Victoria - 5. Urban Life Along the Water

Sea planes, sea taxis, fish shacks, and houses that float are the urban sea life in coastal Victoria. Even though it is March, the harbour walkway is still busy with tourists, travellers, and Vancouver work commuters, with seas planes taking off and ferries coming in.

The municipality’s artistic dolphins, the world’s ‘smartest animals’, line the historic downtown water walk (in other cities it is cows and pigs), and you know where you are based upon the dolphin there – the mosaic or the animated?

Here, there are some of the best ‘fish and chip’ shacks in the area. The day we visit, ‘Red Fish, Blue Fish’ is busy with lunch until 3p.m. when they swing their wooden shutters closed, and the eaters waddle away.

At the B.C. museum, located between the provincial parliament buildings and the Empress hotel (from the exterior stone it is difficult sometimes to tell which is which), we sit on the third floor in the aboriginal and indigenous peoples’ exhibit listening to taped stories of ancestors speaking. The room is dark. There are masks in front of us in the case, and as each voice comes on, a mask lights up. If you are a storyteller, a writer, a person who remembers listening to your grandparents’ stories, sit here. The voices are mesmerizing, and the stories of greed, love, creation, and betrayal are the sparks of novels.

Hand-carved canoes and home entry-ways made of totem poles stand in front, and we walk through a bear, a seal, and a white man to head down the escalator to the urban view once again.

Victoria - 4. Ideafest University

People probably do not realize that most universities have lectures, panels and workshops most weekends, if not daily, open to the general public. If you are in need of some intellectual stimulation, but are not interested in enrolling in a full course or degree, then these [often free] seminars can be inspiring.

The idea sessions that I attended, because of my own interests, were focused on creativity. Rita Wong, a poet and environmental water activist from Emily Carr University in Vancouver had just completed a series of poems and visual word watersheds based upon American Sandra Steingraber’s Living Downstream framework. Wong invites everyone to “listen to what’s around you; to be open to what you are connected to on the ground and through the air; and give back.” For Wong, the catalyst for creation begins with one’s environment. We are connected to the ground we walk on, so we have to be open and aware of this connection. How the connection changes, “what it says”, will provide the content for ideas.

For example, Wong says, “what if the sidewalk were to break open? What would be hiding underneath? What if the English language cracked open? What languages, words would pop through?” Like many West-coasters, Wong is fascinated by indigenous Canadian culture and language (although she has learned neither fluently). She feels strongly that endangered, indigenous languages should be restored and preserved (but is not sure how to do this), so her poems evolve out of this need.

If you are attending talks in British Columbia, you will often hear the speaker give thanks to the Kwakwaka'wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth, or the Coast Salish whose land is here. It is a gesture of thanks to the first known, continuously living people in this part of the World.

Ideafest also featured ‘the future of games’ day, and I was most captured by a “Games without Frontiers” workshop led by David Strong who said, ‘journalism may be saved through gaming.’ Gaming, and the stories behind the games, is a growing industry in Canada, and each new game constructed requires a story writing team, and those stories are getting longer and longer with more sustained playing time. Strong thinks that gaming may be one alternative way to tell our stories. Is gaming a new forth of truth sharing?

“Is there still potential for human activity?” was the question debated, or discussed, at an evening panel in the science building. Five ‘creators’ in their various fields discussed how “an artist cannot live outside of her time and experience” (Jennifer Stillwell); “communal creation can still be distinct if not completely independent from its cultural connection” (Victoria Wyatt); and how ‘all art involves some form of plagiarism’ (Lee Henderson and Jonathan Goldman). Goldman, for example, said, “Shakespeare took all of his ideas from someone else, but his genius [his creativity] was in the execution of the idea.” Most of the panelists agreed that it is impossible to sever the artist from the world s/he lives within; all new ideas evolve from somewhere. What makes something creative is the sustained work and thought that goes into refining the idea until it is unique.

“The roots [to creativity] are children,” George Tzanetakis said, “they don’t have panels about creativity; they just do it.” During Picasso’s life, he was always struggling to find the essence of the child artist within himself too.

Let’s find our child. Go home, find what you most loved to do at five, ten, twelve, and do it!

Victoria - 3. Branding Hockey Culture

If Victoria is known for its friendly, laid-back culture, it does share one thing with the rest of Canada – sold out branded hockey games. Walking by the ‘Save-on-Foods’ grocery store with it’s big green apple-vegetable sign, I discovered, ‘hey, wait a minute, this isn’t a grocery store at all; it’s an arena!’ The ‘Save-on-Foods’ disguise is pretty complete. Only locals in-the-know, all 7100 who pack the arena for sold-out games, realize it’s an ice rink not a supermarket.

What is this big branding trend in hockey? We don’t have local teams anymore we have: Air Canada (Maple Leafs), Scotiabank (Senators), Bell (Canadiens), Rogers (Canucks), and in Victoria, Save-on-Foods. How is a hockey outsider suppose to recognize their team arena anymore?

The Victoria Royals play in the ‘Western Hockey League’ and the night I walked by their grocery store, they were playing a sold-out game against the Portland Winterhawks. ‘A’ teams are wonderful to watch if you’re an NHL fan because many of the players on the ice are still vying for spots in the NHL, so the star players today at the grocery store could be playing at Scotiabank or for Air Canada tomorrow. Victoria is ‘Royal’ blue, which is convenient because many of the fans are also Vancouver Canucks fans and wear their blue Canucks’ jerseys to the rink on game nights. I think the hockey fever in Victoria surprised me because Victoria is mostly known for its contemporary dance, superb restaurants, and active living lifestyle. And yet, as the late Tom Connors reminds us, ‘we’re a hockey town tonight.’ This is one cultural past-time that is just as popular in Victoria as it is anywhere else in Canada.

This is the first hockey game I have been to where the players come out on to the ice and skate and sign children’s cards, shirts. The people’s pick, by longest autograph lineup, for players most likely to make it to the NHL? 17-year-old defender Keegan Kanzig and a centre with a Hansen brother mullet, Logan Nelson. Also, Portland’s top scorer Chase De Leo and aggressive goalie Brendan Burke seem destined to enter the entertainment league as well. The lineups to get on to the ice with the players after the game swam around the rink, and true to corporate culture, not one person was allowed on to say hello before signing an insurance waiver and donning a helmut. With that done, another ‘hockey night in Canada’ was enjoyed by all the children meeting their heroes, happy skaters and players meeting their fans.

Victoria - 2. The Butchart's Backyard

Do you know the difference between a merry-go-round and a carousel? The former has only ‘horses’, but the latter has all kinds of animals and birds. We drove over to Butchart Gardens to walk through an emerging West-coast Canadian garden, and spent a most memorable ten minutes, all alone, riding around on an orca, an antelope, and a lynx.

If you are going to visit the most popular national garden in Canada, then early Spring is the time to do it, or in Victoria’s case, early March. There are no crowds. There are no bus groups. There is only peace, gentle green carpets of moss and grass; gentle water flowing; and a snowy cover of crocuses and daffodils. It is hard to believe that these rolling gardens and memorable views use to be the Butcharts’ backyard. I cannot imagine looking out of my kitchen window while washing up and seeing these manicured mile high cedar hedges or colourful rising rock plants. What a gift this area of the World must of seen to the Butcharts’ 150 years ago when they moved in!

Walking through the Butcharts’ yard, I challenged the boys to take a ‘bad’ photo, and sure enough – there are no poor views here:

Victoria - 1. The Crazy, Friendly City

Every once and awhile you come across a community culture that, although it may be in the same country, is completely alien from your own. We travelled to Victoria, British Columbia from Toronto, Ontario in Canada to discover just this.

Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, is located on Vancouver Island, a peninsula on the West coast of Canada, and just like California, is home to some of the friendliest and laid-back people on the continent. The West-coast mentality really is one of ‘Welcome!’

We stepped off of the plane in full Winter-combat gear only to be stripping down for the 10°C  balmy Pacific weather ‘on the island’.  The sun was bright and warm. We squinted. This wasn’t just a different city in Canada; this was a city in a whole different season! Grass and flowers were actually growing. There was a lake with ducks swimming in it! While all of our friends had travelled South for the March break, we had travelled to Western Canada only to find the same Southern weather.

After ‘paddling’ around in the lake on the beach for a short while to acclimatize, we stopped by the store for some supplies. “BC Bud is all over the place here,” Mark told us, and although we didn’t see any of that in the grocery store, we did find a lot of people who could have easily been smoking it. I should explain that Toronto, Ontario, the New York of Canada, in comparison to other places in Canada is fairly frigid. No one would ever greet you in the street, let alone spark up a conversation, unless they were ‘mentally ill’, or genuinely knew you. I come from a small town, and the first time I came to Toronto, when I said, ‘thank you’ for someone holding a door for me, a friend admonished me saying, “don’t talk to people here! They will think you’re crazy!” And that’s true. No one says, “Hi”, “How’re you doing?” or “Thank you” to strangers on the street.

After years of hard Toronto conditioning, Victoria people were a shock. We went to check out, and the clerk asked, “so how’re you doing today?” “Good,” I replied suspiciously assuming it would end there. “What did you do today?” she continued. “Well, actually we came from Ontario just this morning for a visit,” I said and thought cynically, ‘and are you actually going to check us out sometime?’  The clerk continued with her chatty exchange as if we had been friends living ‘on the island’ for years. ‘She’s crazy,’ I thought (Toronto had trained me well.) The whole exchanged took about 15 minutes, and she was just genuinely a kind, nice person, but I was not use to that, and as a result, came face-to-face with the very different lifestyle I had been living all of these years.

Victoria weather had welcomed us with sun, smiles, and chatty strangers, and we took advantage of the day by climbing up a nearby mountain lookout over the city, and a swim at Crystal pool before bed. Crystal pool is a huge Olympic-size pool with waterslides, swinging ropes, and diving boards for the kids. I love those pool attractions too, but I guess adults in Victoria do not generally partake of the swinging rope or the water slides, because as I lined up with all of the other eight and ten-year-olds for a chance on ‘the rope’, kids kept cutting in front of me. “Oh, it’s my turn now,” I said politely to a small six-year-old.

“I didn’t think adults did this,” she said incredulously. “Well, sure,” I said, “adults from Ontario do anyway.” I guess Victoria, while friendly, is not quite so crazy in the pool.