Tuesday 31 Mar
Today Virginia, her friend John & I (Laurette) took the buss to 24th & Fraser. We headed up Fraser to 50th ave & walked back to 41st. This area is a mixture of Asian & east Indian stores. It was sunny, cold & very windy. But we trudge along & got out exercise. Afterwards Virginia & myself only headed to Main St, Punjab area for our lunch. After that she went home & I went to visit our friend Vera who is in the hospital. Great outing.
Contributor Laurette
Saturday 04 April
Today yielded a great surprise: we had three new ladies join our walking group - Henny, Deborah and Rosemarie ... we caught the #20 bus to Hastings and Richards and walked to Pan Pacific Hotel at Canada Place where we met up with Lorna ... Laurette had called earlier to let me know that the new conference centre beside the hotel was officially opened to the public today, so we followed the hundreds of people throughout the three levels of this magnificent structure ... the most important job I had was keeping every one in our group as close together as possible ... it was like being a Brownie den mother again ...
The conference centre is built of wood, steel and structural glass, jutting out over Burrard Inlet and providing 180 degrees of view from Stanley Park and Grouse Mountain on the West through North Vancouver, the Iron Workers Memorial (2ND Narrows) Bridge, and the industrial harbour area to the East ... the day was sunny and mild with noticeable bands of snow on the Grouse and Seymour ski runs .
The interior walls of the centre are covered in yellow cedar blocks reminiscent of BC's forests, the openings to the escalator wells are steel grids, the muted carpet colours resemble the ocean waves, the floor to ceiling glass walls slope outwards affording a view from the water below to the sky above ... special feature rooms are set up on each floor ... one large reception room was decorated in Italian Tuscany grape/wine theme for last night's special guest opening ... another room contains totems; the end wall of a Haida long house with a central figure of a bear, flanked by wolves and ravens; and separate islands of BC rockery, reeds, trees and mosses ...
We left the conference building at the west side doors and took several stairways to ground level near the Harbour Air float plane docks ... strung along the edge of redeveloped Coal Harbour parkway are the Thunderbird Marina, Harbour Marina and Westin Bayshore Marina ... as we continued west, we found the "Light Shed", a sculpture mounted on three slightly slanted logs painted silver ... atop the logs is a replica of an old freight shed that sat in Vancouver City's Coal Harbour wharf 100 years ago ... the shed was created by Liz Magor in 2004, half-scale, cast in aluminum at the Harman Sculpture Foundry... it looks exactly like the rough-wood siding and door of the original but is all metal ...
We arrived at the new Starbucks on the corner of Robson and Denman Streets where we found comfortable seating to enjoy our mugs of hot coffee and a snack ... this was the former location of popular Bo Jangles Cafe which moved to Pacific Boulevard and will be bought out under a new name ... sadly, another of our local favorites disappears ... we say farewell ...
We bused back to Britannia Centre along Robson, Seymour and Hastings Street ... next week we plan to walk Beaver Lake in Stanley Park ...
Contributor Virginia
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