Aquatic Inspiration

April 16, 2013April 18, 2013 ~ Teresa ~ 3 Comments

Vancouver Public Library, along with about twenty partners, has introduced a new way for locals to experience the attractions that are usually left to visitors to Vancouver. Over a two-week borrowing period, the Vancouver Inspiration Pass allows patrons of the library to visit local attractions and recreation facilities for free. It’s a nice way to play tourist in your own town.

My friend Tricia has one of the passes right now and today she took me along with her to the Vancouver Aquarium for a photo visit. It was a challenging environment for photography and I only got a few shots that I was really pleased with. I’m sharing a few that I like for photographic reasons, and a few more that I’m fond of despite their flaws. (You can find some more professional shots from Tricia, here.)

Aural Atmosphere

March 5, 2013March 7, 2013 ~ Teresa ~ 1 Comment

When we think of the soundscape of a city, we think of engines and sirens, footsteps and voices, and car alarms, always car alarms. But each city has its own catalogue of sounds that help to define it.

I was reminded of this a few weeks ago, when we went through a period of unusually heavy fog. Fog horns sounded through the night, confusing some. Vancouver is touted as a recreational paradise of mountains and seaside, but it’s also a working port.

Those fog horns are a fickle, seasonal addition to our soundscape, but we have a few more reliable components. There are two, in particular, that define Vancouver’s soundscape. The Nine O’clock Gun can still startle me after all these years of living in the city, if I happen to lose track of time. It can be heard across the city and beyond its borders into the surrounding municipalities. The Noon Whistle, which you can hear in the video at the top of this post, brings daily relief to office workers downtown and serves as a rallying cry to weekend late sleepers. They aren’t as famous as Gastown’s Steam Clock, but they pace out life in this city for its residents.

Other Vancouver sounds that come to mind for me: the beeps and whirrs of our trolley buses, the sound of trains moving, the Carnival Band, and the roaring of the cranes at the Port of Vancouver. Oh, and I can’t forget crows. There are so many here that they’ve become a sort of emblem in art and music.

I’ll leave you with a video that uses more Vancouver sounds and a question: What are the sounds that define the place you live?

No Doldrums Here

January 22, 2013May 4, 2014 ~ Teresa ~ 1 Comment

It may seem counterintuitive, but January and February are busy months in Vancouver. Years ago, restaurateurs got together and created Dine Out Vancouver to help combat slow post-Christmas sales. It’s become a tradition and there can be fierce competition to get reservations for the discounted, set course meals at some of the swankier tables in town. One of the most anticipated events, though, is not all that swanky. Street Food City is a four-day gathering of some of Vancouver’s hottest food trucks and many of them have added Dine Out exclusive dishes. I suspect there will be line ups around the block again this year.

Other events have grown up around the Dine Out frenzy, like Feast Van, which offers prix fixe meals at a nice selection of mid-range restaurants, with $1.00 from each meal benefitting the Strathcona Community Center Backpack Food Program. I admire their model – great food for a great cause.

Another favourite of mine is the Hot Chocolate Festival, which runs until the middle of February. It’s a great way to wait out the last of the chill and sample some of Vancouver’s finest chocolatiers.

It’s not all about food, though. This weekend, the Museum of Vancouver is presenting their annual Winter Wander, which allows you to visit all six Vanier Park venues for a total of $5.00. It’s a great way to explore these out-of-the-way attractions and I suspect a lot of people buy yearly memberships after their visits – a boon to venues and patrons alike. It’s also time for the PuSh Festival of Performing Arts, which seems to get bigger and more innovative every year.

In sadder news, the legendary Ridge Theatre will be screening its very last films in the coming weeks as they present their Last Film Festival. Vancouver has lost so much of its cultural capacity and heritage to out-of-control, cookie-cutter condo development. The Ridge and The Waldorf are just the latest casualties.

Though it’s true that venues come and go, in Vancouver they seem to go and go and go. Affordable space for upcoming musicians, actors, and dancers seems increasingly endangered. I don’t think the solution is for ‘everybody’ to move to New Westminster, either.

My worries about the future aside, I’ll leave you with something to look forward to – the 2013 Vancouver Poutine Festival has just been announced and it’s going to be bigger than ever. You might want to make some travel plans for early March, as at least one of my out-of-town friends is trying to arrange.

First Person Imperfect

January 8, 2013 ~ Teresa ~ 5 Comments

Friendship in the face of the differences and inequalities in our culture can be a tricky thing. Working through our various political and social struggles can be exhausting, sometimes. What’s hardest, though, is really seeing each other and truly hearing what each of us has to say. Not excusing one another when we’re just not getting our areas of oppressiveness, but also not deliberately misinterpreting what someone says in order to seem more politically evolved. Trust-building, communication, and clarification are tools that can get us past the noise, but we need to remember to use them.

Like the message in the photo above, beyond the imperfection, there can be something beautiful.

The Power of We

October 15, 2012 ~ Teresa ~ Leave a comment

This year’s Blog Action Day
theme is The Power of We, which is particularly appropriate for this blog, because one of my focuses here is community.

This theme brings to mind vast social movements. When change happens, it often seems to have sprung out of nothing – a zeitgeist that moves inexplicably through a population. In fact, the sweeping changes of civil rights, social or environmental movements usually begin with small groups of people, acting locally.

It’s this scale of activism and community that interests me. Local organizing and community-building is the most accessible level of change-making, but it’s also the most invisible. National and regional politics and lobby groups are well-represented in the media, but our understanding of municipal politics, local government, and small-scale activism suffers.

A good example of this is the issue of separated bike lanes in Vancouver. For folks in the outlying suburbs and even for some in the city itself, the bike lanes were a shocking surprise. But, they were the result of years of work by organizations like HUB (formerly the Vancouver Area Cycling Coalition) and BEST. These groups arose because cyclists found themselves travelling the same, unsanctioned bike routes, encountering the same dangers and frustrations, and began to organize. They connected with others in more established cycling cities and slowly began to educate citizens and city officials about best practices for cycling. It’s taken years to get cycling integrated into transportation plans and separated bike lanes are part of that.

The same can be said for the establishing of community gardens, changes to municipal rules around where food can be grown, and bans on pesticide use in city limits. These changes, along with the establishment of neighbourhood farmers’ markets have helped to shift our city’s focus on food production and land use. We can thank groups like Vancouver Farmers Market, Farm Folk City Folk, and SPEC for this.

I’m lucky to live in a place where there is so much involvement by community groups. We’ve got strong neighbourhood associations, an active heritage foundation that works to preserve our built environment, and a wealth of organizations that connect community members across abilities, class, and race.

My challenge to you for this day of action is to look at your local issues and discover the groups that have been working on them. Perhaps you’ll find one that motivates you to get involved and to experience the ‘power of we’ firsthand.

Food Trucks and Summer’s End

September 4, 2012May 4, 2014 ~ Teresa ~ 5 Comments

The Labour Day weekend has just passed and for many of us, that signals summer’s end. Though summery weather around these parts (barring early torrential rains) seems to last into October some years, September usually marks the end of community celebrations and summer programs.

With that in mind, I decided to stop by the last day of one of my neighbourhood’s most popular events this summer – The Waldorf Hotel‘s Food Cart Festival, which has been taking over their parking lot every Sunday since the end of July. I took a few photos there and indulged in a double-decker cone from Earnest Ice Cream – their salted caramel was perfect and the strawberry-basil made me want to run home and roast some strawberries right away to recapture the flavour. But I digress…

The Food Truck Festival is a great example of the zeitgeist in Vancouver these day – a nice selection of local food (in those trendy trucks); pedestrian and bike friendly; a neighbourhood event that attracts folks from all over the city. Along with VIVA Vancouver and the community celebrations funded by Neighbourhood Small Grants, Vancouver’s summer street scene is becoming a lot more vibrant.

Speaking of Neighbourhood Small Grants, a group of neighbours planted this herb garden I passed today. I thought it was a lovely concept.

So tell me, does your community promote street-level interaction? What are the community events that define summer for you?

What We Have to Offer

August 28, 2012August 28, 2012 ~ Teresa ~ 1 Comment

Much is made of the internet’s ability to connect us and just as much is made of its ability to rend us apart. The reality is that it’s a medium that allows for both. Time spent on the internet can be a morass of LOLcat reposts and click-games, but it can also be used for communication, organizing, and creativity.

The challenge for most of us is being aware of all its potential and the tools that are available to us, if we know where to look. One such tool is Amara (or, Universal Subtitles), which enables users to caption any video on the net for translation purposes, or for deaf and hard-of-hearing folks.

If you’re like me, videos come across my Facebook page and Twitter stream regularly. If I like one, I’ll repost it and keep it moving. If it’s something that’s particularly resonant, it can become a cultural touchstone, like this video:

There’s a closed captioning option available, but if you turn it on, you’ll notice that it’s mostly nonsense. Being able to crowd-source accurate captioning for such videos makes them accessible across language and hearing barriers, allowing that cultural transmission to continue.

I decided to try my hand at captioning Eliot Rausch’s beautiful video of Charlie Kaufman‘s words. When I went to Amara, I found the video, which already had Brazilian Portuguese subtitles created for it. My task was English captions for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. The site made it easy – the hardest part was trying to capture the punctuation of spoken language. If I didn’t achieve that adequately enough, another Amara user can edit my subtitles and improve them. (In an ideal world, the author would stop by and create a definitive version.) Here’s the video, with captions:

What I Have to Offer

It’s not just these small moments of resonance that need this treatment; there are also larger projects in the works. Amara is looking for volunteers to help translate or caption movies, news programs, and more. I like the idea of crowd-sourcing transcription and translation talent to help widen the pool of people able to access all the video goodness floating around the interwebs.

Sounds like time well-spent, Mr. Kaufman’s caveats about entertainment aside.

Dog Social

August 14, 2012August 14, 2012 ~ Teresa ~ 2 Comments

Having a dog in the city is an inherently social act. You don’t realize that until you suddenly start having conversations with folks around the neighbourhood that you’d never spoken to before, just because they like your dog. Going to the dog park leads to an acquaintance pool full of people you only know by their dog’s name. It’s something that helps me feel even more rooted in my neighbourhood.

Vancouver East Village and the neighbourhood business association there capitalized on this by hosting a pet social for neighbourhood folks and neighbourhood dog-related businesses. Full disclosure: I live on the edge of the next neighbourhood over, but I dropped by anyway. I’m glad I did, too, since I won the draw for a bag full of doggie goodies from Dog Country. I’m looking forward to picking it up later today.

I think events like this are smart. Neighbours get to connect with each other and local businesses, while dogs get to do what they love best – meet, greet, and play. (Best not to mention the rolling around on dubious patches of grass.)

While we were there, we also got to enjoy the beauty of Pandora Park’s community gardens. I’m lucky enough to have a back yard big and bright enough for vegetable beds, but a lot of urbanites don’t have that luxury and sign up for community garden patches, instead. They’re spreading across the city and it’s a wonderful way to enjoy gardening and grow your own food. I bet there’s as many connections being made in community gardens as there are in dog parks, too.

In the Swing of It

July 17, 2012 ~ Teresa ~ 4 Comments

It’s truly summer here and I’m spending a lot of time fussing over the plants in my vegetable garden. That’s not all that there is to do, though. Summer’s a busy time around here.

For instance, while I’m typing away in my stuffy apartment (what am I thinking?), there’s a hyper-local honey tasting at Salt Tasting Room; folks are finding a spot for their blankets to watch a movie in Stanley Park (courtesy of Fresh Air Cinema); and elsewhere in the park, folks are settling in to watch a live presentation of The Music Man.

This week’s Main Street Farmer’s Market is featuring a pie contest as part of their Berry Festival and The Salty Tongue’s brought back their Long Table Supper series with a fruit-focused Pit for your Supper theme. If that’s not enough berry goodness for you, Gourmet Warehouse is tempting folks (well, me) by stocking Bernardin’s Home Canning Starter Kit. If you’re needing a canning primer, the Greater Vancouver Food Bank‘s Community Kitchen program is hosting a Safe Canning Basics demonstration. If you’re more of a grow-your-own sort, there’s Mid-Season Gardening workshop coming up, too. I think I may need a little help on both counts – I got a little carried away with the five(!) varieties of beans I planted and I think freezing all the extras would be a bit of a shame. I’m also trying to figure out what to plant in my newly freed up garden squares – ah, Square Foot Gardening, you really know how to keep a body hopping.

There’s tonnes more going on, with all the festivals, block parties, and outdoor events of the summer. I’m hoping to take in a goodly portion of them. But for now, I’m off to water my garden before it gets dark.

What’s happening in your neck of the woods this summer?

Looking for Connection and Creativity in Social Media

February 21, 2012May 4, 2014 ~ Teresa ~ 4 Comments

Having introduced my nieces, two rather internet-savvy young women, to the world of blogging recently (you can see their Tuesdays with Dorie post on making a chocolate truffle tart here), I started thinking about how much there is to navigate in the social media realm. It can be hard to build community online when it seems that the channels of communication are so fragmented, or worse, the same people are broadcasting the same information over channel after channel.

I’ve found Twitter to be a great resource for information and also a good way to connect in real time with people in my region and in my French Fridays community. Facebook is more for far away friends, local acquaintances, and family, though I do have a Facebook page for my blog. I like to keep all 11 of its Facebook followers in the loop…

I eschew location-based social media applications like Foursquare, but love location-based apps on my phone that help me find shops, food trucks, and even what’s in season. I don’t feed my activity from them onto social media, though. Maybe it’s generational.

What I’ve been finding really fascinating lately, though only as an observer, is how Google+ has taken off as a platform for photographers. A good friend of mine has become deeply involved in the community there and it’s become for her both a venue for connection and a spur for creativity. I think the combination of social media functions and ease of sharing is a big part of what’s made it so popular. Unlike a number of social media platforms, it’s also easily adaptable to users’ needs. A great example of this is the way the video chat function, called Hangouts, has become a forum for tutorials, classes, and even photo walks.

I have to admit I haven’t used Google+ for much, yet, but when I start working on improving my photography skills again, I’ll be looking to the resources that can be found there.

Here’s a few links, in case your interest has been piqued:

Google+ Survival Guide

Google+ photography book for charity

There’s a lot of potential in the web, but it’s easy to get distracted by all the entertainment, fluff, and chatter out there. It’s inspiring to see a web tool like Google+ take off so productively and creatively. Now, I just need to keep that in mind when I turn on the computer.