Vancouver is a funny mixture of leaving things alone (electric buses and an old train through the heart of town) and constructing gazillions of new condos/shops/whatever all at once.
Sometimes I feel like every crane in North America must be here…
This is the site of the Olympic village for the 2010 winter olympics here (and that’s Science World on the left - left-over from Expo here in 1986). They’ve even built an island in the harbour for people to be presented with their medals for the TV cameras (vomit).
Another Olympics-related construction is the skytrain line from the city to the airport which involved digging up a huge stretch of Cambie Street (a once-thriving village south of downtown). It was like an open sore for ages and is only just starting to heal….
Walking around Krakow I am always amazed at how much construction work there is going on. From new roads, to footpaths, to new sewage instalments, to the renovation of old tenement houses. I remember reading somewhere years ago that Sydney Uni spends some 65% of all its money on the maintenance of its old buildings that were erected in the 19th century. Krakow has treasures from the 1400s and its OldTown is listed on the World Heritage List. I wonder how much cash must be pumped into its walls on a monthly basis, given the harsh weather conditions, the pollution and the general illsuitability to traffic and population expansion! During the commy era almost nothing was done to preserve the old structures. So when you walk around the place these days it feels like the town is in a constant makeover stage. Michal’s mum, who used to study in Krakow in the 70s, says she feels strange walking around the freshly repainted facades and shiny new footpaths. To her Krakow was always grey, dirty, unkept and mysterious. The new colour scheme makes her feel uneasy. I like it. I especially like watching the specially trained heritage building restorers. They’re often students studying conservation, young women with special tools, on their knees working the fine stone with meticulous detail…
The Christo effect on all the buildings under constructions
This is the main cinema that I go to most frequently, called “Pod Baranami”, meaning ‘Under the Sheep’. Since arriving its facade has always been under renovation. Maybe they’ve run out of dosh.
The latest project is new underground piping. The old early 19th century water pipes are being gutted out due to all the leaking. Their rustiness is pretty impressive. Alas no picture.
And this is just thrown in for a kick. Scafolding in Hong Kong. Out of bamboo sticks!! Michal and I stared at this for ages. Who would have thought bamboo to be so sturdy.
There is no set definition for what a café is in Vancouver it seems. Some of them look like pubs to me, others like restaurants, but there are a few that match with my definition: comfy seats, dimmer lighting, warm and cold beverages, baked goods and light meals… Bliss!
My favourites in the area are Our Town Cafe and Rhizome Café. Rhizome’s mission is to “promote the work of local artists, provide people with a space to socialize and connect with each other, and support progressive social justice work.” They hold craft socials, NGO meetings, book launches, art exhibitions, talks, music, spelling bees (!), films, board games nights and family discos, and serve a damn good “lentils are everything” stew (which is ‘pay as you feel’ a la Melbourne’s Lentil As Anything). There’s always a friendly face at the counter and it feels like you’re at friend’s house having a drink or a meal.
Then there’s Our Town Cafe - an institution in the area. It stands on Broadway and Kingsway in a triangular building (Kingsway is one of the few streets in Vancouver that doesn’t run North-South or East-West, so it’s like the building’s been cut in half on an angle). Our Town hosts local meetings, music and story slam nights, and once a month they host a ukulele circle where people bring along their ukes and play from a shared song book (cute!)
Now that I’m such a reader, Jeff and I go there once a week to have a read and a hot chocolate/tea (plus one of their tasty homemade muffins). It’s like watching a taping of Cheers where everyone knows everyone else’s name, and there’s one customer who seems to live there (I’ve seen him every single time I’ve been there with his guitar). They have beautiful comfy armchairs lined up against the window so you can spy out at the world.
Just when I had given up hope on receiving an actual parcel to write about (and had laboriously come up with this post topic around “part and parcel” which wasn’t much chop), this arrived:
I had completely forgotten that I’d bought them on ebay. Only 99c each! They’re for the Rubik’s Cube party which I’m having next Saturday, in which guests must arrive in the six colours of the Rubik’s Cube and leave wearing only one (so yes, basically a swinger’s party). I think I will hang them from the ceiling or something. Shy guests who don’t want to talk to anyone can occupy themselves with them.
I need to organise some vegan colour-coded snacks for the catering (niche food group that). Here’s what I’m thinking:
White: Steamed buns, dumplings, popcorn, some coconut-y sweet
Green: Green tea cupcakes, guacamole, asparagus and pesto tarts, vine leaves
Blue: Blueberry tarts, some kind of blue jelly concoction, blue fairy bread, blue fairy floss, blue corn chips (Beth: Are these really blue enough? I remember having them in North America)
Orange: Polenta rounds with carrot and mango chutney, pumpkin bites, candied orange, sweet potato fries, rock melon, carrot sticks
I love parcels as much as anyone. This is a great theme - made me feel happy just thinking about it. But I thought I’d wait till my birthday parcel from my mum arrived before posting, so sorry for being as slow as the slacker-flung-two ;-P.
Here it is! Not quite as many stamps as Beth’s beauty, but still an impressive number. I have realised it is EXPENSIVE for people to parcel me from Australia.
Inside were a book, tshirt and bracelet for me, and an Easter bunny and tshirt (easter tshirt??) for Finn.
Check out the card.
Also inside were some finger puppets mum made for Finn, then lost, then rediscovered. She’s a bit like that. Obviously though, he loves them!
This was a great parcel.
It does remind me though of one of the awesomest parcels of all time, which was from Suzy. Look!
Suzy: we now both wear our tshirts, only Finn’s fits a bit better on him than mine does on me - I stretched it out when I was preggers!
Initially I was going to post an entry about the pregnancy parcel. It seems that after returning from a six week holiday in Australia (insert apology for blogging slackness here), all my friends in Krakow are carrying the preggers parcel or are just popping one open. Spring is definitely in the air. The thought however of photographing their bellies seemed a tad obtrusive. And also a bit boring. The bellies that would most probably agree to be photographed aren’t even big enough to be interesting. So no preggers parcel blog.
Instead here are some pics of the heaviest parcels that I ever had to carry up four floors of stairs. I nearly died and had mad calf cramps. Last November I decided to invest some money into printing arty/historical postcards about Krakow and its people. So far the Krakow postcard market tends to cater for the horse-buggy-and-church-in-background customer. I wanted to release something that I wouldn’t be embarrassed of if a foreigner visiting the place would purchase. I had 20 000 printed. Some 20 images taken by local photographers. Distribution is only now picking up.
The printing company delivered 20 odd packages weighing about 5 kilos each and had them dumped on the ground floor of our building. After lugging them up the stairs all on my own, the parcels collected dust for a couple of months, leaning against a wall in our spare room. Now we have purchased new storage space to keep them all in a semi-tidy existence.
The stack of postcard parcels in my cupboard
Now in some sort of order
Postcard - photo by Robert Kosieradzki
Postcard - photo by Robert Kosieradzki
Postcard - photo by Robert Kosieradzki
Kosieradzki died a while ago but he left a whole archive of photos from Nowa Huta from the 60s and 70s. He used to walk around the industrial utopia with a hidden camera (as photographing without Party permission was illegal), taking pics of the surroundings, the mass industrialisation, the pollution and daily life. Mrs. Kosieradzki has allowed me to use her husband’s images.
Even if a parcel isn’t yours, it’s still exciting. This was brought home to me last night when I came home to discover that Jeff’s brother Daniel’s banjo had arrived (they wouldn’t ship to Australia, so we are acting as middle-people). I knew that banjos were kind of big, but this parcel was ridiculously big, and it is so funny that it arrived in the week we were doing this topic!
I have included Mr Squirrel in the frame to give an idea of scale. Impressive!
We opened the box to check that it was okay and the banjo box itself was lovely…
But back-track a second….how rad was the banjo shop’s use of stamps?!?! Here’s a close-up:
Bless whoever had the job of counting those to make sure the amount was correct!
…in other postal-related news, our postie (not called that here I’m sure) has a key to our apartment building and unlocks the whole front of all of our letter boxes to put our mail inside each one! Jeff has made firm friends with the lady at the post office and she gives him lots of advice to make things cheaper to send (e.g. cut the corners off wrapping paper so it doesn’t overlap so much). We sent my parent’s (heavy) christmas presents via seamail on December 15th and they arrived this week (almost three months)!
Last night I received my first JASNA (Jane Austen Society of North America) newsletter and a hand-written letter thanking me for joining! Very sweet!
I am renowned in our household for being a good mimic (well, maybe just a mimic…) Whenever we walk out of a shop that’s been playing music I’m singing whatever they were playing, even if it’s just a couple of lines over and over again. I get stuff stuck in my head easily so I could never have been a sound or picture editor and maintained my sanity.
Here are some of my cannily brilliant mimics of bus noises
…very similar to 99s door closing sound… The other cool thing about skytrains is that they don’t have a driver (they are remote controlled!) but there is a seat at the front where you can pretend to a reckless driver like Tabs was…
And finally, here’s pedestrian crossings Vancouver-style. They sound like birds chirping (I’m not totally happy with these renditions - work in progress).
Riding home from work yesterday, there were two startlingly gorgeous rainbow lorikeets sitting on the railing of the Harbour Bridge cycle path. They were just hanging out, unperturbed by the cyclists in their own rainbow lycra outfits whizzing past.
I have never seen any birds up there before. While it offers such an amazing view of natural beauty, the bridge itself seems inimical to the natural world. It’s like a massive, bustling conveyor belt for things with spinning wheels and grinding rails and locomotive legs. It even seems that way on the pedestrian side, a conduit for power-walking commuters in sneakers and tourists trying in vain to amble against the bracing wind. Those poor, pointless security guards up there are the closest thing to wildlife.
The lorikeets stayed there long enough for me to ride past, stop in my tracks and head back to take a photo (cycle path chaos!) right up next to them. But as soon as I clicked the button, they were gone.
Ghost bus. Observed two nights ago while approaching Geylang, the red light district of Singapore.The grainy quality robs you of the sight of the ghostly swathes of chiffon covering the wheels, making the bus appear to float across the road. But the grainy quality is also appropriate for the genre of video.
Ghost sightings. How can anyone believe in them? I guess it’s a matter of “third person effect”. Other people can be fooled by illusions, but you and I cannot. And I saw a ghost with my OWN EYES.
Here in Asia it’s as common to believe in ghosts as not to. Evidence includes such experiences as the following:
“I was watching tv in bed, then turned it off and went to sleep. Later that night, I suddenly woke up, and the TV was on, but on Suria. I never watch Suria. And the remote was in a different part of the bed to where I was sleeping.”
“I walked out of the house, and I felt that something was not right, like someone was watching me, and I asked my sister, what was behind the trees. She said “A cemetery.” I did not even know that when I asked.”
Four friends, four continents, four months, four posts a week.
Before they were flung far, four ladies used to live in the inner-
West of Sydney, sharing a love of craft, chin-wags and the
neighbourly pop-in. Love, work, adventure and tax breaks sent them to the four corners of the world - Karen to Singapore, Justyna to Krakow, Beth to Vancouver and Tabitha to... Well she just stayed in Sydney. The geographical distance makes the pop-in more difficult these days, so the Far Flung Four now meet once a week to each write a post on a theme. The theme is communal and shared by all four, but their take on it is shaped by their own locale.
