Vancouver secrets

We spent two days in Vancouver and discovered some wonderful things to do and see, thanks to our friend Kath who lives there. In no particular order they are:

1.    The Museum of Anthropology at UBC

This is an astounding collection of British Columbia indigenous art housed in a building that is so connected to the land that it makes you feel you are standing in a First Nations village. After you enter you walk down a ramp with exhibits on each side to arrive at a spot with huge windows looking out on a shingle beach and water and grassy meadows beyond. These are not your conventional carved poles, but pieces of art that show the stunning originality of the Native peoples that created them.

There was also a gallery featuring artifacts from other cultures, hundreds of them. Here's the one I liked the best. It's a collection of carved hanging drums from Fiji (I think). Each one when tapped with a finger sounded a different note.







2.  The Botanical Gardens, also at UBC, were created by David Lam about 25 years ago, offer a serene space to explore the plants native to British Columbia plus others from further afield.

We spent a wonderful couple of hours walking pathways through areas of ponds, forest, and meadow. It's also a teaching garden and a food garden, offering its produce to those in need.








These last two are places to eat, the first one is a coffee shop/store called Le Marché St. George, on a residential corner in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood. We went there for coffee and crepes for breakfast and spent a wonderful hour sitting outside on a bench talking to neighbours who frequent this lovely place.

And for dinner last night we met up with Jamie at Via Tevere an authentic Napoli pizza place also in an old frame building in the Strathcona neighbourhood. The lineup was huge and we waited an hour but the pizza, olives and arugula salad made it completely worthwhile.

Here we are with Jamie outside Via Tevere after a fabulous dinner.  It's so nice having a local guide to places like this.

Today we headed east towards the Okanagan and tonight we're staying in the ranching town of Princeton. It's quite a change from Vancouver.