Victoria Butchart Gardens

Butchart Gardens is beautiful - even in winter. For Christmas, they had the twelve days of Christmas enacted. Steve is being a partridge (in the pear tree behind him). The pictures of the ocean are on the ferry ride to Victoria.

The picture with the lights is of the capital in Victoria.

Santa in Vancouver

We had taken pictures with these guys before, but when we saw them in Santa hats we had to stop again. There were tons of other people doing the exact same things - mimicking the statues. What a hit!

Lynn Canyon Bridge

Christmas Day was Lynn Canyon Bridge. We worried that Steve wouldn't be able to handle the suspension bridge - as his fear of heights is legendary. But he made it. The park was officially closed, but the 300 other people that were there didn't seem to notice. It was a beautiful park! We had a great Christmas day.

Christmas Eve

These are from our hotel room. Note the lovely white towels adorning the TV.

Today we wandered around Granville Island. It had such fun little shops. Kimberly bought a notebook to jot down ideas for her book. She didn’t reveal the plot. Some of my favorite things were a hammock chair (at a store called Hang Ups) and a check-off diary. There was also a book of lists for you to make on various topics. Very creative!

It’s a Wonderful Life was really fun. The theatre is small and the acting great. It was interesting how they turned a well known movie into a play. Little ZuZu is only four. For the backdrop on scene changes, they used clips from the movie. It was very clever. We hit a Malaysian restaurant – the Banana Leaf. The food was good. Fried bananas and vanilla ice cream may become a Christmas Eve tradition.

We are priming ourselves for a family sauna in a few minutes. My feet are freezing, so I’m more than ready.

Art and Theatre

On Wednesday we talked to the Vancouver art gallery. The landscape scenes were really nice, but the top two floors were too abstract for me. Emily Carr had many of her paintings on display. They weren’t my favorite. One of the unique things was a sculpture by Brian Jungen of a whale, which was made entirely of white plastic lawn chairs. It hung from the ceiling in a large room. It was unique. Another item was a piece of cloth with lots of lipstick prints. It was all of the lip positions of someone singing the Canadian national anthem. There was also the wall of 67, showing 67 individual pictures of oriental Canadians posed in front of the same Canadian mountain scene. The display took the whole wall. On the adjacent wall was another set of 67 pictures showing the same people from the rear. The artist, Jin-me Yoon, was making a statement about cultural identity, but I needed more help understanding it.

The same artist produced Intersection II. The internet says it continues the artist's exploration of motherhood. Like Intersection, this second series is comprised of two staged studio photographs. In one the artist is seen lying on the floor with her day planner in a pool of spilt milk. In the second photograph the artist's child is seen seated and crying in a pool of milk. Both tableaus are shot against a brilliant violet background.

Last night we went to the theatre – Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Nothing is cheap here – and the theatre is no exception. The place was virtually sold out. The performance was good, but added some sexual content that made me uncomfortable. I never can figure out why people think that is so funny. It isn’t clever or plot-enhancing, just disgusting. Today we visit Granville Island to see It’s a Wonderful Life on stage. It should be great!

Christmas in Vancouver

This is definitely a different Christmas for us. For Thanksgiving, it was our year to have everyone at our house. The Christmas holiday this year is for the married kids to be with their in-laws. Steve and I, Kimberly and Greg took off for Vancouver a few days ago. It is a classy city, but COLD. We are lucky it hasn’t rained since we got here. I can’t imagine what we would do in the rain. While the Olympics will be held here in two months, we haven’t seen even a flake of snow, even at the base of Grouse Mountain. Since it was below freezing at the top, we didn’t ride the sky tram to the top.

Stanley Park is a beautiful wooded area not far from our hotel. We walked up on Tuesday, enjoying the Oceanside, birds, and fresh air. They have an amazing aquarium. The jellyfish were beautiful. I’m going to have to read more about them. There was a little marmoset that was sitting on a branch eating. The cutest thing was a little two year old who kept repeating, “It’s a marmoset!” The macaws were so noisy! There were hilarious.



Many things were closed for the season, so we walked a long while before we found a fitting place to eat. We decided just to grab the rental car and visit China town. After loading all of our spare change into the parking meter and walking to the Jade Dynasty, we decided to send Greg and Kim back to the car to move it into a regular underground parking lot. China town looks just like China – all the store fronts announcing their wares in Chinese. Lunch was great. We went to a famous Chinese park nearby. It must have been lovely in the summer, but not much to look at in December.



We visited a world class Indian restaurant – Vij’s. Kim had been told by a friend it was the best Indian restaurant in the West. We tried to get in the first night we were here, but there was an hour wait. On Tuesday, we got there twenty minutes before it opened, but there was already a line. After waiting until people had been seated, we were told we could come in for a drink or go elsewhere and come back. The restaurant was so small, there is no way they could handle all those who wanted to wait, so non-drinkers hit the road. When we returned an hour later, we stood at the back until a table was available. The food was really exceptional. They just assumed everyone would share their food, so it came family style. We later read that the restaurant was “going green” and offering a fare of insects which would require fewer resources to produce. Good thing I didn’t know about the trend before our visit, as I doubt I would have been willing to stand in line at a restaurant that was offering insects. I really didn’t see any insects in my food, but there were some flavors I didn’t recognize.

(Sorry about the random layout. I haven't figured out how to control where the pictures go...)

Do you have room?

I grabbed this from my sister-in-law. I really liked it.