It was dark, cold, and rainy when we got up this morning; an inauspicious start to a day when we were scheduled to go on a walking tour of a park!
We armed ourselves with our umbrellas and set forth into the city, but as it happens by the time the bus dropped us off downtown it had already stopped raining and it didn’t pick up again, so our streak of good fortune remains!
My first item of business today was to visit museum two of three of the ones that I had noted down. Today was the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwestern Art, a small museum named after a famed Vancouver indigenous artist but which also showcases work by other First Nations artists.
The museum is small, tiny actually, let’s get that out of the way: so don’t come here planning to spend a full morning like with a major national museum! That said, the ticket is also cheaper, so it feels less like a ripoff than the Vancouver Art Gallery or the reduced Portland Art Museum.
The thing that most impressed me about Bill Reid’s work was how multidisciplinary of a craftsman he was: he made paintings, sculptures, wood carving (including magnificent totem poles, which I have learned are used to trace family lineage or tell a story), calligraphy, and even jewelry. Look at this gorgeous gold and diamond necklace, designed to look like star constellations:
The museum is really just two rooms, one larger one downstairs, and then one upstairs that just goes around the gallery, so it makes for a very quick visit. Since we were already downtown, we snuck inside the Vancouver Central Library, a peculiar round building with an atrium inside, in case it held a beautiful reading room inside. Conclusion: it does not! It does have a rooftop garden, but honestly the views from it are pretty ugly! By all accounts a 9th floor should have extensive views but all the skyscrapers around the library are taller, so really all we could see from above was an ugly concrete wall with antennae in front of us and towering glass towers on either side. We did see a hummingbird perched on a tree, buzzing intermittently, and that’s quite a rare sight for us in Europe!
When we got out it was getting closer to our lunchtime, early by necessity because we had to go across town for our tour, so we ducked into nearby Cafe Medina for a pit stop. Turns out it’s a very popular brunch spot and there was a line starting to form outside, but being just two people they were able to sit us straight away at the bar. I had a lamb meatball dish that was a bit peculiar as a brunch item but perfectly serviceable as a lunch dish: think of it as shakshuka but with meatballs. I also treated myself to a dark hot chocolate to treat my severe chocolate deficiency this trip. You know, strictly for medical purposes.
Finally we took another bus to Stanley Park, this massive forested park on a peninsula surrounded by the 28 km of the Seawall Walk. We had booked a tour with Talaysay Tours, a First Nations company that offers guided walks around the park. Their most popular one is apparently one where they talk about the different local trees and plants, but I was more interested in one about the local tribes and their history with the land.
Sure enough, our guide (a young woman of Haida and Squamish heritage) gave us a long and extremely informative talk about the long history of the First Nations around the Vancouver area, where I got to learn a ton of stuff that I’d never had an opportunity to encounter before. I learned that recently Canadian courts have started accepting native oral history as legal records; that there are 20 different nations and 70 indigenous languages or dialects spoken in this area alone; how to differentiate between the art of southern and northern tribes; that the former are matriarchal societies while the latter did not assign roles by gender… And, of course, of the many cruelties inflicted upon the First Nations by settlers long ago and then continuously by the Canadian government until very recently, when the scandals related to the central boarding schools brought an increase of awareness and sympathy from the general population.
This was a fascinating experience, especially because our guide was able to talk about these issues from the point of view of her own family, although it has to be said that it was more of a talk than a tour: we spent most of the time standing within view of the starting point, and even then we weren’t really looking at anything so much as just listening to our guide; we barely even made it to the totem poles landmark in Stanley Park. Our guide did explain to us that the southern nations did not carve totem poles, so the ones on display were taken from northern nations and brought down, but there are also a couple of posts that are indeed from a local artist.
I very much recommend the tour if you’re visiting, as it’s a unique opportunity to learn stuff that we usually do not. Just bring comfortable shoes!
I couldn’t bear the thought of taking another step, and there were a very many steps to the nearest bus stop indeed, so we got an Uber instead back to our apartment to rest. I had one more outing planned for today though: you know that when I organize a trip I like to participate in the culture of the place I’m visiting so I always look for theater plays, recitals, talks, recordings, anything that might enrich me culturally and, not for nothing, allow me to sit down for a couple of hours. In Portland I found a standup show, in Seattle a musical, and in Vancouver I settled on a traditional Indian dance recital. There is an argument to be made that shakti dance is perhaps not the most stereotypically Canadian artform, but it is absolutely something that we cannot witness in our own country so as far as I’m concerned it qualifies as an excellent vacation activity!
The actual show was a little more experimental than I expected, although still wonderful. Five dancers used shakti dance to interpret Buddhist scriptures, which a chorus of eight performers chanted beforehand. I’ve heard Buddhist sutras being chanted in Japan, Korea, Thailand, and India, but never before in English! It sounds super weird, although of course why wouldn’t you translate them?
The interpretive sections I could take or leave, but the traditional dance numbers were enthralling. There’s something about traditional Indian dances that feels so elegant and dignified, like they are chaining together beautiful, regal poses through motion. Every head movement, every hand position is expertly calculated and executed im sync with the music. I am not the first person to observe this, but parts of it are reminiscent of flamenco, in the stomping of the feet or the flowing movement of the hands.
At one point towards the end, when the dancers were making a show of pouring tea for the chorus, they picked up trays and actually offered biscuits to the audience (it was the basement of a dance center, the turnout was good but it wasn’t exactly crowded). I was as surprised as I was delighted, that I would be enjoying a gorgeous dance show and suddenly also be offered sweets! “Would you like a treat?” the dancer asked. Don’t mind if I do!
So, perhaps not the most Canadian thing to do on a Friday night, but I am so glad we did this instead of another musical or standup show! What a great way to cap off a pretty productive day!
This Is A Lake 