Powell Street Festival - August 4 & 5

"The 36th annual Powell Street Festival will be held on August 4th and 5th, 2012 at Oppenheimer Park and surrounding venues! This year’s theme is BIG BANG-ZAI! Hope to see you there!"



If you're not familiar with the Powell Street Festival, it's an annual outdoors festival celebrating the Japanese Canadian community. It features performances such as taiko drumming, martial arts demonstrations, and my favourite, sketch comedy group Assaulted Fish!



Assaulted Fish will be @ the 36th Annual Powell Street Festival on Saturday, August 4 from 4:15pm to 4:45pm at the Firehall Arts Centre (280 East Cordova St. @ Gore Ave)! Their show is NOT to be missed! And what a bonus, it's FREE! (Note: General admission seating. Rated “PG”. No latecomers.)

Honda Celebration of Light

The Fireworks are back! This time around, they only have THREE nights of fantastic colour bursting the sky. The Honda Celebration of Light begins TONIGHT!!



The competing countries are : Vietnam, Brazil, and Italy!

National Donut Day in Canada

I saw this on the news this morning. Let's help Canadian food blogger Steve Zussino with his efforts to bring National Donut Day to Canada!



The USA has National Donut Day, every June 1st! It hearkens back to the days of war when women from the Salvation Army would bring donuts to soldiers. Donut stores in the States give out free donuts on this auspicious occasion!

So why don't we have National Donut Day? Canadians love their Tim Hortons, don't they? If you want to help establish National Donut Day in Canada, then go sign this petition!

When a new Georgia Straight Comes Out

Lol! My friend had sent me this website a while ago and most of you probably have already seen it, but if not, check out Definitely Raining for a good laugh at our lovely city of Vancouver!

Roedde House Museum

Did you know that there was a museum in the heart of Downtown Vancouver's West End? It's called the Roedde House, and it's a "a late-Victorian home in the Queen Anne revival style. Built in 1893 for the family of Gustav Roedde, the city's first bookbinder, it has been faithfully restored to reflect the day-to-day life of a middle class, immigrant family at the turn of the last century."



For only $5 per person, a friend and I checked out Roedde House and even got a guided tour! It's a very interactive museum, where you're allowed to snoop around the vintage artifacts that adorn the establishment and sit on the Victorian style furniture. The only things they ask you not to touch are the old Victorian clothing and books that they have out on display.



Looking through a Victorian "View-master":


Pincushion:


Vintage toy piano:


Kitchen:


Office:


The most popular program available at Roedde House is their Sunday afternoon Tea and Tour special, where you get a guided tour along with a tea tasting for only an $8 admission price!





Roedde House is located at 1415 Barclay Street, in the West End of downtown Vancouver. For more information, check out their website. Go visit a piece of Vancouver history today!

Mary Poppins and Rent in Vancouver

WELL, today's post was supposed to be the one on hiking and how we should all go for a glorious hike this weekend. I wasn't counting on rain clouds, however!

So, here's something else you might want to do! Go see a musical!! I am absolutely amazed and stunned at the amount of musicals we have in town this summer! Altar Boyz, Xanadu, Buddy, just to name a few!

Why not check out the touring Broadway production of Mary Poppins, now on at the Queen Elizabeth theatre until July 22? It's half price over at Tickets Tonight and fun for the whole family! In fact, it's supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!



If you want something a bit edgier, then there's always Fighting Chance Productions' mounting of the musical RENT, now on at Waterfront Theatre until August 5th! Tickets for RENT can also be found at Tickets Tonight!



Have yourself a musical weekend!!

Hiking in Vancouver - Lynn Loop

I am not a hiker. But I don't mind doing it, because I do live in Vancouver, after all. And isn't that part of the reason why a lot of people move here? I really need to take advantage of the natural playground that we have at our doorstep. So, this past weekend, Alexis and I decided to do just that! So we hit up Google, and found this site that features hiking trails in Vancouver.

We decided on something that was Beginners' Level, and ended up with Lynn Loop, over on the North Shore at Lynn Valley. Fun!! It was supposed to be only 5K, and would take only about an hour.



See that nice little wooden path somebody built? Yeah. We thought it would be like that.

We were wrong.

Well, we were wrong only because we got LOST.

Lesson #1: Have a MAP!! Why didn't we take a screenshot of the map? Or pick up a map at the park? I don't know. But we didn't, and we were fools because of it.

4KM into the hike, we thought, Oh we are nearly done!! And we would have been, had we not detoured our way onto a DIFFERENT Trail.



See that path that says Lynn Loop Trail? We should've turned right where it says BOULDERS and then gone back to the start to complete our "loop."

However, we ended up going forward, up the Cedar Mills Trail, ending at the Third Debris Chute, and then going back taking the Headwaters Trail. After the easy-peasy jaunt along the Lynn Loop trail, this Headwaters Trail was like a giant slap in the face. We later looked at a map of the park and discovered that it was considered an "Intermediate" hiking trail. That would explain the rough terrain we found ourselves cursing at! "Should we call to get airlifted out?" we kept wondering aloud, but we knew that wasn't really an option so we just pushed on.

Now that we've done it, we're glad we can say we survived! Maybe our next hike won't be quite as ambitious, even though we didn't aim to be that ambitious in the first place!

It's summer, the sun is here, so why not make the best of the season and take in a lovely Vancouver hike!! Bring water, bring a MAP, bring a phone, Stay Safe, and HAVE FUN!!