Victoria

I had to go to Victoria last weekend for work, of sorts. I spent April working as a sort of activities leader/tour guide for my ESL school, taking a group of 18 Thai teenagers on outings around Vancouver. On weekends these outings took us further afield, to places like Whistler and the Island. It was a pretty sweet gig, and I'm sorry it's over. It certainly ended on a high note.

I relish every chance I get to get out of Vancouver. As much as I love it, I'm the kind of person who needs a frequent change of scenery, to de-compress and get out of the doldrums and monotony of the same thing and the same people and the same sights day in and day out. Even when you live in a beautiful, exciting city surrounded by loving, hilarious, adventurous friends, going in a complete different direction helps replenish the soul and mind. And Victoria is the perfect place for that.

We took an early ferry over on Saturday morning. The kids, new to the Pacific Northwest, spent the entire hour and a half journey out on the freezing cold, windy deck, immersed in the beauty of the landscape and enjoying the sunshine, which hadn't shown its face in a week. I told them to look for killer whales. Their eyes never left the water. I stayed in the warm ferry reading The Rum Diary and eating the lunch I'd packed to save money, guarding their bags dutifully.

We arrived in Victoria and dropped our stuff on in our downtown hotel, and then spent the afternoon at the Royal British Columbia museum, learning about global warming, the ice age, first nations culture, and Victoria through the ages. They were bored. I was engrossed.

Then we went on a wander around the small, quaint, beautiful downtown core. We wandered lazily towards the Parliament buildings where we encountered the end of a parade. Sprawled on the manicured lawn in the incredible spring sunshine was a congregation of every hippie denomination you could think of. It was a gathering of liberal, left-wing, vegetarian, yoga, peace activist-types come together to celebrate everything they could think of to celebrate, and protest everything else. The students boggled, and I giggled telling them they were truly getting the west coast experience. They barely understood, being only fifteen and from Thailand, but they loved it all the same, and ran around on the grass, talking to people and taking pictures.

And I sat down on the lawn, back to guarding bags and snacks and cameras, watching the scene drift by: dred locks, hemp hats, naked toddlers and kids in sarongs playing hacky sack, a group of people doing yoga on the grass, people with mohawks slinging stuffed animals in a sling shot, bare feet and long skirts, a live band singing about George Bush and the horrors of olden days residential schools, Woodstock-style jigs on the grass, the smell of pichouli, dark-skinned, bare-chested men sporting buns and smoking pot, dogs and kids chasing each other in the sun, tye dye, Darth Vader playing a violin with a light saber, people handing out brochures about peace, vegetarianism, seal hunting, oil, Bush, de-forestation, water crisis, greenhouse gas emissions, and anything else you could think of. All this was going on in front of a backdrop of totem poles, sail boats and the harbour, and behind that a jade ocean and sparkling blue sky, while the provincial capital building loomed behind me.

I set the kids free for their favourite passtime: shopping, and went with Sam, their group leader, to sit on a cafe patio in the sunshine at Bastian Square, watching the seagulls, watching people, people watching us, drinking tea and eating a brownie, talking about beer and Thailand and how amazing it is to travel and meet new people.

That night we had an epic nineteen-person dinner in a restaurant that was overwhelmed with the Thai chatter and hyper activity of nearly twenty teenagers, and I took them back to the Parliament buildings when it got dark so they could see them lit up, their lights reflecting in the black, bobbing, sparkling harbour water.

Then I put myself to bed. At ten thirty I was under the covers in my very own, quiet, dark, cozy, antique-clad hotel room flipping between The Karate Kid and Pretty Woman, and falling soundly asleep by eleven. It was the best sleep I've had in months.

I woke up early that morning, went down for breakfast, stole a bunch of bagels and cream cheese for lunch, then went back to my sun-drenched room for a shower. After that I spent the next hour and a half lying in the big, white bed in a terry cloth hotel robe reading the weekend edition of the Vancouver Sun, lying like a cat in the crack of sunlight that was streaming through the parted curtains. I was sad to leave that hotel.

We checked out and walked north towards Craigdarrogh Castle, through the beautiful Sunday morning sunshine, under cherry blossoms. The trees looked like they were full of cotton candy, with fluffy pink arrangements of flowers like soft balls, their plush petals floating into my hair and blanketing the ground like snow.

We caught the 5:00 ferry back to Vancouver, and while the kids scanned the waters again for killer whales and seals I sat listening to Modest Mouse and reading the first few chapters of Breakfast at Tiffany's as we sailed in the sinking evening sun towards home.

Most of the kids were picked up by their host families at Tsawwassen, but the three of us who lived in Vancouver proper had to take a cab back. The taxi reaked of beer, which was alarming for a Tsawwassen cab driven by a Sikh at 7:00 p.m. on a lazy Sunday afternoon, but he complimented my earrings as I was getting out of the cab and Granville and Broadway which earned him an extra $3 of tip, and I didn't care about the beeriness of the drive and my own fatigue as I bounced down to the bus stop in the warm evening air. I didn't mind that the air was a bit exhausty, that I had left quiet, laid back Victoria for sky scrapers and traffic jams and business men rushing around on cell phones (funny, sounds like I'm describing Toronto. It's all relative, I guess).

The walk home from the bus, a walk I've done a million times, felt new . The air was thick with the smell of flowers. It was nice, I thought, to come home to familiarity: the people in the green heritage house on the other side of the street sitting on their porch, the two beggars coming up to me for change with the same lie about not having money for the bus, kids outside the bar trying to get me to boot for them, random happenings in the alley, and our upstairs neighbour's cat in the window meowing at my return.