South Asian bread weekend

all from scratch... the naan wasn't that great, but the gothambara roti was greeeat!!!!

Hammock time

Beautiful sunny day here in Van - a good reason for a hammock!

I took a long hike in Stanley Park, finally really discovering it and seen all the beautiful humongous Redwood fir trees. It was a great day with crowds all over the beach unto second beach; it gets thinner after that and more peaceful too.

Sitting here like I love to, watching the sunset, hearing all sorts of different accents passing me in the background (I even heard Sinhalese just now and automatically turned my head to look, like I do when I hear French, and they acknowledged.), I am again blessed with a peaceful evening by the ocean (not a real ocean, I know, but hey). Also as I mentioned the other day on Facebook, watching bald eagles from my office desk, seeing coyotes on my way to work, picking blackberries on my way from work and still, every evening, retreating to the safe haven of my apartment in the cosmopolitan city centre - how can I not love Vancouver? I don't know... but sometimes I don't...

Rock Balancing Art

Joesf Toth (not to be confused with the like-sounding Josaphat-le-violon, of Michel Tremblay's La grosse Femme d'à côté est enceinte) is doing his Rock Balancing art, that has taken Vancouver by a storm it seems - If you ever walk by a beach you are bound to see these amazing displays of rocks balanced in a seemingly unreal way. If you have been to Van and walked on the beach and haven't seen these consider that you haven't walked far enough. They don't chip the rocks or anything like that - they just find the rocks that would balance on top of each other and place them so, and they will withstand your daily wind even. I was reading his thing when I laughed at one of his silly jokes so he immediately took a liking to me and said he will build this for me. It takes a long time obviously and I stood there with glazed eyes for like half an hour. Later he commended my patience and took some pictures himself of the art he dedicated for me.

I almost never put pictures taken by others in this blog - in fact I never remember doing so - but I have to make Josef Toth an exception - I have, after all, never been rock-art serenaded.

Zombies in West End

Today there was apparently an sort of an impromptu call for zombie dress up on Facebook and all the Zombies conglomerated on my street. I was out on the heritage tour and then running errands so I didn't catch the main action, and also I am on a Facebook hiatus, so when one of my friends called me about the event I looked out the window and lo and behold there were some disoriented zombies…

a city's old people

Old people are a window to a society's not so apparent ways of life. Happy old people tell a story of a society that makes it possible to still be happy, long after your traditional productiveness has gone, and in this case, story of a people who grew up with grand parents who witnessed the Chinatown riots of Vancouver in 1907, great grand parents who witnessed the 1887 Chinatown riots - so grew up possibly with some anti-Asian sentiments themselves. But today they are standing here, in my West End neighborhood's heritage art walking tour - singing away sultry Ella Fitzgerald hits and hitting on men 30years their junior. Most ciites have a racist past, some a racist present; Vancouver's was against the Asians, that didn't really end until about 10 years ago, when the city actually took pictures of subtle acts of racism and put them on billboards so everyone can see them and be ashamed of. So if people growing up and growing old in such an environment can become open minded enough to be singing sultry songs and daintily hitting on a West Coast hippie, I think I can definitely grow old here; not that I want to be daintily hitting on a West Coast hippie, but you know what I mean - it does reflect a certain open mindedness. Standing in the hot sun, I watched them coo away , tears rolling down my cheeks at the possibility of a home… Ah only if Vancouver didn't get that much rain…

home brew

I dragged myself to this bbq/bottling activity organized by one of the professors, because things were not going so well in my life and I could use the distractions, even the boring ones - it turned out to be more fun than I expected though; just the regular teasing and what not but it was fun. And then we bottled the home brewed beer.