Side note: Seriously... seriously! How is it so stupidly hot? I did not sign up for summer in Vancouver temperature +32 degrees everyday. Becky, you told me that it doesn't get hot in the summer?! Yarg. How does anyone survive this sort of thing without dying or becoming a mole person or consuming a ridiculous amount of ice cream? Maybe it's from summers spent in the mountains where it gets hot but not ever really over 20, which apparently is my melting point. Stupid body running hot all the time...
Anyway... back to it...
Van Dusen Botanical Gardens. Best name for a Botanical Garden. Ever. Of course it would be something like that... they were very impressive. An amazing amount of land considering it's in the middle of Vancouver. When you're walking around you can't hear the traffic, can't see anything but green, and, luckily for us, it was practically deserted. Oh, except the filming crew of the new movie Marmaduke. Pretty cool.
We're wandering along, see this kinda cool little path down through some bushes so we follow it along winding through the greenery. Suddenly, Claude gets excited and pulls something off a tree and shoves it at me. In her wonderfully straightforward way, she grins and answers my "Wha- What is this?" with "It's a berry. Eat it." and proceeds to pop a couple into her mouth. I squint up at the tree, down at what resembles a blackberry in my hand and up at her, happily munching away. Shrug. Pop it in my mouth. Deliciousness! Delectable! De-juicytastic! haha. So, we stand there for awhile picking a few more of, what turn out to be mulberries, and chow down. This is about the time we realize that we're in a garden. A botanical garden. The Van Dusen Botanical Garden. As in the "Don't Even Think Of Picking Any Of The Vegetation, Let Alone Eating It" Gardens. Oops. We try to wander off casually then Claude looks at me and starts laughing her ass off.
If you've never eaten or seen mulberries, here's a bit of education. This particular mulberry tree, the Black Mulberry, or Morus nigra, has dark fruit about two to three centimetres long. They are also very juicy, when ripe. Said juice can stain things like fingers, hands, and/or lips. Double oops. We spent the next five minutes or so frantically rubbing at our lips and whenever we came across a park employee or anyone really, we hid our hands.
The next step on our garden walk was the Meditation Garden - a gorgeous cool glade with a carpet of mossy green and stone benches. It was a welcome stop as it was so nice and cold!
After that, we checked out the vegetable patch - lettuce, carrots, cabbage, tomatoes, all sorts of stuff that made my thumb itch. I sort of wish I had a real garden outside but at the same time my little garden pots in the back are growing like crazy - I'm especially proud of Luke the Cuke who is flourishing on his bench and producing cucumbers like crazy. It's awesome! We checked out the maze (in which Claude rocked it and managed to get us to the monkey puzzle tree in the middle!), the giant sequoias, a floating bridge. There was even a section of Eastern North America vegetation, which made me feel a little at home after all. The afternoon was capped off with a couple gelatoes, of course.
This evening was spent at a dinner party for a friend, Sarah's, birthday. Her husband Eric made some yummy carrot cake and I attempted a new vegan recipe for brownies but definitely left them in too long so they were a bit crumbly.
I came home and planned to go to bed semi-early but then got a phone call from my friend Corey and got invited to the Burrard St. Bridge, where a group of people were painting the new bike lane with paint.
Eric lent me a messenger bag to carry all of my stuff and I was itching to try it out so I rode with Corey back to his place by Commercial Dr. and booked it home.
Whew.
Photos to be uploaded tomorrow. For now...
Quote du jour:
Oh, and, as a bonus? Found a toonie on my ride home. Boo ya.
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