{"id":130,"date":"2005-08-27T19:51:00","date_gmt":"2005-08-27T23:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scriniary.smallinfinity.net\/blog\/2005\/08\/27\/victoria\/"},"modified":"2005-08-27T19:51:00","modified_gmt":"2005-08-27T23:51:00","slug":"victoria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/2005\/08\/27\/victoria\/","title":{"rendered":"Victoria"},"content":{"rendered":"

Edit: photos are here<\/a><\/p>\n

Had a great time in Victoria, British Columbia<\/a> with my mom, aunt, and three cousins. Some people write wonderful travelogues with poetic and insightful descriptions. This is not one of those. <\/p>\n

Tuesday<\/strong><\/p>\n

Travel day. Got lost in the Detroit airport parking garage, as usual. From Seattle, took the ferry, a very relaxing way to travel.<\/p>\n

Wednesday<\/strong><\/p>\n

Wandered the shops, which was fun. The city is touristy, but in a nice way not a junky way. It’s easy to walk; from our hotel everything was a short walk, including the ferry dock and the bus station we needed on Thursday. From our living room window, we had a view of the verdigris dome of the legislative building<\/a> (photos<\/a>), topped with a gold statue, and a garden at the side of the building, with a sundial in the middle, and every afteroon a bagpiper played near the harbor, and we could hear gulls almost constantly.<\/p>\n

2 p.m. Afternoon tea<\/a> at the Fairmont Empress<\/a>, well worth it. Several kinds of lovely little sandwiches: cucumber, carrot and ginger, smoked salmon, curried chicken salad. An interesting shortbread with some spice we couldn’t identify that according to the website is cardamom (I’ve used that, but not by itself). Tiny fruit tarts and lemon curd to finish it off. And the tea was good, too.<\/p>\n

Wednesday night, some people went on a ghost walk – a tour of the city to see haunted places. My mom and one cousin and I went to eat at the Gatsby, where I had a very good salmon in plum wine sauce.<\/p>\n

Thursday<\/strong><\/p>\n

Went to the Butchart Gardens<\/a> (photo page<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The variety of plants was impressive. They hand out little booklets so you can identify everything. (I just looked at flowers and said “pretty”.) They have a huge bed of dahlias, I think, that was very nice.<\/p>\n

The sunken garden, a former quarry for a cement factory, was gorgeous; the walls are covered with plants and the beds contain masses of flowers. There’s a stone hill in the middle that we did not go up. Carefully manicured lawns that you aren’t allowed to walk on.<\/p>\n

It was *crowded*. The crowd was well-behaved but still there were too many people – I’d hate to be there on a weekend.<\/p>\n

The Japanese garden was cool and shady, with tiny moss covering much of the ground and stones and flowing up the tree trunks. Off one path there was a view of the ocean.<\/p>\n

I wandered down to a bookstore in the to look at the local offerings and purchased two:<\/p>\n

Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of an Artist<\/em>, is Emily Carr’s<\/a> published journal, which is partly about her life and her art, but also contains her descriptions of the landscape. Born in Victoria in 1871, she’s “generally considered Canada’s most famous woman painter” according to the back of the book. I’ve been reading snippets of the journal at random, and it’s delightful. Some lovely images, some musings on trying to paint or various aspects of an artist’s life. This icon is one of her paintings.<\/p>\n

Also an anthology of short stories by writers from British Columbia, West by Northwest<\/em> (David Stouck and Myler Wilkinson, eds.). I don’t like short stories much, and I don’t like mainstream\/literary fiction much, but I ought to broaden my horizons. Am also amused that it’s “printed on 100% ancient-forest-free paper”.<\/p>\n

Friday<\/strong><\/p>\n

Went to the Royal BC Museum<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The museum is wonderful and at times, a little depressing. One exhibit covers the potential effects of global warming on the province’s ecosystem. Another depicts the First Nations cultures and how the people were affected by the arrival of European. One chilling display included quotes from newspapers from 1862 – the year that the native population was nearly wiped out in a few months by smallpox.<\/p>\n

That said, the dioramas depicting the plants and animals were very well-done. Also they have an impressive collection of First Nations carvings and good explanations of how they made clothes, tools, houses.<\/p>\n

We took a break for lunch in the restaurant of the Parliament building, which has good food. Never took a tour of the building, but on Wednesday, we’d looked up at the underside of the dome. One level has paintings of historical events; another shows the region’s natural resources: lumber, fish, gold, and apples.<\/p>\n

At the museum I got another book: The Remarkable World of Frances Barkley, 1769-1845<\/em>. With her husband, a captain, she sailed for eight years trading sea otter pelts from the northwest coast to China, India, and other places, and conveniently for us, kept a diary.<\/p>\n

Afterwards I went to a park and walked through a small part of it. Then I sat on a bench and worked on describing the scene (perhaps to be posted under writing exercise filter later, or not).<\/p>\n

Saturday<\/strong> – wandered the city some more, then back on the ferry to Seattle, where we spent the night and caught planes in the morning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Edit: photos are here Had a great time in Victoria, British Columbia with my mom, aunt, and three cousins. Some people write wonderful travelogues with poetic and insightful descriptions. This is not one of those.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}