Let’s ignore this morning’s sloppy snow (cleared from the fern by my loving fingers but slumping off the chair all by itself)…
and let’s ignore yesterday’s sullen drizzle that had this would-be patron waiting in vain for someone to open up the Espresso Bar at False Creek and start serving coffee.
Let’s instead revisit January 29.
It is a breezy-clear day that rewards a walk along the Coal Harbour stretch of Burrard Inlet — even if afternoon light is already fading by the time I reach this installation, which overlooks the Vancouver Harbour Flight Centre from its spot beside Vancouver Convention Centre West.
I’ve seen it before, always liked it a lot, but today, I pay more attention to it. I start reading the signage. I learn the artist is Vancouverite Doug R. Taylor, who has “a passion for building whimsical mobiles that reflect the storyline of a site.”
The more I read, the more I understand what this means. And understand there’s more going on here than artistic whimsy.
The site, in fact, is directly opposite, not here — past the float plane activity, over there on the north shore where sulphur piles mark one of the many terminals that comprise the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority.
What we have on this side, in this Wind Wheel Mobile, is a memorial to the workers who loaded asbestos over there for so many years.
This mobile is Taylor’s way of working with that history, and those consequences.
I give it a moment, I do, and then I walk on.
I am almost immediately captivated by another storyline — this one created by the dance between the two sites now in front of me. Orange harbour cranes, down there on the left, bounce a fiery explosion across Convention Centre windows, here on the right.
I keep walking, treat myself to a closer look at the reflection, which by now has only the peaks of Convention Centre East to play with. (Plus one swooping gull.)
And then, very well satisfied with wind, water and light, I go on home.
23 January 2025 — My legs want to go celebrate the relatively balmy temperature (4C) and the lack of anything heaving down at us out of the sky. Rough plan: bus rides to Morton Park on the edge of Stanley Park; my own two feet back through the West End on the Comox-Helmcken Greenway to downtown; a visit to the Outsiders and Others art gallery on Howe; and then … well I don’t know. It’ll sort itself out.
Fun, right from the first bus ride.
Old geezer hops on, sporting a grubby old hockey sweater bearing this logo: the Canadiens.
I squeak with delight, shake two-thumbs-up at him, and soon we’re deep in our old-geezer memories about Rocket Richard, Boom-Boom Geoffrion and other heroes of the 1950s/60s Montreal Canadiens hockey team. I bail, to catch my Beach bus on out to Morton Park, but the hockey talk continues: he and another geezer start arguing the merits/stupidity of current Vancouver Canuck team strategy.
Second bus ride is as larky as the first. We would-be passengers put in an extra 30 seconds at the stop while the approaching driver brakes and waits for a solitary gull to walk — very, very slowly — across Station Street in front of the bus. We climb on board cheering the driver.
(He later proves equally considerate of human life forms, making a safe but illegal stop that allows an elderly lady to get off a bit closer to her destination, the Aquatic Centre.)
So I am buoyant with good humour and confidence in the day, as I turn turn off Davie Street onto Bidwell to walk on over to the Greenway. Right at the corner, I’m charmed by Fiona Dunnett’s design for the City utility box, with its happy musicians in a local park…
The box…
and I am equally charmed by the message I see on a stickie pressed to the top of the box, on the other side.
and its stickie.
More street art, or at least street-viewed art, at Bidwell & Pendrell, where the base for the fence around Lord Roberts Elementary School bears design work by its 2016/17 students.
At Comox, I join the Greenway. The intersection is marked a pair of comfy black chairs (prudently bolted into place) — a repeating feature of this corridor, with its emphasis on restful human interaction.
This pair has an impromptu addition: a decidedly unofficial, and decidedly battered, wooden chair left by some anonymous donor. It is not bolted into place!
Street-side gardens everywhere, even if, mid-winter, there are more bare branches and bare earth than plants. This plaintive notice near Nicola, for example, seems unnecessary…
but no, I’m wrong.
Half a block on down the street…
First snowdrops.
I see my first snowdrop of the year.
The accelerating trend to glossy new towers, so visible on Davie Street, is less apparent here. Here so far, and this far west, architecture is older, smaller-scale and somehow more restful. A vintage brick apartment building faces an only slightly newer wooden equivalent at Comox and Broughton.
Volunteer-tended Green Streets gardens are prevalent — a feature here, as elsewhere, of the City program to promote greenery in (and I quote) “traffic-calming spaces.” Often accompanied by benches or pairs of those black chairs, the garden surroundings are indeed calming. You don’t have to love jargon to love the result.
Though sometimes, as in this garden at Broughton, I don’t much love the aesthetic, either.
Garden with the usual gnomes (etc)…
But then… ohhhh, I get over myself. What’s not to love about gnomes & plastic owls & toads & toadstools & bunny-rabbits & watering cans & even a startled bird atop a column of improbably turquoise plastic vine?
Furthermore, there are gardens I really like a lot. So there.
Like the one at Jervis.
No… more precisely, like the brightly daubed fire hydrant next to this garden. With its elephant on top. (I did promise you an elephant, here he is.)
and one with an elephant…
I’m also very fond of this garden near Bute, with its bike-wheel tribute to the joys of cycling.
and one with bike wheels.
Right at Bute, not a garden, but another expression of community and joy and creativity.
Chalk art.
Chalk art…
I don’t know who Baba and Addy are, but this young artist wishes them well, and so do I.
I’m on the diagonal now, slicing through Nelson Park, passing between happy dogs in the off-leash park on my right and happy kiddies in the playground of Lord Roberts school annex on my left. I meet Bella, a slightly skittish Pomeranian/Husky cross, who eventually decides I am to be trusted and gives my hand a nuzzle. Her owner reaches the same conclusion, and allows me to feed her a treat. All three of us are pleased with the encounter.
I pause at a tree. It has pussy-willow-ish catkins on it, though I don’t know for sure that’s what they are. Anyway, that’s not why I pause. It’s the ornament that stops me. The world’s tiniest baby rain boot, bright green and adorable, dangles from a branch. Some infant kicked it off, and some later pedestrian has hung it high, in hopes the parent will come searching and find it.
and a tiny boot…
Once on Nelson Street, I’m heading for the business/entertainment/financial district — serious downtown. At Burrard, the Wall Centre rises tall. It’s arresting in its own right, even more arresting as it throws Gaudí-esque reflections of buildings opposite.
and far reflections…
Still arresting when I’m right in front of it, fountain spray adding further dynamics to the scene.
and close-up reflections…
One last image: the quiet majesty of Arthur Erickson’s Law Courts Complex, seen from Nelson at Hornby…
and the Law Courts.
before I turn onto Howe, make my visit to Outsiders and Others, with its decidedly different sensibility, and finally walk on north to Pender Street and my bus ride home.
No hockey sweaters or hockey talk, this time — instead, a loving young father gurgling nonsense at his toddler son. Everyone within earshot is as charmed as the baby.
12 January 2025 – First, “D” for the Everything, Everywhere Doctrine, which has set its targets for 2025: Greenland, Canada, Panama.
It is beyond alarming & insulting, it is surreal to hear the duly-elected incoming leader of a supposedly principled (and supposedly freedom-loving) country announce his intention to subjugate his neighbours — my country included.
Greenland he plans simply to buy, though upon questioning he explicitly does not rule out the use of military force. Canada he believes he can crush “by economic force.” Panama… well, the U.S. has a history of intervention in its southern neighbours, so there must be a long list of strategies already in the arsenal.
It is stirring, but not comforting, to read David Suzuki’s account (Toronto Star) of why he chose to return to Canada from the U.S. and why he hopes all Canadians “will fight to preserve our differences from [that other] great nation.” It is no comfort that some Americans (cf. this comment on my previous post by a Seattle-based reader) think that members of the incoming administration are “evil, twisted… and some are very stupid.” And it is no comfort to read that the subjugation plans are bound to fail (cf. Stephen Marche analysis, Maclean’s Magazine) since “at this point in history, America has come off 70 years of failed imperialist adventures.”
Even when the target nations are united and patriotic, even when the leaders of the aggressor nations are stupid and bungle their projects — even then — those projects still inflict great damage and suffering on the way through.
…
Shall we move on to a happier pair of D’s?
Doorways and Details
Fresh off a visit to a stunning exhibition in Equinox Gallery, I prowl my way back down this southern extension of Commercial Drive.
It is still home to vintage architecture and to small, independent shops and activities. Doorways are individual, and expressive.
This café with its door wide open…
The café…
and a collection of vintage bottles overhead.
and its bottles.
This crafts workshop…
The workshop…
with its glorious live-edge door pull.
and its door pull.
This café one block farther north, where the door may be physically closed but the signage welcomes you…
Another café…
and a small notice apologizes for the need to bar pets…
and its puppy-love.
and offers a free “puppiccino” in compensation.
An adjacent door, barred and locked, appears unfriendly, but is deceptive.
Another door…
It guards something very friendly indeed, a tool-lending library — “an affordable community-based alternative to personal tool ownership or tool rental.”
Sadly, its window detail, hard to read through bars and glare, suggests neighbourly puppiccinos may become a thing of the past.
and its activism.
“How can you call this a development when the only thing going up is my rent.” Later I see land-acquisition notices in front of other vintage properties, citing CD-1 zoning, i.e. Comprehensive Development.
Another, much smaller doorway, this time near the north end of a narrow linear park threading its way parallel to Commercial Drive, on down to East Broadway.
A tiny door…
One Little Free Library door, with two heart-warming details. First, the pointillist celebration of whales on the door…
with a whale…
and, second, the introduction to Harmonious Joan taped to the frame inside. (You don’t need to be a ukulele player, to be glad that people like HJ exist.)
and Joan.
One final “doorway” for you, and note those punctuation marks of uncertainty.
I debate its inclusion, and then decide that, yessiree! it qualifies. True, it is an intersection…
Sort of a doorway…
but are not intersections the doorway to a pair of streets?
Anyway the detail, another of the city’s sidewalk mosaics, deserves attention…
with magic underfoot.
even if I cannot find a reference to it anywhere and so cannot identify it for you.
All these small things — ordinary, everyday, and worth defending.
1 January 2025 – And what always tops the Resolution list?
Get more exercise.
Well… Vancouverites are on it already.
Yesterday, after my own get-some-exercise walk through Stanley Park and back toward town from Second Beach, I see this cluster of tents set up on the shores of English Bay.
I see a cluster of tents…
Coming closer, I hear a deep-bass male voice doing sound checks, and then practising his “Happ-py new year, everybody!”
Coming right up to it, I see this is not prep for some dissolute New Year’s Eve blow-out. It is prep for a serious New Year’s Day feat of athletic endurance.
It’s the Polar Bear Swim!
The annual Polar Bear Swim. Still underway as I write these words, but with years of tradition behind it.
Mind you, I’ve already had my own modest bit of exercise, this 1st day of the year.
Down to False Creek, just to say hello. Where there’s lots of exercise underway.
Including swimming.
Even Hinge Park ducks are having a swim.
All right, they do it year-round, but it counts.
As I follow that False Creek tributary through Hinge Park, I come to the playful little bridge connecting one side to t’other…
My favourite Hinge Park “bridge.”
and then peer inside.
Where, at the far end, I see a father beginning to swing his little girl down-down-DOWN the steps to enter the bridge.
Kiddies also love it.
I meet them toward that far end.
She stamps her feet on the echoing deck, and giggles at me. I stamp my feet, and giggle right back at her. To her father’s vast amusement, she and I then have ourselves a foot-stamping contest. (And a giggle contest.)
Day 1 of a new year, and the exercise box is ticked!
29 December 2024 – Also pandas & moo-cows & more, as I have yet to discover. All I know, before I set out, is that it is positively heaving down out there.
But I go out anyway, because, delightful as holiday sloth has been, it’s time to move my body.
Dripping tree against a sodden sky…
but happy ferns, in this front yard…
and happy winter moss on this tree, plus a cheerful ornament hung by some passing pedestrian.
The Vancouver Special is hunkered down, properly stoic — as it ought to be, here in its own native eco-system…
while the vintage green lampshade next door rises to the occasion, knowing it looks better in rain than sunshine.
Out on Main Street, a trio of pandas advertise dim sum…
a solitary cat advertises records…
three dogs advertise their very own bakery…
and an exceptionally silly cow (through this butcher’s doorway, left) advertises which succulent cuts come from which bits of her anatomy.
What is more dejected than a construction site in the rain? Not yet able to advertise the condo delights to come.
But this trio of guitars is warm & dry & a good advertisement for the magic of music…
especially Mr. Heavy Metal in the middle, whose tiny lettered plaque reads:
“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
It’s all very swell, wonderfully diverting.
Nonetheless, I wish to point out that, after all this walking… it is still heaving down out here.
So I go home.
As I bring my dripping self through the door I envy, not for the first time, dogs’ ability to shake themselves dry.
Just look at that spiral shake!
But alas, we humans are not built like that.
So I do the next best thing.
I make myself a mug of spicy Mesoamerican hot chocolate.
(Recipes abound. Mine is 1 c. milk simmered with 1/2 tbsp honey, and a pinch each of ground ginger, cloves & cayenne; and then a generous 1/8 c unsweetened cocoa and bit of vanilla extract whisked in at the end.)
While I’m enjoying the drink — and wiggling my toes to extract maximum flavour — I read more about the long history of cacao & chocolate in Mayan and Aztec cultures.
Oh look, it is still raining. But I no longer care.
30 November 2024 – Vancouverite and, more to the point, horologist Raymond Saunders died one week ago today, age 84. I want to pay my own small tribute because, multiple times most days, I walk by one of his creations. It is part of my neighbourhood, and therefore part of my life.
This is the Mount Pleasant Welcome clock, which he was commissioned to design and build in the late 1980s as part of the uptick then underway in the neighbourhood.
But it is not the clock for which he is best-known.
This one is.
Residents and tourists alike, we know this clock: the Gastown Steam Clock. In the mid-70s, Saunders, already an experienced horologist, was asked to design and build a clock to camouflage a steam vent at the corner of Water and Cambie streets in the Gastown district of downtown Vancouver.
The result, unveiled in 1977, was 16 sculptured feet of bronze & copper designed to reflect the buildings around it. For the first ten years the clock was indeed steam-powered (perhaps, but perhaps not, the first steam-powered clock in the world). Since then it has run on electricity, though the whistle…
emulating an 1890s steam locomotive whistle, is still really-truly powered by steam.
Obituaries and other articles and videos (click here, and take your choice) tell us he designed and built more than 150 customized clocks world-wide, often in equal part art works but always functioning clocks as well. I’m charmed to know, for example, that his Scenic World Steam Clock, installed in Katoomba Australia, commemorates coal miners and their pit ponies — and, to mark the hours, plays Waltzing Matilda.
Our local clock is much less grand…
but it reflects this neighbourhood, bearing not only the Vancouver coat of arms…
but sprigs of hops as well. After all, this was, and is again, the Brewery District.
The clock’s image, like the physical clock, is part of who we are. You see it incorporated into shop signage…
and on sidewalk banners….
and in my own Winter Solstice blog post, last 21 December…
when I stood patiently in front of the clock, waiting to photograph it at exactly 7:27 pm — the exact moment of solstice, Pacific Time. While my theme was the phenomenon of the solstice, not the clock or its creator, I naturally turned to this clock to make my point.
The obits tell us that Ray Saunders was still fixing clocks and advising collectors world-wide right to the end. They also tell us he was still playing poker right to the end. His last game, with friends, took place last Saturday.
26 November 2024 – I’ll get to “Great Northern.” Let’s start with “bimble.”
I learned this splendid word just three days ago, reading Snow! — James Elkington’s latest post to his blog Mountains, Myths and Moorlands. The post began, “We woke to a lot of snow, I managed to get onto the moors for a bimble.” Subsequent e-chat with this Yorkshireman taught me that the word is both noun and verb, and means “to walk about without purpose.”
(I am not going to rename my blog “Bimble Broad”! Though the idea does have me giggling…)
Yes well, on to Great Northern Way.
I decide to have myself a bimble the length of GNW, so-named in tribute to its earlier life as a stretch of the Great Northern Railway route from Seattle to Vancouver.
Easy access for me, from my home just a bit uphill: down Main, turn right-east on East 6th instead of left-west, then left on Brunswick… and there it is, the Great Northern Way, just a few blocks farther down.
Down by the construction crane, which will be there for a good while yet.
There’s all the activity for the Broadway Subway Project — the westward extension of the Millennium Line — and then there’s the whole South Flats neighbourhood thing as well. I already know about the former (and live with it, in my own neighbourhood); I become aware of the latter in the course of this bimble.
Down/down, north/north, past a curious cat on a gate post at East 2nd…
and here I am, at GNW itself. Already so transformed from its railway/industrial/service area, let alone from its earlier, natural life as the final stretch of False Creek before the needs of expanding commerce decided to fill it in.
To the right of the construction crane, the white, blocky complex of Emily Carr University of Art + Design, whose arrival triggered this latest academic/creative/high-tech/digital era. Far right, the Centre for Digital Media (UBC, Simon Fraser U, Emily Carr, BC Institute of Technology). Far left, the corrugated metal and bright red of Canvas, one of the area’s new-builds catering to the Emily Carr vibe by offering its condo owners such amenities as flexible artist gallery space and collective workshop space, along with the more usual fitness centre and children’s playground.
And, in between, the work-in-progress GNW Emily Carr transit station, with its hoardings and bouncy signage to explain what’s happening, along with viewing slots so you can see for yourself.
I read signage, I peer downward through a viewing slot.
I read more signage.
I learn how to move three elephants, should the need occur…
and, around the corner, I learn why to pat every dog I see.
Still hoardings, still signage, but now with a whole other focus.
South Flats.
With an “s.” Please notice that. Not “z.”
Until recently, this trending area, to prove how very artistic/creative/trending it was, branded itself Flatz. Not like the grimy, grubby old industrial False Creek Flats spelled with a humble “s.”
Nosiree. With a “z”!
And now the anonymous They have decided that “z” is passé.
This whole area, the whole length of Great Northern, is now branded Flats-with-an-s. (I remember a New Zealand academic, at a Learned Society conference I once covered for the CBC, observing that every reputation goes through three stages: “Bunk, Debunk, Rebunk.” Z has been debunked; S has been rebunked.)
My bimble is showing me that South Flats is A Thing. A Very Big Thing. Forgive me this moment of flackery, but I have to offer you the development’s website, its explanation of this emerging “tech and arts hub.” Rapid transit is just part of what’s going on, in behind those hoardings.
A lot of that is still to come. While waiting, you can play South Flats bingo…
or just visit Nemesis Coffee, whose striking petal shape is also (see above) the central icon in the bingo game.
Far side of Nemesis, the eastern entrance to Emily Carr…
and facing it, the Centre for Digital Media. Except I’ve stopped gawking at all that high-design high-tech.
I am now gawking at winter moss.
The season has begun. I remember, my first winter here, becoming totally enraptured by the vibrant green of winter moss. I am still enraptured.
On east along Great Northern Way, lots of chain link fence, with Things Happening in behind.
Nature likes chain link fence, vines especially, they climb all over it. Even when the fence is mostly draped in bright blue tarpaulin. Vine still finds a way.
I am fascinated to see that somebody has deliberately, carefully, spray-painted some of those leaves blue, to match.
I am now, almost, at the end of GNW. The thoroughfare itself won’t end, it will just — yet again — change name. (West 4th to West 6th to West 2nd to East 2nd to GNW to East 6th.) Never mind! Here opposite China Creek North Park, it is still Great Northern Way. As I look back, I can read the purpose behind its broad, straight lines, and see again the railway track it was designed to carry.
And then, just like that, I find I have left Great Northern Way. I have passed Glen Drive, I am almost at Clark Drive, and I am now on East 6th Avenue.
I am also passing one of the City’s icons: the East Van Cross.
Currently behind chain link and tarps, because that’s the here-and-now of things, the artwork has its own decade-plus of history, and speaks to a much longer history than that.
Asked by the City to commemorate Vancouver’s role as host of the 2010 Winter Olympics, artist Ken Lum created this sculpture. It is not a symbol of Christian piety. He drew his inspiration from a graffito image of the day, frequently seen in East Vancouver alleys, the intersection of “East” with “Van” in a spare, elegant shape dictated, Scrabble-like, by the interplay of letters. “Over the years, the symbol had been adopted as an emblem for East Vancouver as a whole,” said Lum, “but its appearance has generally been tentative rather than overt.” Lum brought it out of the alleys, made it overt.
As I turn north onto Clark, my bimble ends. I am now walking with purpose. I shall briskly take myself on down to East Hastings, and start the bus trip home.
The Coast Range Mountains are before me. The light is failing, the sky is snowy, and the mountain peaks — look at those Grouse Mountain ski runs — are white with snow.
Snow! It’s perfect. James Elkington’s post about snow taught me to bimble, and my bimble ends with snow.
23 November 2024 – A play on “bright & early,” of course, and a favourite winter-time quip of the host of the CBC early-morning radio show that I listened to for years.
He’d sign off, promising to greet us again the following morning, “Dark and early.”
What came to mind yesterday, as I walked an alley just off East Broadway & Brunswick…
is that, this time of year, “dark & early” describes both ends of the day.
It is exactly 3:53:36 p.m. — not yet 4 p.m.! — and Nomi Chi’s VMF mural (2016, the Festival‘s inaugural year) broods with extra drama in the failing light.
(I know the change is increasingly dramatic, the farther north you go. I do know this. I spent time in Inuvik, one January, and learned that the Arctic is not only the Land of the Midnight Sun, it is also the Land of the Mid-day Moon. But… now I am here, and here I am now, and this is what I notice, in my here-and-now.)
18 November 2024 – This weekend — for the 28th year — was the annual Eastside Culture Crawl. I take advantage of Sunday’s better weather (merely iffy, as opposed to torrential) to join in.
I’ll visit studios like this one…
but mostly, as seems to be my personal Crawl tradition, I’ll just go for a big old walk. And visit some studios along the way.
When I cross 2nd Avenue, northbound on Scotia Street…
flaming beech trees welcome me to official Crawl territory: it runs from the waterfront farther north to right here, 2nd Avenue. (And, east-west, from Victoria Drive to Columbia Street.)
Also part of my personal tradition: my first visit is always to the bustling Arts Factory on Industrial Avenue, but before that — just to get in the mood — I loop my way through the False Creek Flats, taking in their evolving mix of new facilities and old warehouses as I go.
Streets in here have helpful names. Western Street runs up/down the Flats’ western boundary; Station Street to the east runs to the train station; and they are connected, you’ve guessed it, by Southern, Central and Northern streets, in the appropriate geographic order. North of Northern lies Terminal, and beyond that, Industrial.
I pass one of my all-time favourite rusty warehouses at the corner of Southern and Western, now with a gleaming new high-ish rise in the background…
but I’m even more taken by this tear-drop puddle reflecting the warehouse back at me, as I round the corner to head north on Western.
A huge stump marks the corner of Western and Northern. The building looks more derelict every year, yet it is still in operation, as its grumpy shipping-receiving notice makes clear.
After my visit to the Arts Factory, I double back west to Main Street. This makes no logistical sense at all!
It’s the most perversely roundabout way possible to get to Gore Avenue, which houses the three studios I’ve decided to visit this year — but, hey, I’m out for a walk, right? The rounder-about it gets, the better.
And I’m glad for my few blocks on Main. They take me past something that may look bleak, but deserves respect.
Yes, it’s behind chain-link fence and yes, it is November-dreary. But it is also a seasonal community garden, here at the corner of Milross, and it bears our local Yarn Bomber’s tribute of a crochet heart — recognition of the resilience of people doing what they can, in a tough context.
Back east along Prior, heading for the end of the block where I will turn north on Gore. I plan to scoot right along, but I’m stopped by this Mexican cervecería, just past Hogan’s Alley.
A moment for a giggle, and then eastward-ho to the corner of Gore Avenue, with the venerable Hunnybee Bruncheonette [sic] on the left and equally venerable Strathcona homes on the right.
I’ve walked along Gore on other occasions, but it’s always been the ground-level shops that caught my attention — I’ve never thought who might be doing what, higher up in these old buildings. Today, I start to find out.
First target: Godzilla Studios, where one workshop — Street & Saddle — will be open to visitors. Once inside, once upstairs, I’m distracted en route by the instructions I see through an open washroom door over the waste paper bin.
Politeness seems to work! The bin is full to the brim, but the floor is clean.
On down the hall to Street & Saddle, a warm, welcoming and very impressive workshop of cheerful people and good clothing. Good business practices, too, as I learn from this sign on a counter top:
Isn’t that the best? Each year, their little shop keeps a whole pony’s-weight of fabric out of landfill.
Back down the stairs, out the door, on up the street to the Pot Spot Studio.
A word about stairs. Stairs literally come with art-crawl territory, since studios are usually located in the higher reaches of their respective buildings. Savvy artists, like these Pot Spot folk, make sure you know which stairs to climb…
and then give you a bonus.
Turn the corner to climb those red-arrowed stairs…
and a serpent leads the way.
As the potter at this top level studio wraps some purchases for other visitors, I hear a bit of his backstory: from his Russian homeland, to art school in Jerusalem, to — one year ago — Vancouver. I think of the losses, the struggles, the terrible choices that must be locked up in that chronology, and tell him I wish him well in his new life. His eyes soften, he nods acknowledgment.
North again on Gore, on to the eponymous Gore Studio, can’t miss it, just follow the sign for Kim Hung Noodles. (It’s the doorway I teased you with, at the start of this post.)
In, and up.
Again up.
And the invitation to go on up yet again. Again.
I’m not sure what that is! A multi-coloured toilet roll? An aerosol paint can? Doesn’t matter; It’s of a piece with the fantasy-land all around.
I find myself taking photos for some enchanted visitors who are struggling with their selfie technique, then do my own tour of the wonders, and then leave. Back down all those stairs, back out onto Gore Avenue.
With a last glance at that impressive building, noodle ghosts and all…
I walk past the Himalayan restaurant next door…
past the gloriously pungent Chinese market spilling out over the sidewalk…
and finally take myself back out to Main Street, and a bus ride home.
16 November 2024 – I enjoy walking this ‘hood, this part of Fairview. It’s a quiet stretch of older wooden homes, all very human scale and welcoming, with their front porches and front gardens.
But this street, indeed this whole area, is adjacent to the Broadway traffic artery and lies within the ambit of the comprehensive Broadway Plan — which, for all its consultations and talk of public space, is focused on intensification.
Land Assembly billboards have become commonplace.
The future is on its way.
I’m with Graffito Guy. It’s gonna be ugly.
On a happier note!
The Very Large Waterfowl I showed you in the previous post has been identified.
In her comment on the post, Lynette d’Arty-Cross was cautious enough only to say she was “reasonably certain,” but that’s good enough for me. We’re looking at a juvenile trumpeter swan.
Thank you, Lynette.
Do the rest of you know her blog (In the Net! – Pictures and Stories of Life)? If not, click here. You’ll be glad you did.
"Traveller, there is no path. Paths are made by walking" -- Antonio Machado (1875-1939)
"The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes" -- Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
"A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities" -- Rebecca Solnit, "Wanderlust: A History of Walking"
