The ThunderBlogs

Andrea Potter stood in front of a row of gleaming jars filled with small green cucumbers.  She used her fingers to push down the cucumbers as she poured salty water over them.  Elsewhere on the table, a tall beige pot held freshly shredded cabbage and apple, a mixture that will become sauerkraut after a few weeks of fermentation.  A bright pink mixture of red and green cabbage showcased the final product of the process, giving off a pleasantly light pickled scent.

Potter is a holistic nutritionist and chef.  On Saturday, she was staffing a booth at Trout Lake farmer’s market.  She was invited to the event to show people how to preserve food using the lacto-fermentation process, rather than canning or pickling their produce.  Shoppers at the market stopped by Potter’s booth to ask questions and share stories of their own attempts at food preservation.

Potter’s booth was just one of the many activities and vendors at Saturday’s market.  Under another awning, market goers swapped cookbooks with each other.  Musicians entertained shoppers in the shade of a tall tree at the centre of the market.

At the far end of the line of white, blue and green tents, a small purple trailer was surrounded by hungry people queuing for large buckwheat crepes with fillings such as pesto, Vancouver-island brie and locally grown salad greens.  Another trailer served lattes and iced coffees, which people sipped as they browsed through the abundance of fresh local fruit and vegetables.

According to manager Anita Georgy, fall is one of the best seasons to visit the market.  She eagerly described the variety of produce available, noting that local cranberries and hazelnuts had just arrived that day.  For Georgy, markets are important because they serve as a bridge between the people who grow food and those who eat it.  She noted that the number of customers at the market is increasing and many people bring their children with them.

Perhaps one of the biggest draws of the market is the chance to be in touch with the seasons and support the local economy.  Vancouver residents can meet their local farmers and craftspeople at Trout Lake Saturday markets until Thanksgiving.

The small strip of Broadway, from Main to 12th Street, was blocked on Saturday to celebrate the community’s sense of social responsibility by showcasing sustainable methods and by opening a street market for local small businesses.

The Autumn Shift Festival was organized by the Mount Pleasant Business Improvement Area, to “create an endless summer party”, said Lynn Warwick, executive director.  The occasion was quite fitting to the weather of Saturday, as the change in season was apparent with the sunny afternoon to the rainy evening.

Children strolled around with red and blue balloons sponsored by Hyundai, and others drew happy faces on the sidewalk with chalk.  Someone wrote “Be yourself.  Everyone else is taken,” in big letters beside a butterfly.

The range of kiosks offered information pamphlets on how to create a composting worm system or order a composting bin, find areas in the Mount Pleasant community are outdoor study-friendly zones, and locate where to buy installable solar energy panels, and other environmental ways of life.

A henhouse, with dailyeggs.com engraved into the wood, attracted a lot of the youth to peek into the metal mesh windows at the chickens.  Called a “Van-cooper”, the coops are sold for $600 and can be installed in one’s backyard.

Another popular attraction was a colony of bees that were swarming around in a wooden frame, displayed by the same organization under which Van-cooper is part of, the Backyard Bounty. The representatives talked to on-lookers about beekeeping as a hobby, and how to maintain a colony.

The west side of the street featured mostly community-oriented organizations, while the east side was opened to the merchant market.  Knitted tops, vintage clothing, and long feather earrings were among the items sold by the local store vendors and artists.

A live performance by a rock band called Matinee, courtesy of Shore 104 FM had a few 20 year olds slamming their heads in the air and kicking their legs up.  An old bearded man, with a rusty-orange shirt and stressed jeans exclaimed, “yee haw!”

The event represented the way of life of Mount Pleasant locals, who are interested in responsible living, said Warwick.   Volunteers coordinated the festival, who were a handful of students and seniors.

The Vancouver School Board will close schools for 10 additional days next year in order to partially offset a $17M budget deficit. Longer holidays will hurt vulnerable families and further stretch community resources.

Around 50 community members met Thursday to discuss education cuts at a town hall meeting hosted by Jenny Kwan, MLA Vancouver Mt. Pleasant, at the Strathcona Community Centre.

Some parents came with young children. Kwan announced in English and Chinese that translation could be made available those preferring to listen in Mandarin or Cantonese. A small group gathered in the back corner of the room for a whispered translation session.

Tom Barker of the Strathcona Parental Advisory Council said that the Strathcona Community Centre currently runs a Holiday Safe Space program over Christmas Holidays and March Break. The program serves 120 kids who are identified by their schools as “at risk,” and offers them structured activities while schools are closed.

One study found that while children from higher income families increase their learning over extended school breaks, the learning levels of children from low income families actually decrease, Barker said. Children from all income groups showed similar rates of increase in learning while school was in session.

“Inner city children are most vulnerable during extended school breaks,” Ron Suzuki from the Strathcona Community Centre said. “The saddest times of the year are Christmas and Spring Break.”

Suzuki said that the community centre will have to fundraise an extra $26,000 to cover the cost of additional programing during school closures. This funding could otherwise have gone towards needed renovations to the childcare centre or towards offsetting the Food Security Program budget deficit, Suzuki said.

The 10 additional school closure days were proposed as a one-time measure that will save the school board $1M. However, Patricia Badir of the Strathcona Community Centre worries that closures will continue indefinitely.

The Strathcona Community Centre has an amazing volunteer board of directors and an amazing staff that will find a way to put on great programming for the 10 extra school closure days, Badir said. “We solve these problems. We see a leak, we patch it up. We jump into the crisis and we solve it. But that just means that things will look okay to the school board. There will have been no disaster in Strathcona, and I’m worried about what that will mean for the next year.”

The psychic hold that the sea has on a port town such as Vancouver – where the European exploration of the Burrard Inlet predated the city’s incorporation by more than 90 years – is evident in the circular wooden sign that greets visitors to Sailor Hagar’s Brew Pub. The emblem for the North Vancouver bar and restaurant, overlooking the inlet, features a larger-than-life carving of a wizened sailor’s hard squint, his face rutted by years of salt and sun, his white beard draped down the front of his raincoat.

Inside, a sandwich board reads “SPORTS ALL DAY.” And sure enough, if you take a seat on the middle of the dining room, you can see no fewer than eight flatscreens, all of which on a recent Saturday night were showing the B.C. Lions kicking the tar out of the Calgary Stampeders and the Vancouver Canucks thwacking puck after puck past the Anaheim Ducks. Another screen showed keno results, over by the mantelshelf with a model ship with three tall sails in a clear box.

The curious collision of the nautical and the modern were all around the bar. By the flatware station hung a portrait of a sailor, kettle and coffee pot in hand, clinging to a rope on a ship’s deck swamped by waves. The sign above the stainless-steel kitchen station read “galley.” Around the corner hung another portrait, this one of a traditional galley, with men crowded around a wooden table, one with a guitar, another with a banjo, a third playing an accordion, a fourth smoking a pipe. Beside it, also on the wall, stood a lottery machine, like an ATM in reverse. A small waste bin on the floor overflowed with crumpled keno tickets.

The full-scale fibreglass narwhal mounted on the far wall clashed with the veggie burger on the menu. A couple seated beneath a boom with fakes sails lashed to it complained audibly about the saltiness of the gravy and sent back a lasagna they said was inedible. A woman asked a man at her table a hypothetical: “Would you date yourself if you were a woman?”

Every so often, the chatter of the dining room would halt as men cheered and applauded for a Canucks goal. Even the interior of salty ol’ Sailor Hagar’s isn’t impervious to Hockey Night in Canada.

From a block away you could see orange balloons bobbing over the heads of guests at the Renfrew Ravine Moon Festival this past Saturday held at Slocan Park. Kids scurried around the playground with the balloons secured to their wrists while adults lounged next to the stage watching the rotating 20-minute performances.

There were kids on stilts with wigs and headpieces resembling jellyfish, tentacles streaming as they sauntered, waving rainbow coloured flags. Anthropomorphic vegetables were on display as part of the Harvest Fair, for example, tomatoes with faces drawn on in black marker. Next to the tomatoes was a flyer announcing a Harvest Fair competition, including categories for craziest carrot and ugliest gardening shoes.

The Moon Festival has been held annually since 2003, and is a melding of the traditional Chinese Moon Festival; the Harvest Fest, supported by the Renfrew Collingwood Food Security Institute; and the Still Moon Arts Society.

Carmen Rosen, artistic director and founder of the Still Moon Arts Society described the event as an “environmental festival without bashing people over the heads,” when talking about celebrating the natural beauty of the Renfrew Ravine.

And she acknowledged the Asian moon fest ties when speaking about the lantern making workshop and the large percentage of people with Chinese ancestry in the area, calling the event a “blend of different harvest traditions.”

The stage performances began with a First Nations drum circle, followed by music from Latin America and then a clown and puppet show. The “Renfrew Chinese Seniors Dance” and the “Renfrew Mandarin Choir” prompted the mainly elderly Chinese audience to erupt in spontaneous applause during those performances.

Chance Stewart, who described himself as the “Master of Ceremony” entertained the kids and kids at heart between performances dressed in a homemade hat made to look like a bird’s beak, completing the bird costume with tights and boots. “I’m getting tired of standing on one leg,”  he joked to the audience, which by the look of the blank faces in the crowd, seemed to confuse them more than amuse.

After three hours of stage acts, local politicians Don Davies, MP, and Adrian Dix, MLA, announced winners of the best tables at the Festival for categories like creativity and best overall. A few of the tables were represented by the Collingwood Neighbourhood House, the Renfrew Collingwood Multicultural Artist Network and Community Action for Seniors’ Independence.

To end the festivities at Slocan Park the crowd followed a marching band to the Renfrew Ravine where lanterns had been placed. Fireworks were expected and another successful year of the Moon Fest.

A wall was covered with grass, fish and waves at the end of a literacy gathering Friday and Saturday at the Cedar Cottage Neighbourhood House. Over 200 people crowded into a 400-square-feet room to discuss the community’s new literacy plan.

The literacy gathering, “Sea of Change,” was organized by Joanna Lemay, facilitator for the Kensington-Cedar Cottage neighbourhood literacy plan. Participants jotted down their thoughts, ideas and suggestions on colourful paper cut-outs that were all stuck onto the back wall.

“We want to look at what’s going on and what people would like to see,” said Lemay.

According to recent data published by the Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP) in B.C., kindergarten children in the Kensington-Cedar Cottage neighbourhood are the third least ready developmentally compared to other Vancouver communities.

Lemay was aware of these findings and emphasized the importance of community-based discussions to help address shortcomings. The new literacy plan is funded by Legacies Now.

As the attendees funnelled in through the single door, excitement and anxiety permeated the room. Children, parents and seniors, inspired to be part of the new change, were greeted with the smell of warm soup and traditional Cree bread, bannock. They gathered around tables covered with colourful paper cut-outs.

Translators for Chinese, Vietnamese and Spanish positioned themselves at all the tables. The majority of attendees were visible minorities. Many were Chinese, but there were also Filipinos, aboriginal people, Vietnamese and Spanish-speaking people.

On grass-shaped green paper, participants wrote down what they currently see in the neighbourhood around literacy. Some complained about the increasingly expensive childcare facilities, and the overall increase in cost-of-living in the neighbourhood. Some expressed their fears over the impending closure of several elementary schools in neighbouring communities.

The strengths on which the community can build on to improve literacy were identified on pink fish cut-outs. A popular characteristic participants identified was the multicultural integration inherent to their community. Many agreed that the community was built on sharing and having family get-togethers. They were also proud of First Nations programs available to help aboriginal children integrate without denying their heritage and ancestry.

Finally, on the wave-shaped blue cut-outs, participants identified what they would like to see in the new plan. The major concerns they had were racism in school and the lack of resources to breakdown language barriers. They expressed a need for more adult E.S.L. classes, and classes for children under the age of three to learn writing.

Most of the children wanted more comic books, one child wrote on his blue wave, “More Spiderman stuff!” In response, a librarian from the Kensington Library said they had just ordered over $4000 worth of graphic novels.

Lemay was satisfied by the turnout and discussions at the event, and said she will strive to incorporate the community’s thoughts into the new literacy plan. What started off as a bare wall at the back of a solitary room was now filled with colours, shapes and ideas.

The third race began with the smell of cigarette smoke and the earthy grass aroma of horse shit hanging in the damp night air. The bell sounded, and the announcer’s voice echoed down from the ceiling of the vaulted grandstand, hopelessly unintelligible at the rail. The five ponies pounded ahead, 20 hooves a muffled snare roll on the loamy track, sending mud erupting. Then they were past and out of sight.

Anyone watching a race from ground level at Hastings Racecourse can track the horses until they make the left turn, which at Hastings puts them on a northward course, toward the Burrard Inlet and the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge. Looming over the scoreboard – itself still lit, in classic fashion, with individual bulbs, like the border of a marquee – is the waterside grain elevator at the Cascadia Terminal, one of the 28 marine terminals operated by Port Metro Vancouver. The Viterra logo its side is a clue that the agriculture corporation that runs Canada’s largest grain network handles the imports and exports from this particular terminal.

Within a tight radius, Canadian oats meet the world and turn into purse-winning six-furlong runs. Cranelike grain-moving equipment cantilevered in the backdrop as the horses raced out of sight on the back of the track. As with so many parts of Vancouver, aspects of one of its main economic engines hung in plain sight but utterly out of mind.

With the race afoot, track denizens turned their attention from their programs and onion rings to stand on benches and peer, tip-toed, over the rail. Down from the ceiling blared the announcer’s gibberish about who was moving, who was leading, who was fading. A knot of sweat and silks thundered across the finish. “You were close,” someone told a companion, but no one could know for sure as the PHOTO FINISH sign lit in red neon on the scoreboard.

It was Woombroom Express for the win, paying $8.70 on a $2 bet. Slew’s Boy and Soldiers Return followed. From the stands, high up but well within earshot of the hoi polloi, came the unmistakable pop of a cork from a bottle, and a jubilant cry rose just behind.

Derek and Michael Ip spent their Monday baking ice cream-filled croissants out of a bright yellow school bus.

The entrepreneurial brothers, 22 and 20, respectively, are part of a new street food pilot program that runs until April 2011 and is intended to cook up some international alternatives to Vancouver’s much-maligned street menu of hotdogs and chestnuts.

The Ips, in business since mid August, offer fresh-baked goods with an original twist. Be it ice cream, s’mores or mac ‘n cheese, the filling packed into their flaky treats is like nothing the city’s streets have played host to before.

The many influences on PanDa Fresh Bakery—a nod to Derek’s nickname and a pun on both the Japanese and French words for bread—draw at their root on the cuisine of those two nations.

“I was in Harajuku last year,” said Derek, “and there was a little stall in the street that sells Parisian-style croissants. They put the croissant inside a waffle cone, and they put soft-serve on top. So it’s kind of a play on that idea.”

The school bus, located near the corner of Drake Street and Pacific Boulevard, was Derek’s concept. He spent several months with a friend converting it into a workable kitchen, which now wafted out a scent of sugary oven dough and shaved chocolate.

Derek and Michael, like several vendors involved in the process, had mixed feelings about the pilot program and the lead-up to its launch.

“There was a little complication,” Derek said. “During the application they changed the location. We were going to be in front of Granville Station, which would have been great. Then a week into it they changed it without informing us.”

The city removed the Granville location as an option for “motor vehicle” vendors, as opposed to basic cart vendors. There are five of the former, including the PanDa Fresh Bakery, parked around the city for the duration of the pilot program.

Complaints directed against both the timing of the program’s unveiling—only one vendor was up and running by the start date, July 31—and the applicant selection process, which was lottery-based and did not try to distinguish well-prepared entrepreneurs from blithe amateurs, remain fresh in the minds of many Vancouverites.

Far from the other downtown carts and trucks, the PanDa Fresh school bus bookends a long stretch of parked cars on Pacific. Sandwiched between Yaletown’s glass-panelled condo towers and the green plane of David Lam Park, the two young vendors can enjoy a nice view, if not a brisk pace of weekday business.

Beyond, the prows of white-hulled yachts and red-bottomed water taxis point to an unexploited market. Meals on waves, anyone?

Nine years ago, Meghan Gardiner wrote a ten minute script for her graduation project for her UBC acting degree.

Over the following years, it grew into a 45 minute performance where Gardiner plays ten characters. She has now performed Dissolve, her one-woman show on sexual assault, over 450 times across North America.

On a Tuesday evening, Gardiner was back in UBC to perform it as she has done almost every year since the concept was created.  Twenty-eight women and eight men sauntered into the lounge in the Walter Gage Residence where the play took place.

A woman in the third row rested her head on her friend’s shoulder, her straight black hair cascaded onto her friend’s back. Near the door volunteers from Women Against Violence Against Women passed out fliers and asked people to sign up for their mailing list. They were joined by members of the UBC Sexual Assault Awareness Program, a new group formed on campus.

The play started simple.

Gardiner faced the audience and ran her fingers through her brown hair.  She was wearing a plain black tank top and black pants, her feet were bare.  Madonna’s Like a Virgin blasted from the speakers.

Over the following hour, Gardiner was able to switch between vastly different characters. With a lowering of her voice and a forward thrust of her pelvis she transformed into an obnoxious club bouncer. Her green eyes focused on her feet as she became a woman talking into the phone while putting nail-polish on her toes. Each character was a bystander or a contributor to the sexual assault the play revolves around.

The show’s last character was the victim, whom the audience did not meet until the end. “I feel violated and embarrassed, I feel like damaged goods,” she said. “I’m feeling all these things and I have no idea what happened.”

In the discussion following the performance, Gardiner revealed that the play was based on her personal experience when she was a student at UBC. She lost 13 hours of memory after someone slipped a drug into her drink.

Coming back to UBC annually is important to her, she said.  “I guess I am sort of protective over the UBC community… I want to make sure they get the message. “I want to hit home a little harder at UBC.”

As the discussion ended, the audience crowded the information stands to find out how to be involved.

One woman went up to Gardiner and asked for a hug.  Gardiner embraced her tightly, shut her eyes and smiled.

Residents of the Musqueam urban first nation have confronted dispossession and discrimination from the government over the last 130 years. These restrictions have shaped the current situation at the nation, where many face poverty and prejudice. Nonetheless, a number of Musqueam members have enhanced their employment opportunities at the Native Education College- a cultural sensitive institution fostering academic training and community spirit for the aboriginal learner.

“The aboriginal people deal with social issues like homelessness and unemployment. We try to help them improve their lives here, “ said Gary Johnston, Cultural Coordinator at the Native Education College.

After 3 years since the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, civil societies in Canada continue to urge the government to implement it without much success. The declaration aims to diminish the gap of opportunities between non-aboriginal and aboriginal people.

Founded in 1985, The Native Education College has enrolled hundreds of aboriginal students- including several members of the Musqueam Nation- in their basic education programs, offering certificates and diplomas to their graduates. “Our Early Childhood Education program is the most successful one. This program has an employment rate of 100 percent after graduation. There is a high demand for this type of service in the aboriginal communities, and our program is well-recognized in Vancouver,” said Johnston.

The school intends to level out students who need pre-requisites to enter universities or teach new careers to adults seeking to improve their employment situation. “Our students on average are 30 to 40 years of age. Many businesses for the aboriginal people have diminished over the years, like fishery for example. We enroll many people trying to change careers because they need new jobs,” said Johnston.

Moreover, this organization not only provides learning opportunities to students, but also cultivates unity amongst Aboriginal cultures. The Longhouse that comprises the campus was built in accordance to aboriginal traditions, and it promotes positive energy and community spirit.

At the beginning of each semester, the college organizes a welcoming ceremony for all students following traditional protocols of the Longhouse. Students enter the college from a door carved in a cedar pole, symbolizing an abandonment of negative energy and the beginning of new career opportunities.

“The ceremony is an important experience for students. You enter the college from this door, and you leave all the bad energy behind you.  During the ceremony we play traditional songs and we dance to the beat of drums,” said Johnston.