Flowers at the Butchart Gardens
I’ve never been to Canada before. I’ve been to Mexico, North Korea, and points further east, but never Canada. Which, all things considered, is a little strange, because Canada is probably the best first option for a first time traveler from the US. More importantly, I’ve been coming up to Seattle for three years now in the summer, and still never been to America’s Hat.
That ends now, sorta. Here I am, sitting on a morning ferry from Seattle to Victoria, Canada. Granted it’s on Vancouver Island, so I’m still not going to be on mainland Canada, but, it’s a start. I’m traveling with a co worker and my childhood friend and college roommate as well as his fiance. It’s a three hour ferry ride to Victoria, and I become a quick student in gin rummy and spades winning my first two games. There is some significant chop en route throwing Jeff’s fiance Zoe into fits with an upset stomach, but the games are engaging enough that I disassociate from the turbulent motion almost entirely.
Victoria harbor is a quaint little thing, idyllic and pretty, and we are greeted by seaplanes landing and taking off shuttling people too and from the mainland. Customs is surprisingly tough, the Canadian customs agents all wear bulletproof jackets and are fully armed. I wonder if Americans are the unwashed uncivilized horde to them. Beyond the customs check, we cross over into Canada, on a bright crisp summer day.
Canada, or at least Victoria, is quite the picturesque little microcosm of the US. The landscaping is well attended to, the buildings are a pleasant mashup of modern architecture and colonial stonework, the people are attractive, and their manners are ridiculous. Please thank you, and apologies drip off of every sentence, and a permanently bemused smile etches itself into my face as a result. This apparently, isn’t necessarily how mainlanders act however I’m told, rather, as North America’s largest island, this is Canadian Aloha spirit. Even so, Canada, and Canadians give you the impression of exuberant six year olds with rosy cheeks, the entire population is so bloody cute you want to pinch their cheeks in a grandmotherly fashion. We walk down the street with the light traffic and horse drawn carriages, looking for a place to breakfast. We stumble across the Bard and Banker, a Scottish pub that comes with recommendations from co-workers that have already been here, and we drop in to sample their wares.
Bard and Banker
Everyone here is in skirts and kilts, which, which brings me two realizations. Canadians got some great looking legs, and they are remarkably tolerant of the cold. The temperature is barely mid 60s, and yet, every girl out here is rocking short shorts and t-shirts. I am reminded of my childhood in Colorado, where we’d be in shorts if the sun was out, playing soccer in the snow, and though I remember how 60 degrees used to be warm, that memory hasn’t followed to me to California.
Our hotel is a modest affair of a Best Western, made more curious by the fact that it’s on geek street and gay street. The block is wall to wall comic and game shops, anchored on the one end by gay night clubs. That is something I think I’d pay to see, a gay Magic tournament, if ever there was a place where that could happen, this seems like it.
Emo Bronies
Our plan is to take the bus out to the Butchart Gardens some 30 km away, and we wait at the stop for the last bus. It is here that you realize how bloody white Canada is. Everyone on the bus is white, young white, working white, old white. All white, all painfully polite. The argument that other countries in the world do things better then the US is suddenly brought into question. While it is nice that everyone rides the bus here, and Japan doesn’t have guns, and Norway has amazing socialized health care, the example before my eyes reminds me that those solutions were implemented in very homogeneous societies; while we may not have the best system, we should be commended for challenging more racial and social barriers then any other nation I’ve visited to date. The bus finally arrives, but it’s packed, and the bus driver informs us that he’ll radio that he had to leave people behind, and another bus will be along for us shortly.
We acquiesce, and settle to wait. An hour later however, no bus ever shows up, and we hail a cab instead. Outside of the tourist downtown, Victoria looks much like anywhere in the US with strip malls, apartment complexes, and grass. This would be the white America that our conservative friends in the midwest always dream of. What irony that this situation is nourished by the teat of social welfare.
The Butchart Gardens are an extensive garden built and maintained by the Butchart family, originally for the purpose of entertaining their private guests, but now has been landscaped and expanded to the point where it is now a large commercial enterprise. Ever since my first botanical garden tour in St. Louis almost twenty years ago, I’ve been a sucker for nature, wild and managed alike, and a good garden is always high on my priority list of tourist attractions to attend. While very pretty, and well landscaped into the old limestone quarry, the gardens aren’t anything terribly out of the ordinary, but it does finish with an impressive fireworks display, synchronized to opera and classical music. It’s a good show, and makes up for the fact that I didn’t get any fireworks on the 4th back in debt ridden California.
That evening we visit an Irish pub, which is filled with lively good natured patrons and great beer. I try a local ginger flavored beer which proves spicy and tasty if rather light in body. Victoria however, closes early, and the clock hasn’t even hit one before last call is announced in polite and cordial tones and we’re chased out into the street.
