White birthday

The night before my 30th birthday, Jono organised a surprise dinner for me at the pub with a handful of friends that we have over here, including Barb, Brian and Cass who I have mentioned before in this blog. That was pretty nice, and helped make 30 not seem so scary and alien. As much as I was playing the air-violin for myself leading up to the big 3-0 turning, I have survived to tell the tale, and it was a pretty magic birthday, only lacking my family and friends from home.

On the morning of my birthday we woke up to big beautiful flakes falling out of the sky, and everything covered in powdery white stuff. It was very exciting. We both ran out and played in it like a couple of kids, made a snowman, had a snow fight and I even made a naked snow angel. (Just to prove that turning 30 doesn’t have to mean growing up!) As a summer child, this was a very strange thing to be doing on my birthday.

That night was MEC’s Christmas party, which was a lot of fun. It was great to see all those fabulous people that I worked with again. The party was held at The Commodore, a beautiful historic venue in Vancouver with a sprung wooden dance floor - that got well and truly tested out with the MEC crowd. I have never been to a work party where the dance floor has been full right from the beginning before. I got to wear my now one and only dress for the first since Colin and Julie’s wedding - and this time it stayed on! (Ooops, that sounded bad - I changed into long pants at Colin and Julie’s wedding ‘cause it was outdoors and I got cold. Really.)

Oh, and we went to a really good local play in the last week of November called The Ecstasy of Rita Joe. It was based on the story of a Canadian Aboriginal woman who moves to the City (Vancouver) and finds she does not fit in either with white people or with her own people. The play was in an old fire station, now called the firehouse theatre in the East side of downtown Vancouver - just a block back from Hastings St, which we wrote about when we first arrived here. (I can't make the link work but this is the url: http://www.travelblog.org/North-America/Canada/British-Columbia/Vancouver/blog-133268.html). It couldn’t have been in a better setting. You walk out after having viewed a dramatisation of homelessness, alcoholism and addiction in to the “real world” of homelessness, alcoholism and drug addiction. The play was written in the 60’s but nothing has changed, and it was written about Canadian Aboriginals, but it could just as easily be Australian Aborginals or any displaced indigenous people in the world. Needless to say it was not very uplifting.

Other than that, we have not really done a lot else. Our car has broken down at the moment, so we need to take it to a mechanic tomorrow, and touch wood, it will not cost too much. Car troubles are rarely cheap though, so I had better touch lots of wood.

Speaking of wood, I have included a couple of pics from a walk Jono and I did along Ambleside, just down the road from us on the waterfront - including a really cool wooden sculpture.

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