ST. JOHN'S -- Finally, winter, if only for an hour or two, snow whipping horizontally across the hilly streets of St. John's. Canada's rules of blizzard driving quickly come into play: Don't halt at stop signs as you're riding up hills -- which, in the old city, is a lot of the time. Just look and check and then keep going, rather than spinning your wheels, and be glad you're not on the deck of some old sealer.

The next morning, the snowfall had ended (a pity that), and we were back to the new Canadian winter: mild and forgiving and likely to be washed away with rain in no time. The skies were a clear blue, and as I walked by the old Bishop Feild school -- the one that I know Joey Smallwood went to, because of Wayne Johnston's fine novel The Colony of Unrequited Dreams -- the kids were calling out goodbyes and their playtime plans and throwing snowballs in the streets in a way that is just not possible in the districts of cities where cars rule paramount.

St. John's is our Amsterdam, which is not to say that it is a haven for glass-fronted sex workers' shops and drugs (though oxyacetylene has been a problem here). It is comparably pretty, lived in and loved. Here you will find restaurants such as The Sprout, a congenial café and bistro on Duckworth Street serving good vegetarian fare, where the tables hum with the chatter of folk who clearly don't want to be anywhere else.

The streets are lined with clapboard houses painted in bold colours and built along streets and steps whose sense preceded modern traffic, and so direct their own rules of wandering, much as Amsterdam's canals do. They tack up the hill as hikers would a mountain slope, and crossing certain roads (wide in front of churches) or following their supposed roundabouts can be confusing and outright perilous to the visitor who has rented a car -- blizzard or not.

In winter, Velma's, the landmark restaurant with its stubborn 1950s hospital colours, is filled with locals, as is the grocer Auntie Crae's, where I popped in for an obligatory jar of bakeapple jam that was later seized as a potential terrorist threat (even without the knife and toast).

What with winter's diminished tourism activity on Water Street, the boats docked in the magnificently protected harbour seemed more prominent. The freighters, ferries and Coast Guard ships were evocative and even slightly intimidating. Do press gangs still exist, I wondered, as I walked alongside them.

I had just left the Murray Premises Hotel, revamped a few years ago and offering loft bedrooms with splendid pine beams, and was headed toward the northeast end of the docks and the best views of the Battery. For a change, I had no book-signing or speaking to do -- I simply owed a dinner to Ed Riche, the author of Rare Birds.

The houses of the Battery, so named for the fixed guns that used to defend the harbour, sit almost brazenly at the foot of the cliffs beneath Signal Hill, protected from rockslides and avalanches by snow fences. They resemble the scatterings of houses in any number of outports in Newfoundland and Labrador, except that in St. John's they are all occupied and there's a waiting list of people wanting to live in them. These houses were once the most visible reminder of a bygone era of "flakes" -- the "platforms built on poles and spread with boughs for drying cod fish on the foreshore," according to the Dictionary of Newfoundland English's poetic definition -- and "rooms," the tracts of land, each with necessary waterfront, on which fishers landed their boats and built their flakes, as well as the wharves and sheds they needed for storing materials and sleeping in.

But since the summer of 2005 (though a few years prior if you count the bickering), there's been another, and much more domineering, reminder of Newfoundland's cod-fishing past. At the crown of the hill behind Old St. John's sits The Rooms, a museum designed by Newfoundland architect Phillip Pratt as an oversized concatenation of the shed-like structures that used to be found upon the water. It is here that the province's archives, artifacts and art are consolidated.

The Rooms once provoked a lot of local consternation, as it towered not only above the harbour and the rooftops, but the city's Anglican cathedral and its Roman Catholic basilica too. Even now, argument about The Rooms can be divisive. Many see the building as an eyesore and a waste of money (and object to it being federally funded).

It strikes me as a fabulous addition to the city. Inside, it is airy and interesting without being incommodiously modern, though this verdict comes from someone who thinks Daniel Libeskind's plans for Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum should not have evolved beyond a napkin. Fact is, another dour building or wedge of shiny marble would not have suited St. John's at all.

I visited the old museum and archives a number of times -- most recently to see the maps of Shawnadithit, the last known survivor of the Beothuk -- with Michael Crummey, the author of River Thieves. It was evident then how excited the curators were about the new premises, as the artifacts were in desperate need of new storage space, a better venue and better treatment. Now, the city has all that within a beguiling bit of architecture.

Newfoundlanders visit The Rooms in droves -- and not just because you can get an excellent fish 'n' chips up the street at Leo's, or at the more venerable Ches's ("more like a cultural signifier than a restaurant," says The Scope, the city's listing magazine). They come for its exhibits -- a Mary Pratt and War Brides' show, currently -- or to eat in the museum's restaurant and enjoy the building's fine city views.

Combative Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams once opposed The Rooms, one of his reasons being that it was built on top of the ruins of Fort Townshend, the hilltop site of the first Government House -- and, in 1800, of Newfoundland's "United Irish Uprising" (a failed soldier's mutiny at the fort). Yet now, even that objection withers.

Dean Brinton, the mainlander who was brought in to open The Rooms and make something of it (a brave undertaking for a fella from away), has plans to create a whole new exhibit around the remnants of the old citadel in the museum's basement, and make a virtue of what remains of the fort's foundations in the cavernous space around the building's supporting pillars. (A lot of the old stone, before the construction of the museum that so many objected to, was routinely plundered for locals' walks and terraces and foundation walls.)

Now, if Brinton finds the money, what does remain will be preserved and properly displayed. It's a second-best situation, but a good one. Often, the best outcomes are wholly unexpected.

Noah Richler's This is My Country, What's Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada is in bookstores now.