Vancouver (Part One)

After the long train trek across Canada, I was super excited to arrive in Vancouver--home of the 2010 Winter Olympics! I'd never been in the Pacific Northwest, so this was a major first. After arriving at the train station, I grabbed the SkyTrain to my hotel.

Thankfully, they had a room ready early, so I dropped off my stuff and headed out to explore. Vancouver is a truly beautiful city, with lots of blooming trees and flowers all around.

And, like any good West Coast city, they also have a plethora of sushi restaurants. There were no less than six within a one block radius of my hotel. I chose Sushi Zero One because they got great ratings on Yelp, and I was not disappointed.

On my second day in Vancouver, my plans was to visit Chinatown (the second largest in North America) and, especially, the Dr. Sun Yat Sen Chinese Garden and the neighboring Dr. Sun Yat Sen Park.

The garden is a faithful recreation of Ming Dynasty era scholar's garden from the Suzhou province of China. All the materials except for the plants and trees was imported from China, to achieve a truly authentic recreation. Here are some of my favorite pictures from that adventure.

As you can (hopefully) tell from the pictures, the garden was simply gorgeous. It was a masterpiece of Yin and Yang, of balance and peaceful beauty. You could walk through the relatively small garden for hours, or just find a place to sit and think, and the rest of the crazy world beyond the garden walls would simply ... drift away.

That night, wanting to continue my exploration of Chinese culture, I attended the Shen Yun Performing Arts at the beautiful Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

I have to say I was extremely disappointed. The classical Chinese dancing was absolutely breathtaking, but the lighting and the digital projection screen animations were pretty awful. They could just crap the projections and hire a lighting designer instead.

On top of that, the performance seemed to be more like a two hour mass recruitment to the Falun Dafa religion than an actual dance performance. (I won't use the religious C word here, but that's what it felt like.)

Will I go see classical Chinese dance again? Without a doubt. Will I go see the Shen Yun Performing Arts again? Um, no.

Hugs,
TLC