After our long walk through the park yesterday, humans and dogs slept quite well in our West End apartment. We are on the right on the ground floor. I sort of wish we were up a floor, but as I have said, you make compromises when you are traveling with two animals the size of a Shetland Pony.
After a bite of breakfast, I went off to Eucharist at nearby Christ Church Cathedral. It is not an imposing building, but it is located on a particularly grand section of Burrard Street right across from Tiffany’s. The Anglican Church of Canada is supposed to be in a great decline, but there were very few empty seats at this service. The music was provided by a visiting choir from Taiwan who did well with the Chinese language selections, and had some trouble with hitting the the high notes with those English vowels.
After I came back – John had taken the dogs to frolic in the local off-leash park – we headed off to Granville Island. This is an recreation and shopping district which was created in an old industrial zone on the shore of False Creek, just south of downtown. There is still a little bit of manufacturing going on, but it mostly consists of restaurants and small boutique shops. There are lots of open spaces for performers, and on a warm Sunday like today, there were lots of performers. We watched a Japanese dance show, a Spanish guitarist, and a French cafe chanteur. This is the island, lying under the Granville Street Bridge, as seen from the Burrard Street Bridge.
At first, both John and I saw this as another tourist attraction, even if one which is environmentally aware, much like Pier 39 in San Francisco or South Street Seaport in New York. But what sets Granville Island apart, what makes it a draw for locals as well, is the Public Market on the Island. The numerous stalls here sell every kind of fish, meat, vegetable, fruit, and cheese imaginable, all of it fresh, and much of it local.
Our only disappointment of the day came when tried to locate the off-leash dog park at Spanish Bank park. The beaches which stretch along the south coast of English Bay are quite lovely, but the one stretch of it which is supposedly OK for canines is NOT at all well-marked. But as we went along looking for it, we did see some of the nicest neighborhoods in Vancouver.
We went back to the apartment and gave the dogs their dinner. We then went back to the shores of False Creek to see Much Ado About Nothing at the Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival. The plays here are performed in tents just on the shore. The back of each tent, where the stage is located, if opened to show the mountains of North Vancouver and the ships passing by in the bay. Nature becomes the ultimate backdrop.
It was a good production of the play. All the Shakespeare comedies are problematic for modern audiences – The Merchant of Venice in particular – and this one, with its obsessive focus on Hero’s virginity and Beatrice’s ultimate submission of Benedick, could be upsetting if taken too seriously. Fortunately, the director kept it sort of frothy with an odd mixture of Edwardian-era costumes and flamenco dancing. The main actors were quite good, even if the woman who played Beatrice looked and sounded exactly like Katherine Hepburn.
We wandered home as the sunset turned the condominium towers of Yaletown into magical pillars of glass and light against a the twilight sky.
