them for me.

Nathan Sizemore was kind enough to shoot video of all of the Pecha Kucha presentations on Thursday night, and here they all are. The video setup was imperfect: crazy lighting conditions, a tiny screen, bad audio, etc., and Nathan did wonders making it all work as well as it did.

1. Bruce MacNaughton: Experiences in the Key of D
2. Robert Paterson: What is going on? How did we get here? Are we hopeless? Is there a future?
3. Valerie Bang-Jensen: Books in Bloom: The Story of a Garden
4. Katie Cousins: Farming’s Sustainable Answer: Youth Involvement
5. Paul Lopes: The Story of a Website
6. Frances Gertsch: Stories of a Northern Land: Working in Nunavut’s National Parks
7. Aaron Stavert: Sustainable Architecture: The Importance of Place
8. Peter Rukavina: Making Envelopes with an Adana Eight Five

We’d been trying to eat out at The Pearl for two summers in a row with no success. Our friend Ann said we had to go. And so we tried. But never with any advance planning; and so every time we showed up on the spur of the moment they were full. Friendly, but full.

So this year I decided to get crafty and with Catherine’s birthday on Friday I emailed a request for a reservation on Monday. I heard back with an enthusiastic confirmation within hours.

It was worth the wait.

One the drive out to The Pearl – they’re on the road from North Rustico to Cavendish on Prince Edward Island’s north shore – we passed Dayboat – remember Dayboat?

Or, rather, we passed the empty carcass of what used to be Dayboat, now closed and with a for sale sign on the lawn. Dayboat always stuck me as a restaurant trying much too hard to be something more than it had any right to be: it was like one of the self-proclaimed popular kids from high school who, in the end, were neither interesting nor worthy of much envy.

The Pearl is the antithesis of this: there is not a drop of braggadocio in the place, and yet, in a quiet, unassuming way, everything from space to service to food is almost perfect. The Pearl doesn’t have pretensions, doesn’t claim to be something it’s not, it is just simply excellent.

The room, on the ground floor of a wooden house, is eclectically decorated without being cluttered. I was sitting on an old church pew on a comfortable cushion and felt immediately at home. The view out the back windows is of Island farm fields; they have good taste in music.

The service was flawless: servers were witty, kind, and thoughtful of Oliver (such a rarity in restaurants; “we can make anything he might like” was such a refreshing counterpoint to the usual “chicken fingers or spaghetti?”).

I had the $45 prix fixe menu, part of the Dine Around initiative of the PEI Restaurant Association. It was a good choice: a lobster and asparagus tart to start (so good it brought tears to my eyes), a well-cooked piece of halibut served over potato salad for a main, and a rhubarb tiramisu for dessert. I had an espresso with dessert and I’m happy to report that it might be some of the best-prepared coffee available on the Island.

Oliver had crepes made with Kim Dormaar’s smoked salmon; he devoured them quickly. The chocolate pot de creme he had for dessert was equally quick to go down; I grabbed a spoon or two, and it was dense, dark and luscious.

Catherine started with oysters, had the scallops as a main, and a tart for dessert (which they discretely put a birthday candle in without me even asking); she really enjoyed all of these.

Prince Edward Island being Prince Edward Island, we knew almost everyone else in the room: Oliver’s grade one teacher was in one corner, our friend Karin in another, and a group of women that Catherine had seen earlier in the day at Fanningbank at the front. Everyone seemed to be enjoying things as much as we were.

If you’re looking for a nice place to eat outside of Charlottetown, I can’t recommend The Pearl more highly: they’re open nightly for supper at 4:30 p.m. and on the weekends for brunch from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. If our experience over two years is any guide, you should probably make a reservation.