Flags of Newfoundland

Newfoundland has two flags, one that looks like a modified Union Jack, the other that looks like a slightly faded Irish Flag.

The first looks like this:



This is the official Newfie flag, and it was designed in 1980. It's got all the nice explanations - white is for snow and ice, blue is for the sea, red is for "human effort" and gold is "confidence." It's funny (strange) that the first two are for these very tangible things and the second two are for entirely abstract feel-goodisms. They aren't even really Newfie, in my mind. The red should be for humorous surliness and the gold for funny-talkin' hospitality.

The other, much older, flag is called the 'native flag':



This one was adopted by a bunch of Irish-Newfies in the late 1800s in St. John's. Both are flown around the island; for a long time, I thought that the native flag was an Irish flag.

I'm in St. John's at the moment, a really lovely little city situated on a bay, with an improbably hilly downtown populated by narrow, brightly-painted houses, mostly in various stages of disrepair and slantedness. It's a great walking city, with paths and hills all over, and nowhere a straight road. Everything winds around, connected by steeps stairs and alleyways. There's a big hill with a lookout, called Signal Hill because it was the location of the first transatlantic wireless signal; it looks over the bay and the narrow, hill-flanked entrance to the bay, and then out to the sea beyond. The easternmost place in North America is in view, Cape Spear. The whole city feels like it's the end of the world, even though it's got all of life's luxuries, like Indian food and libraries. The city is cold and smells of salt, and trees are uprooted here and there from the recent visit of Igor, and the houses can't keep their paint on for long. The wind blows constantly, and the light is gray; abandoned buildings downtown are boarded up and falling over, their paint coming off in huge chunks. It feels old.

I like it.