Oot and Aboot in Canada, Aye?

A couple of weekends ago I finally got to see my dream country - Canada. It's got a little bit of English, a wee bit of French, a whole lotta free healthcare, a couple of "aye"s here and there, and who doesn't like some good 'ole maple syrup? Oh, and the Queen is on all of the currency in British Columbia (which is where I was), specifically Vancouver!

My super sweet awesome-sauce boss gave me Friday and Monday off so that I would have enough time to navigate transportation and take advantage of being so close to the wonderful land of Canada. I can almost smell the maple syrup from the bluff, with Victoria, Canada in sight right across the water (almost as clear as Sarah Palin can see Russia from her house). I  took my first ferry ride ever with Sylvia, Roland, and some family friends (all of whom were going to Seattle for a graduation ceremony). Sylvia took my picture posing as Rose from the Titanic from the front of the ferry. This was our process:

                            

After that shot, our captain alerted us to a pod of killer whales off to the right, and I got to see water coming out of their blowholes! It was - here comes the pun - KILLER!

Anyways, I took my first train ride ever (via Amtrak) all the way to the train station in Vancouver, where I met up with Norah, a friend from school who is staying in the area. We navigated the SkyTrain and various public transportations (sometimes unsuccessfully) to go to Stanley Park (one of the few green spaces in the city), walk through a kooky and overwhelming bookstore, skim through Chinatown, stumble upon a social justice café, and walk up Commercial Drive, where we ate Ethiopian food (which I now highly recommend, by the way). That evening we took about an hour-long SkyTrain ride to take a bus to Fort Langley, where Norah is staying with a family friend. The house was large and homey, with a hard-working mother and several teenage boys who played the piano almost as naturally as taking a breath. I went to sleep with tired feet and a warm bed.

 Feel the kook and overwhelm. It almost doesn't even look real...

Saturday was probably my favorite day of the weekend. We biked into downtown Fort Langley to volunteer in a community garden located in a public park near a school for the arts. The people already there were working on laying brick for a small patio to make a space for garden classes. The garden was immaculate. There were about 40 beds, each of them owned and maintained by a member of the Fort Langley community. The ground was neatly mulched and the beds were weed-free. We chatted and had some laughs with the other kids working on the project. Most of them were students in the garden club at the arts school. We learned how to level the ground before laying the bricks (I believe it's called "skreeting"), and then got to put in about quarter of the bricks in a random arrangement. It was fulfilling work and very inspiring. And they fed us lunch and snacks...gotta love them Canadians, aye?

Afterwards we walked around town and had some coffee and tea before heading back to the house for dinner, which was followed by a walk in the woods with the family dog - definitely my kind of day!

We came across some grazing horses on our walk with the doggie

Sunday, we both agreed, was a bit of a hazy blur, with much confusion figuring out bus timing and SkyTrain stations. We bussed through University of British Columbia's campus to get to the botanical gardens, where we realized we did not have enough time to buy tickets and walk around, since we were meeting Norah's friends in North Vancouver for dinner. But it was alright, we just looked at each other and shrugged with tired smiles, and then took the SeaBus over to the Lonsdale Quay Market for dinner. Her friends were very nice and the food (one of the girls and I had Greek, the others had Indian) was delicious. We then began our journey back to the house in a zombie-like state.

The next day, I started making my way back to Port Townsend at about 8 AM, and completed around 8 PM. Involved in my travels were the following types of transportation: walking, biking, training, bussing, ferrying, and carring (it's a new word, call me Shakespeare). Highlight of the day was getting off my four-hour bus ride to hang out at Pike Place Market in Seattle, where I ate a cup of crab meat and to-die-for gelato while talking to my mom on the phone.

Speaking of the phone, I noticed something that weekend which I was aware of before but not so in-tuned to think about very deeply - everyone, and I mean everyone on public transportation is plugged in. To their phones, iPods, newspapers, Kindles, and what-have-yous. It was interesting to just watch all of them, in another place other than where they were. I am, of course, a culprit of this activity from time to time. It's as if any spare second of doing nothing is forbidden to existence, and it must be occupied with some sort of distraction or the human attention span will explode from lack of something, lack of anything. The reason why I noticed this, ironically, was that I forgot my headphones at my host family's house. I picked up my book from time to time on the way back to Seattle, but I mostly was just intrigued with everyone's consumption around me. I think that just about did me in on my commute back into the States, and I was very happy to come back to open, green space and a breezy walk out to the bluff.

All in all, the weekend was very fun in an adventurous, I'm-still-learning kind of way. It was really nice to see a familiar face from Antioch and to get to talk a little bit about how we've felt about our jobs and the school quarter to come. And although spontaneous jaunts (such as the social justice café and Pike Place Market) are memorable gems in and of themselves, I'm definitely going to try to do some pre-planning before the next trip I go on by myself.

Hello Vancouver, British Columbia. Thank you for your quaint surprises and friendly people, aye?