This is not to say that Sarah's adventures are not as exciting as our joint excursions into the city of Vancouver. For example, on Monday this week she spent a good deal of Monday exploring Broadway, the big road which runs through Kitsilano and a good chunk of the way to New Westminister. This was an act of selfless devotion: I had been feeling very down, and frankly, this was because all my bears are in storage. Tenpence Bear and Hugh Manatee are my favourite bedtime companions (some would ask whether this is really the case with Sarah around, but Tenpence has been with me a lot longer) and I feel bear-eft without my small corduroy bear to hug of a nighttime. So Sarah went looking for a bear for me, and trogged for what I understand was a long, long, lonnnnnng time along Broadway looking for bear shops. Eventually she found one. He's very cuddly, somewhat bigger and lankier than Tenpence, but he's reasonably adorable. It takes a while for a bear's name to become apparent, but after a few days of pondering, he has decided that his name is Nelson (one of the roads we're living on just now). So we welcome Nelson to my entourage, and nighttimes have been a little less lonely.
Sarah's other solo activities this week have included attending a Valentine's Day concert, and returning to the "Afternoon Delights" choir which she sampled last Thursday.
More on choirs in a moment, but first, here are this week's photos. I'm afraid there aren't many, but hey, quality over quantity, as I'm sure you'll agree when you witness:
... the world's most derelict burned-out-looking shop which is still actually open.
"The Wicker Woman" (now a major movie)
This one's for Phil.
Shop here for all your generic computer needs.
This is pretty. A decorating idea which isn't used very often.
And this, from Toys'R'Us. Possibly the most disturbing use ever of a panda head (itself a disturbing enough phrase)...
Well, that intro seems to have broken my writer's block, so time to document our collective experiences of the week.
Monday: a singing masterclass at Vancouver Library, featuring a song cycle by Strauss. Except it wasn't a masterclass (where experienced performers get tips from even more experienced teachers, in public) but rather a kind of analysis of the songs themselves. The song cycle in question is a five-part setting of German poems about death. Each poem was read for us first in German and then in English, and then we heard one or other of the two sopranos sing it with piano. Then the experienced guy told us something about it, asked the singer to talk about the challenges of singing it, and so on...
...
...
... argh, look, OK, it was very annoying, and I'll tell you why. This is not my kind of music to start with. I don't go for foreign-language songs, because I generally don't believe that I can understand the meaning. If I can appreciate the actual sound of the words, then fine, it may be fun to sing it. But the only reason I cope with Latin songs is that I understand a reasonable amount of Latin. Italian or German - I have no idea what's going on, nor do I want to bother finding out. If it's possible to discern the general sentiment of a song by listening to it without understanding the language, then clearly that's a skill I don't possess. It might be more true where there's acting involved. And as you'll remember from the last entry, I don't mind putting in some effort to decipher an intellectual code, as might be used in modern dance. But when someone just stands there and sings a song in German as a singer, I don't know what it means, and I don't care how pretty it might sound.
So Sarah knew up-front that I was going to be a Restless Panda sitting there, and I knew it too but had hoped to learn something interesting about singing technique. When your man announced at the start that it wasn't a masterclass, rather a lecture about how wonderful this bunch of Strauss songs are, I gritted my teeth and sat there for it.
I completely lost interest when, during the analysis of the second song, the guy played an excerpt from a CD of the songs to demonstrate how impressive was Strauss's orchestral arrangement. I'm sorry, but I've been sitting here listening to it being played on piano, and I now find out that it was composed for a chamber orchestra? No bloody wonder it sounds grim on piano. The CD sounded a lot more interesting. The orchestration was clever. The different textures of the instrument added a lot. And, most irritatingly, the presenter kept on banging on about how for Strauss, music let him go to places which mere words couldn't... WELL, IN THAT CASE, WHY ARE YOU WASTING OUR EVENING MAKING US LISTEN TO A PIANO REDUCTION OF THE DAMN MUSIC?! It would be like telling me that such-and-such a film is the best ever, and proving it by restaging key scenes with some people you brought along from your amdram group. 10x10x10xNo!
By the time they hit the last song our backs were in agony from the library's chairs, so we, along with plenty other people in equal consternation at how much it was overrunning, got up and left.
Bloody Strauss masterclasses, rassinfrassin library misrepresentation, etc etc. Tump.
We had a very nice meal at Milestones on Hamilton. This is in Yaletown, which we haven't really explored as yet. It's a bit like the North Lanes in Brighton, US-style... lots of buildings converted into apartments. A further exploration is required. My meal was particularly excellent, although I can't remember what it was... some kind of pasta and peppers with a big load of chicken on top. Local beer is a bit watery, incidentally. I'm trying all the varieties and finding that Canadian lager gives me the same kind of grimace as English (or at least varieties available in England, whether English or otherwise). You can get Stella out here. No sign of Fosters though... Burge and Brook will have to make do.
Wednesday evening we went to a choir. And I felt very strange. I was sitting there, looking at the conductor (the same Ieva who runs Sarah's Thursday afternoon choir), looking at the people all around me, who were perfectly harmless individuals exemplifying the amateur choir type... and I sat there thinking "I want my posse". I felt very disconnected and homesick. We're joining for a term, anyway. It costs money to join a choir though... it might not actually be that much by the time you remember that almost everything in Canada costs $100, but still... it would be about a hundred and fifty quid for a year's membership. And I have to buy a poxy shirt for the concert. Burge apparently told Sarah to start setting up choirs as this is clearly where the money is.
This was the second week of this term's rehearsal, so everyone had already given a couple of the songs a bash. Some of the repertoire is the typical annoying cutesy crap, like "El Grillo", a gripping little ditty sung in Spanish, about how cute crickets are and why they sing. Do people not realise that this is the kind of crap that no-one wants to pay to hear? And it's in bloody Spanish too! Meanwhile, back in English, Bob Chilcott arranges The Beatles' "Penny Lane" for The King's Singers. Well, that'll be easy to learn then. We fled eight thousand miles to escape Bob Chilcott arrangements, but apparently they drift around the world in a silent spectral hunting pack. What else did we do? Oh, an Italian madrigal which they all learned last year, but which was probably the nicest thing of the evening. And a couple of other songs which have already lost my interest.
I want my posse :(
The only upside of this choir so far is that it's quite a bus trip away from our apartment, so I get to watch Sarah be quietly annoyed about our no longer having a car. I said last night that having a car by no means ever guaranteed that we (or many other people we know) ever got somewhere on time, and that bus trips are exciting! But I don't think I'm winning this argument.
On Thursday we ate at the Gain Wah chinese cafe on Keefer Street. Immense amounts of food at bargain prices, with the usual proviso that the food isn't necessarily the best ever. Sarah chose this one from the internet and it turns out she thought it was a little classier than it actually is. We may not go back there, but it is in walking distance from Radical's offices so I could conceivably steam up there one lunchtime and get a plateful of chow mein for about three quid.
On Friday we dropped to our lowest ebb for restaurants and went to Vera's Burger Bar in Kitsilano, on our way to the Planetarium for a late-night laser show set to a selection from "The Wall" by Pink Floyd. The show itself was great; lots of 360-degree photomontage effects, with the actual lasers being a bit limp until "Run Like Hell" came on and they fogged the place up a bit so the lasers started looking like what we'd actually been expecting. Sarah, it turns out, might be a Pink Floyd fan without having realised it. Obviously this is the right album to choose if you're going to start listening to the Floyd, but still, I'm pleased. Obviously I loved it: it's the best concept album about the post-war decline of England and dealing with your dad's death ever! And it certainly made up for the food. Vera's is a franchise operation with half a dozen or so outlets around Vancouver. The slogan is, and I quote, "You can't beat Vera's meat". Well, there's a challenge. Worse, you actually can, because the burgers weren't all that great shakes even by the standards of "look, you're eating a goddamn burger, what do you expect?" The service was pretty lacklustre, they'd run out of fries and chilli (OK, it was 10:15pm, but, no, actually that's when a burger place should expect to be selling a fair bit of food), and, oh, whatever. We won't be going back.
Interesting tidbit about how the internet works, though: you try Googling for "You can't beat Vera's meat". You'd think people would think that was hilariously funny and it would be all over the net. But in fact, there are just 15 results. OK, so it's kinda titchy as fast-food franchises go, but still, if this was San Francisco or even New York, people's comedy blogs and Flickr albums would be all over it. In Canada... even in the biggest city in Canada... not so much.
Vancouver Planetarium has a bloody great crab statue outside it. Scared the daylights out of me. Look!
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