Snow is Cold

Maaan I’m getting behind with this… Since I last wrote we’ve been to the ‘Celebration of Light’ – the biggest fireworks competition in the world – a couple of times, and we’re going to see China’s offering tonight, which you would think would be pretty good seeing as they INVENTED fireworks. I wouldn’t say that the shows we’ve seen so far put the Cheltenham racecourse fireworks to shame, but they were certainly impressive. First up was Canada last Wednesday, then Sweden last Saturday, now China then the ‘grand finale’ this Saturday. They launch the fireworks off these boats that are out in the bay, and people amass on English Bay beach, Kitsilano beach, all the way down toward Stanley Park and a ring of boats forms across the inlet, creating a complete ring around the show!

I thought it was kind of strange to be watching fireworks in the middle of summer, in fact at one point I had a kind of cold sensation as if it were winter due to the association between fireworks and Guy Fawkes!

The amount of people who turn up to this thing is insane. We were sitting in a restaurant last Wednesday and there were literally hordes of people walking past the window. It was surreal, like there was a mass exodus taking place or something. I tried to capture it in a photo but I’m not sure it’s come out very well yet cuz I haven’t checked! Still haven’t gotten round to putting the latest ones on the net.. Soz.

Last Wednesday we went on a crazy bender, which was going to be a lads night out until Pete agreed to letting a girl come too, loser. Me & Daz berrated him and told him to uninvite her but he wouldn’t listen. This was to become his undoing as she turned out to be really weird and meant he missed out on an opportunity elsewhere, ha. Infact therein lies a tale. After we had dinner (we’d already been for a couple beers beforehand), which was the WORST curry EVER, so much so that we felt it could be described with the words “awful”, and “terrible”, which I can’t say is a very common occurence with restaurant food.. Anyhow, I put it down to experience and we ended up heading to a kebab house for drinks as it was the only place serving alcohol (the beach was under severe lockdown) where we could also watch the fireworks, after a fashion.

When it finished there was a reverse mass exodus so we legged it to my house to get changed and tried to call a cab to town. We were quoted a 45 minute wait but one turned up pretty sharpish, so then the guy had to navigate through the people who filled the streets up to Granville. Pete, being the bright spark that he is, had forgotten to bring any ID with him. You’d think that being 6’4 and 26 years old there wouldn’t be a problem, and indeed other places we’d been too before had been reasonable, but you knew that this time, because it was planned, they were gonna be stupid. So the inevitable happened and he had to do the 45 minute round trip home to go get his passport. At the same time this girl had already turned up so me & Daz had to simultaneously get leathered and try and entertain her, which would have been ok but a 3 way conversation is pretty impossible with club music.. We started nailing down a silly number of highballs (spirit mixers) cuz they were only 2 bucks a pop, and by the time Pete got back we were way ahead of him and he’d sobered up from the journey. We kinda thought he wasn’t coming back because it was a bit of a mission but I guess he couldn’t really leave the girl there!

The next eventful happenings were on our way out, we met some guys who were marines or something like that, so somehow we got talking to them and to show us how to ‘disable’ someone :) Daz had disappeared so me, Pete & the girl took forever to walk back down to my place, stopping off to play with the fountains outside the Wall Centre and a yellow Corvette, then ending up on the beach via a conversation with a homeless guy which caused this chick to freak out majorly (even though it was nothing untoward.. She somehow made a connection with an incident in Barcelona where she ended up losing her wallet), after which Pete wanted to go home but I wanted to go to the beach :) actually we spent a while psychoanalyzing this bag of clothes that the homeless guy had given to Pete after he came back from their argument before we made it down there. It was pretty decimated from all the people’s litter after the fireworks and it was getting light by this stage! I ended up going shopping at 5.30 in the morning and going to bed at 6. Pete, after reclaiming his bag from my house had to stay with this girl for another half an hour of torment before his bus came heheh. While we were on the beach I tried to pick her up (as in LIFT) too after her & Pete had had another argument but she was too heavy so we both bailed headfirst into the sand, lol.

Anyway what the hell am I talking about? :) Enough of that. More soon!