I enjoy sausage and
eggs for breakfast from time to time. I ate one of the most memorable
such breakfasts at a home where I was staying in Newfoundland over 20
years ago. The sausage on that occasion turned out to be made from
moose. Delicious.
But in Alberta sausage
and eggs are not only a good choice for breakfast. They also make for
monuments.
Today I visited
Vegreville to take a service at the local church. It was a nice group
of people, and an enjoyable service. After the service there was a
lovely coffee hour with loads of food and loads of discussion about
tomorrow's provincial election. Then it was time to play tourist a
bit on the way home. It was a perfect day for it – warm and sunny.
First stop was
Vegreville's famous pysanka, or Ukrainian Easter Egg. Constructed of
aluminium in the mid-1970s, the pysanka is enormous. It weighs some
2.5 tonnes and is mounted in such a way that it can turn in the wind,
like a giant Easter weathervane. The pysanka was built to honour both
the Ukrainian heritage of many of the area's residents and the
centenary of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It's still billed as
the world's largest pysanka.Very impressive!
Then, on the way home,
it was from the sublime to the, er, ... not quite so sublime. We
stopped in at Mundare to see their giant kubasa, constructed in
honour of the local sausage maker. “Kubasa,” I discovered, is a
Canadian English word, evidently a corruption of the Ukranian
“kovbasa”, which is a cognate of the Polish “kielbasa,” which
means sausage. The origin of the term seems to be a Turkic language.
Kubasa is pretty commonly eaten in Alberta, either on a hot-dog bun,
as a “kubie”, or on a hamburger bun (a kubie burger) or in slices
on a tray of snacks. In fact, there was some kubasa and cheese as
part of the coffee hour this morning.
Another lesson in
Alberta's geography and culture.
