After consuming at IHOP for breakfast, I met up with Sigrid at the Starbucks at the mouth of Granville Island to take part in the Canada Day celebrations and the tail end of the Vancouver International Jazz Festival. Walking through the crowded marketplace, Sig and I were pleasantly overwhelmed with the varieties of fresh meats, dairy, vegetables, fruits, and seafood, and the overall vibrancy of the marketplace.
Granville Island is, in many ways, like Seattle's Pike Place Market. But unlike Pike Place Market, Granville Island offer much more than just fresh seafood, as we've got a prevalent art community. In addition to the Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design school right on the island, there are art merchants like Opus frames and art supplies, and a purveyor of the fine art of beer-making: the Granville Island micro-brewery, where they give tours for the public.
Coming off the cute rainbow coloured False Creek ferry, Damien, his acquaintance, John, and Amy joined Sig and I for dinner at the Granville Island Backstage Lounge, where we had spent the rest of the evening socialising. The dried ribs I had ordered was awful, so I mooched on the nachos John ordered for all of us. Jen joined us after bussing up from her bakery and dropping off a bag full of artisan bread at the Union Gospel in downtown.
Vancouver is a very boring city when it comes to celebrating Canada Day. Since the stabbing between a couple Surrey residences during the Canada Day fireworks at Canada Place several years ago, the city found that it was too costly to bring in extra law enforcement officers for crowd control, so they simply found it more convenient to cancel the fireworks instead. Jen and I walked across the Burrard street bridge to join the crowd of hopefuls claiming sand and turf space along English Bay, but after asking a few people along the walkway, a representative at the Sylvia Hotel, and a police officer inside his cruiser, it was pretty clear that nothing was going to happen.
Wanting to end Canada Day with a bang rather than a fizzle, Jen and I walked towards the Atlantic Trap and Gill for some pub music and drinks, meeting up with Damien and Sigrid along the way. And it's a good thing we did because "Three Row Barley", our local Celtic band, were performing! As soon as Jen heard celtic music from a block away, she made a mad dash inside to see who it was, and the rest of us followed her in. Alexander Keith's were on special too! Playing a few songs off their album, they ended the night with O' Canada, and everyone sung along strong and proud, hand to heart, to our national anthem.
Happy 139th Birthday Canada. Strong and free.
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