A fine weekend

View of Capilano slamon hatchery
Feeding the birds during lunch break on top of Grouse
View of the slope anf Vancouver
Maarten with the bear wood carving. In summer we had a photo of Maarten with the bear on grass.
CZarina getting ready to ski
Clear day on Grouse, Maarten posing
after the crab was done

Before we cooked the dungeness crab
The Lobster Man is definitely the best place to go for crustaceans. They’re at Granville Island just on the left as you walk along under the bridge towards the covered markets. Very disappointing to find out they close at 6pm so we settled for mackerel from Ocean city in the markets on Friday evening and had it with potato gems. We watched Man on Fire with Denzel Washington, an amazing eye opener film lent to us by Ron and Donna. It was about the business of kidnapping in Mexico. Half way through the film we could only watch it on slow motion but it was a bit too violent for me so we watched the Director’s take on it and that was better.

Saturday I had a very tight itinerary planned. It included dropping by Ariane and Aad’s garage sale as exclusive guests (10 minutes early except we were late). I scored a dainty brass bell all the way from Utrecht Bell tower, it's to be my bear bell...I'm set for summer. We distracted them for a while and then went grocery shopping on Broadway in the very cramped vege shop by Ace Cycles (don’t go there, go to Dan’s Bikes instead), Transylvania Bread shop was next where the kooky guy sells only rye sour dough and one other sour dough. Not much for choice so we went to the Greek bakery and got what we wanted including a very good pasti of feta and spinach. That was via the book shop where we got our kayaking and canoeing books as well as two from Barbara Hodgson, my new favourite Canadian author. She writes The Lives of Shadows and The Tattooed Map to name the couple I bought. Can’t wait to get my teeth into them. We postponed her exhibition at Vancouver Museum for next time.
After that we dropped by Granville Markets again to get our tulip photo framed. Wonderful price, great service and highly recommended Opus just opposite the Emily Carr institute. Lorraine at work told us about this place where you buy the equipment and frame it there yourself. We had fun choosing what we wanted. After which we went and finally got our Dungeness crab at The Lobster Man. It weighed about 2 and a half pounds (about a kilo for those in Oz) at about 8.95 per Lb. They ‘sorted’ it out for us there, Maarten was afraid to watch. We stored it in Donna’s fridge and then took off with Donna to Lonsdale for the supposed Persian festival. Through contradicting information we were still not able to tell whether we missed the festival by a week or if we were one day early or if we just couldn’t find it or if people were conspiring to keep us three away.
Still, the sunset was amazing; it was like being on holiday to see another side of Vancouver, a town on the base of the ski slopes.
We got home and cooked the crab in fresh garlic, ginger, and coriander as well as cumin powder. We had it with rice and choy sum greens and just made a total mess on our plates and licked our fingers.
Woke up earlyish on Sunday and made our way to Grouse. Maarten is good with organizing (pardon the z) the sea bus and bus times so we made it there door to door in 1 hour and 15 minutes. It was a beautiful day, we had birds eating out of our hands, a fantastic view, a lovely lunch with the hot sun on our faces. The snow is coastal snow so a bit too slushy but ok. Another type to get used to. I tried my first Double Black Diamond and needless to say I fell down about 25 meters of it. I had all my stuff scattered everywhere and Maarten who was yelling to see if I was fine had to grab it all very quickly and make it down to me. Well he was there taking me down the rather steep hill bump by little bump but at some point I just got my ski points into a bump and they snapped off too quickly. I did try grabbing a little tree in my way but I was going down too fast. I remember thinking ‘oh my god, so much for all that physio’. I landed in a little seated position, which was fine for me to recover in. We still had far down to go but after that I had revenge on my mind with the shakes so I got down. But that was what Purgatory (for experts only) was like. We did stop to eat long Popsicles off the pine trees and they tasted like pine too. I suppose you could say we loved Grouse, it was out first time, so we’ve got Y2Play passes which is a $275 pass you buy between February and March for next season but you can start using this season. We figured we need to use it in 8 night sessions and we’ll have it paid off. The passes are normally $700 for the season. After the day of skiing we took off down by the gondola, sea bus and 2 busses as fast as they/we could to make it in time for dinner at Lorraine and Peter’s house. It was the best Hungarian meal we’ve ever had (we had snitzel, potato mash, red cabbage, pickels, peppers, shaved cucumber and paprika salad, and for dessert a very yummy palacsinta; crepe and apricot). After an entertaining night we went back up the hill to our beds, all snug and very full. Another successful Vancouver weekend.