Food

On the subject of food, the prices here are unbelievably high compared to UK.

E.g. bunch parsley + 1 lettuce + 1 yellow pepper + 2 large tomatoes + 1 lemon + 3 very small garlic = around £7.60, 1 seeded bread loaf okay quality costs around £2.75/3 at a cheap shop. A shop like Waitrose and you'll double these prices! 

Everyday items that in the UK you'd spend around £5 for are $10 plus 15% tax. We've found the Dollarstore ($1-$2 each item) and this has provided a useful retail experience for some basics like storage crates for clothes and food. Yet there are some more exciting items lurking in the dollarstores E.g. we've dined on escargo. 

The other newish experience here is buying food from the Bulk Food stores. Here you enter an emporium of dry goods stored in big tubs where you help yourself to what ever quantity you want into plastic bags and pay by weight. The unusual thing is that you find say organic spelt pasta right next to artificial sprinkles!*! It's fun selecting all sorts of things to try like tamari almonds and then buying storage jars for them. Mark has sampled a variety of sweetie delights, god only knows what's in them. 

We bought locally caught fresh cod and scallops from an ex-UK, now very happy Canadian fisherman. Delicious flavour and well priced too.

Digby Ahoy! scallops, Nova Scotia

Digby (Nova Scotia) is an unassuming small town in the Annapolis valley, with a harbour fronting into a sheltered bay that leads out to the Bay of Fundy (north shore of NS). Here you can take a ferry across to the province of New Brunswick and a short distance to the US border. That's the place to buy cheaper gas and food/clothes.

Digby, and all along this coast, still has a fishing industry and Digby scallops are world renowned. We've had some and they are delicious.
Mark is looking out towards the fishing boats tied up at the harbour. At high tide the boats almost reach the wharf level. Fundy tides have big variances from 120 - 215 metres at the mouth of the Bay, down to 14 m by the bay head, changing every 6 hours. I'm sure the first historic settlers here in 1783 sipped their tea and watched the water level change, just as we did today.

Djembe drumming, Sandy Cove, Nova Scotia

We met this lovely Djembe drum teacher Kadijah who holds a drum circle in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. She invited us to a Friday night drum by the beach at Sandy Cove, overlooking the Bay of Fundy (north west Nova Scotia). It was lovely to hear the djembe beat, albeit a very quiet drum circle compared to what we're used to!

Kadijah brought along a selection of musical shakers and a drum so Mark had a play. She also had a Hung. If you ever get to hear this modern Swiss metal percussion instrument being played, it's a real joy, such a soft, caressing, polite and clean tones. [Storm, I now appreciate your playing even more]

  

The rich orange sun setting over the shore, shedding rays across the fish weirs (native traditional way of fishing, seen in the background photos). The wooden drill deck is taken out to the circular fish weir and used to replace the long wooden stakes. In the photo the drill deck is tied just off the beach in the water but when the tide retreats it's at beach height.

I was told that a fishing boat goes into the weir and collects the fish (mackerel) so it's definitely not large scale nor harmful to the environment. Unfortunately the government have stopped local funding to help maintain the docks/harbour and storage sheds so it's all looking  a bit run down now. Along this part of the coast the main income is from fishing and whale watching and the odd artist or two.