WEST PLAINS, Mo. — At 8 30 on a cloudy, frigid morning late last month in this folksy Ozark town, the superintendent of an area school strolled through the glass doors of the local newspaper office to deliver a news release.
In Uganda, there are pedestrians everywhere: schoolchildren walk to school, adults stroll to work, elderly people go for jaunts about town.
Here Mina extends her fictional landscape to a neighborhood where all the houses are "big and lonesome" and an overbearing father might send a private plane to pick up a son at boarding school — or stroll out on his lawn to hang himself.
Opened in 1977 near the New Brunswick coastal community of Caraquet, one of North America's oldest Acadian towns, the historic village is like a tasteful theme park: dozens of wooden buildings dot the bucolic farmland, while costumed interpreters (from grubby urchins to hoity school mistresses) stroll around, bringing the past to life.
He saw them at school events, strolled the sidelines with her father before soccer games, and even came to their house for an end-of-year team party.
On a cool evening after school, Chantal strolled down the main street towards her village centre.
"Maybe it's our time again," said Catherine Mendle, 25, a school social worker strolling the grounds and halls of the square glass and concrete Chancellery building on a recent afternoon as part of a government open house.
It's on the museum's top floor, with its rotating exhibitions of family documents, that one can conjure what was really lost: the people who ate here, who posed for photos in their school uniforms, who strolled along the dusty paths of the Parc Monceau outside, and who loved the art inside.
The morning stroll to school is only a few minutes long; we live in a normal estate, surrounded by normal things, there are children going to school and commuters hurriedly marching to work.
Some moments have been so staged as to appear campy, like Mr. Gore's stroll to school with the Gozas, who typically do not walk their children the few blocks to Thomas Jefferson Elementary.
