Part of the reason for this is that time is already starting to speed up. The shock of the new, the impetus to regard every single second of our time here as unique and memorable, has worn off, and now each day is... eh, just another day. There's still lots to do, meals to eat, shows to attend, hills to walk and (soon) an apartment to furnish, but we're not strangers in town anymore. And so time is operating at normal city speeds, and it's already a week since my last blog entry, and I don't know what happened on Monday or Tuesday, which I could have just confessed, but I'm trying to be deep here.
On Wednesday we were at the choir again. I'm starting to get into this. I still don't rate some of the songs, but it never goes amiss to hear nice things about my voice, and now that the poxy Spanish ditty El Grillo has had some of its bizarre rits removed, it bounces along with much more vigour. It's also been a doddle to learn, even in Spanish, so I can now sing it while watching Ieva our conductor. And blow me if watching the conductor isn't actually a good thing in a choir this size. Who knew? I still think you shouldn't have a choir so big that its members can't conduct themselves, because that means your choir is too big for quality purposes, not for singing-without-a-conductor purposes. But, bah.
I spent Friday night listening to the rehearsal tracks for Penny Lane and Sing, Sing, Sing. The latter is a 1930s song with a Gene Krupa beat. Funky! And also likely to be very fast. Sure enough, when we had section rehearsals this weekend, people boggled at the speed, and various assertions were made about "learning this one as opposed to reading it". Posse take note: this choir performs with books.
My random timejumps all over the week continue with Sarah starting a five-day course in buteyko down on 6th Avenue, a pleasant 15-minute steam up Main Street from the SkyTrain station. (I know this because I've gone up there to meet her a couple of evenings. It's much easier walking back down.) For those of you unaware that you can click on underlined words (my mother is excused, as she gets this as a printout), Buteyko is a method of adapting your breathing for improved health - Jacqui, are you taking notes? you could be surely only about the second practitioner in England - and after only a few days of this course, Sarah has learned how to breathe through asthma attacks which would formerly have sent her scurrying for the ventolin. She's still shockingly unhealthy - don't worry, Unhealthy Bunny fans, she isn't running a half-marathon just yet. But she could easily beat me to it at this comparative rate of health improvement. I've had a cough since before we got here.
Sarah has been signing up for courses all over the place - a true renaissance rabbit. On Saturday she went to the library for a "Song Finders' Workshop", wherein she discovered all sorts of interesting reference sources, many of which they keep behind the reference desk and only hand out on application. Some interesting potential markets for songs...
Actually we had a very busy weekend what with section rehearsals, Buteyko, and on Saturday evening, the improv concert which we heard about at that library presentation about improv music the week after we got here. This took place at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, and featured members of the Vancouver Inter-Cultural Orchestra and the NOW Orchestra. What a lot of links! Go follow some of them now. Annnnnnd...welcome back. The VECC is very funky - it reminds me of the New Vic in Bristol... a small, very informal theatre, with seats that go >boink< at the slightest provocation, and a fantastic hippy vibe. The band was unafraid in its explorations of the various songs - I'm figuring that music written for an improvising orchestra involves a number of blocks each with a theme and potential ideas for the instruments, while the conductor's job is part sound mixer, part traffic cop. The pieces in the second half weren't as interesting, but it was only $10 apiece, and they had Strongbow at the interval, so all good, really. And it's up a road with the grooviest houses you've ever seen. Photos next time - e.g. if we go to see the taiko drumming there this Saturday.
I've just remembered what we did on Monday! There was another presentation at the library. This was a movie called "A Zen Life", a biopic of D. T. Suzuki, a leading exponent of Zen and translator of numerous Buddhist works. I had sort of expected a slightly pretentious (and thus interesting) movie full of images of water droplets hitting the lake surface, and blades of grass, and that kind of thing. Sadly this was a deadly serious history of the man's life, and the first two-thirds of the film nearly put us both to sleep. It livened up a bit in the last twenty minutes as Zen was actually discussed a little. Quite why the event was being presented by the Thomas Merton Society, I'm not sure. (Merton was a Trappist Monk who is apparently considered the most influential American Catholic author of the twentieth century - didn't you know even that most basic of facts about the man?! Look at his site, it's immense! Shame on your ignorance, I say.) Sure, Merton crops up in the film a couple of times, but he doesn't say a lot. It looked a lot to us like the Society was showing the movie in order to say "Look, our founder knew this man who had completely different religious beliefs - now join us and be a good Catholic!" Which is slightly odd, considering Suzuki evidently had epic disagreements with people who believed in different variations of Buddhism, let alone in a Christian God. Never mind. Thinking about zen calms me down.
At the supermarket on Monday night the checkout girl admired my "Don't Hit Pandas" badge. This led to Sarah making the following outrageous comment: "You need me... without me, you would be unbearable... with me, everyone thinks you are cute and put-upon". Grrrr...
This week's meals out: on Thursday, the Sala Thai on Burrard, just down the road from us - perfectly nice food in great quantities, and as usual it came in at about $50 including drinks - and then on Friday and Sunday, chinese takeaways! On Friday we took the greatly courageous step of phoning for a delivery - the Tim Kee Kitchen, which supplied a fair chicken in black bean sauce for me. Sadly Sarah's food wasn't what she had expected, so she went off exploring and found the New Hong Kong Kitchen on Davie, sequestered in a little brick inlet behind a coffee shop. The woman in there was asleep when she came in. We returned on Sunday for a takeout, which again did the job - their potstickers were tasty - and this time she was on the phone, refusing to come off it when she could just as easily take our order with one hand while nodding into the phone clasped in the other. I suspect this woman may turn out to be be one of those characters you read about often in this blog...
And now this week's photos:
Bunny snow!
We've been meaning to show you this Batman-esque building in the town centre for a while:
A funky building two blocks down from us:
Awwww...
Sarah went to New Westminster (another Mad Bunny excursion at a moment's notice) and this is what it looks like in brief:
Not a lot to see there, which makes New Westminster's brochure an even hootier prospect than it already is. I'll have to remember to mock it for you all next time. "So good it'll take you more than one day to explore" is just the start of the comedy value.
And that's your lot. Goodnight from Vancouver.
"First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is" is a zen koan. Although, in Vancouver, there is always a mountain:
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