These are the shoes at my door.  Last Saturday, I was at Camp Cove in a sarong, last night, I was in the pub in a scarf. Somewhere in between, I was left high and dry in my football boots after the Very Social Soccer League was rained out yet again.  Not just dampened, but absolutely washed away.

I don’t think I’ve ever mourned the passing of a season so much as this Summer.

Here in Singapore

I wear thongs every day

That’s EVERY day

Having good shoes is key for happiness during a northern snowy/puddly/wet winter. And by ‘good’ I mean waterproof and warm. I supplement my (hush puppie) boots with double socks on the really bad days, and I live in fear of my boots spring a leak because I haven’t worn any other shoes since October and I really don’t want to have to buy another pair before winter is over.

Jeff is another story. Ever the more sturdy of the two of us, he’s been wearing sneakers the whole time without complaint.

I feel sorry for critters who don’t have any extra footware for the harsh cold, but they seem to do fine. Dogs love trotting through the snow and cats have the good sense to stay inside (haven’t seen a cat outside in ages come to think of it).

People in Vancouver tend to not have special snow tyres (tires) because it only snows about 10 days a season - tops. This makes for horrible treacherous driving when it is snowy. Pedestrian crossings fill me with dread…

^{Mmmm, slush…}

By far the funnest footware in town are snowshoes. We gave snowshoeing a go on Mount Cypress (30 mins from downtown Vancouver) and it was a lot easier than I expected.

They have come a long way from these fellas

And yet the principle remains the same…bigger surface area equals less getting your legs stuck in tonnes of snow. There was 4 metres of fresh snow beneath us that night (and counting) and we only went in up to our knees. The beauty around us was breathtaking - like a lunar landscape…

All power to seasonal footware!

Hey dear blog readers,

FFF is going on a little summer-winter break while Justyna is on the road and the rest of us are playing the sand/snow.  Check back in a week or so for our next topic - seasonal footware!

Love, FFFourers

I have been thinking quite a lot about the jaunt that the bats living in the Botanic Gardens make every night at dusk, heading out to find whatever batty food it is that they like. I was walking down Art Gallery Road a couple of weeks ago, heading to the Domain with thousands of other people to watch Paul Kelly, and the sky was seething with them. No-one was paying them much attention, probably because they’re such a fixture of the city, like possums in Hyde Park at night, and ibis in your sandwich at lunchtime.

I, too, have not given the bats enough thought. But because the Sydney Festival has been so brilliant, and the weather so perfect, the bats all too easily indulged my self-satisfied isn’t-Sydney-great frame of mind, where everything once unnoticed and mundane is added to the catalogue of relish for the city. And why shouldn’t we acknowledge how spectacularly screechingly wonderful it is that we have a bat fly-over every evening in our very own CBD?

And now I’m on a roll, so bear with me. This week I have seen some of the best bands in the world, and then caught home late weeknight buses packed with other balmy festival-goers. I have run along the waterfront at Blues Point, the view making me more breathless than the hills could ever do, and cycled over the eternal arc (apologies to John Birmingham) of the Harbour Bridge every morning. I have stumbled from pub to pub in Newtown, and then danced with my friends in my loungeroom until six in the morning. I have watched schools of fish shaped like hyphens swim in formations beneath me while snorkeling at Gordon’s Bay. I have played board games and cultivated a sandal tan and met up with friends for vegan breakfasts and painted new neighbours’ bedrooms and read the paper in three different parks and eaten at least four different gelato flavours and food from surely at least ten different countries.

Right now the last of the bats would be making their way to Moore Park. And there’s nowhere else - absolutely nowhere else - I would rather be than here.

Today we went on a birthday jaunt for Richard, and ended up at an Exercises in Happiness. It was an exhibition of sorts, part of the Singapore Fringe Festival, but actually put together by two Australian artists.

Starting late, the two artists, dressed smartly in black, met their audience at the doors to the gallery and took us in five at a time after a short briefing/survey. We were asked questions like “do you enjoy shopping?”, “do you spend a lot of time thinking about the future?”, “is censorship necessary for a healthy society?” and shown into the room. Inside there were various stations, and we were given a small piece of paper listing the names of each of the activity stations.

We were to attempt as many of the activities as possible and rate our happiness during the activities on a scale of one to five. There was a little bed of soft soil with plants waiting for potting and a full watering can at the Gardening station. There was a bottle of wine and a single glass at another, with instructions saying we were welcome to drink, but if we do, “consider that there is only one glass”. There was a “pinata party for one” station where you could take one shot of tequila and whack a pony once.  And there was a video interview station where participants sat on a chair being filmed as they answered questions on an instruction sheet. There were many more; my favourite was either the Bed station where you lay down and read aloud to someone sitting at the Chair, or the Build a Person station which gave you step by step instructions on moulding a lil guy out of plasticine.  Richard liked the dot and ball station, where you throw a ball at a mark on the wall, but only because it made Finn burst into loud baby giggles.

After the experiment, we could stick around and watch people’s video interviews, with their thoughts on happiness - what it is, whether they have it. But before the end they asked us to stand on a line, marking a place between one and ten to indicate how happy we felt right then, or with our lives as a whole. On such a happy jaunt, I found myself up at the crowded end.

Jeff and I walked to Kitsilano the other day in an attempt to prove my theory (spurred on by Karen’s comment about Vancouver being like a small town) that Vancouver is a collection of villages strung together.

12:20pm Walking along 16th Avenue from Main Street (Village #1)…

Man they love their hockey here.  Haven’t been to a game yet, but feel it is vital in order to understand Canada/Canadians.  Sounds like all the violence of rugby on ice skates with scary masks and sticks.  As far as I can tell this is someone’s balcony… dedication.

12:25: Someone egged the Community Centre sign.  Classy.  Maybe they did it when the strike was on - no libraries, pools or community centres were open for nearly three months when we first arrived.  Spring has begun to very tentatively sprung, but I imagine any flower that is exposed is wishing it hadn’t shown it’s delicate petals just yet - still bloody cold (meant to get down to -12°C this week!)

12:35: Get to Cambie (Village #2)

Poor Cambie.  It must have been a rad street before they ripped it up to make way for another SkyTrain line out to the Airport for the Olympics in 2010 (not HUGE Olympic flag…)  It’s coming back to life now though… cute cafes and restaurants, a Dutch pancake house, groovy cinema, lots of shops selling pet accessory and raw food for your dog etc., Choices market, Capers (I love it but it’s the Canadian version Macro so a bit self-satisfied).

12:40 - Walk down 12th Avenue off Cambie

12:50 - Reach Oak (Village #3).  Haven’t explored this fully yet, but it’s renowned for its black and brown rice sushi.

12:51 - saw squirrel but too slow to get a photo of it.

1:00 - reach Granville St (Village #4) and eat oatmeal, cinnamon and raisin cookie from bakery.  Jeff eats an eccle (raisin pastry triangle thing).  Note: they sell REAL muffins there.  What a relief.

Bit of NY, NY stairs on the outside action on 12th and Granville.  Granville is like Broadway shopping centre on a road with a bit of Neutral Bay thrown in….

1:17 - Reach Burrard and Broadway (Village #5).

1:20 - Broadway and Cypress.  I go past this sign everyday and think ‘What is Wawanesa?’  It sounds so cool!

Alas.  It is an insurance company.  Not quite what I had conjured up in my head (dancing girls with big head-dresses, musical numbers etc.)

1:26 - go past Arbutus Coffee (cute little coffee shop).  No time for photos though - both in need of a toilet.

1:30 - reach Kitsilano (Village #6).  Use facilities and eat copious amounts of mexican food

Mmm!

I am currently awaiting some hot buttered toast, which will be pretty much the only thing I’ve eaten today. Last night, Richard and I had a degustation menu at a beautiful restaurant in the National Museum, before seeing an excellent play. I returned home to puke all night. This is my third bout of food poisoning in the last three months, and there were a goodly number in the months prior to that. I’m starting to wonder.

I feel too sick to sit here and type very enthusiastically, so I’m going to go watch a vcd on the couch. But before I do, I’ll share briefly with you the wonder that is Ya Kun.

I think I’ve already mentioned kaya in this blog - a coconut jam with a subtle pandan flavour. Ya Kun specialises in the serving of kaya on crispy “kopitiam” (coffee house) toast, with slabs of butter, a side of two runny eggs and a cup of  condensed milk-enhanced coffee on the side. While no photography is permitted inside any Ya Kun outlet, their website is well stocked with appetising images of the calorie-rich treats on offer. Unfortunately it doesn’t feature the poem about Ya Kun that is inevitably on the wall, with “choicest” (the only adjective appropriate for butter and butter-related concepts) lines such as “butter the kinship, sugar the friendship, not a tad more, not a tad less, just the right amount of its richness, the toast that binds all relationships” - to paraphrase from memory. Anyhow, I recommend you visit the website and learn all about the life of Ya Kun, until such time as you can try his kaya for yourself!

I had Sonia, Mel, Nathan and Anthony over for breakfast last weekend, and while making toast in the griller, I managed to set my oven mitt on fire:

Toasted.

It seems to have been made of the most highly flammable materials imaginable. It really went up in flames, and required dramatic beating against the footpath to be extinguished.  I bought it from the Marimekko store in Helsinki, and it matched my pot holder which Karen and Richard gave me for my birthday last year, so I am upset by its dramatic end.

This brings to a total of three the number items I have set on fire in my kitchen in the past couple of months.  First it was a tea-towel with a dog motif, which brushed against the gas burner, and then I put my bamboo steamer in a saucepan to steam some dumplings, but forgot to put the water in. The heat of the saucepan actually made it catch alight, create a heinous smell, screw up my saucepan and ruin my dumplings.

It is only a matter of time before I set off the fire sprinklers.

When I was in the United States in 2004 I was disgusted with the state of their bread. It was white and thick and sugary as hell. They sweeten their bread here in Canada too, so when we got here I was determined to not fall into the trap of thinking sweetened bread was the norm. It was really hard to find bread that didn’t have some kind of sweetener added at first, but there are a few kinds. Here are the ingredients of the one we’ve got at the moment. I’m sad to say that I don’t find it sweet at all, meaning that I’ve gotten used to sweet bread!! Ah, the shame!!

organic sprouted whole grain wheat, filtered water, wheat gluten, sesame seeds, soluble raisin syrup (raisin solids, water), organic cane juice, organic sunflower seeds, yeast, sea salt, oat fibre, cultured whey (milk), ascorbic acid, enzymes, soybean lecithin, cornstarch and tricalcium phosphate.

On a personally toasty note, last week I bought a snow jacket from the hallowed emporium of second hand goodies - Value Village (known as VV Boutique in much the same way Target gets called Targét). I now see my winter as being divided into BJ and AJ (before and after jacket). It’s filled with down like a doona and has dual layer protection with two zip ups, fake-fur lined hood and fitted cuffs with little thumb holes to keep your hands warm. I will never fear the cold again!!