Dateline: Monday 14th March
gotta say, i'm cramming in a lot of action the past few weeks. the last 7 days is no exception.
Last Thursday night, literally 48 hours after my return from Seattle, I was out checking a band in Downtown Vancouver. The Frames (www.theframes.ie) are pretty much one of Ireland's biggest bands that have yet to break out of the country. During my time in Dublin I became quite a fan of theirs, but didn't get a chance to see them live, one of my few regrets from 2004. It is nigh on impossible to get a ticket to one of their gigs - you'd have to book months and months in advance and pay in the vicinity of 35 to 40 Euro for a club show. Or, one of their gigs, where they headlined an outdoor mini-festival in Marlay Park in Dublin, was closer to 60 Euro - kinda outta my price range.
So, when i saw the gig flyer for a Vancouver show at a tiny 400-500 capacity venue, Richard on Richards, for C$18 (12 Euro) I kinda got a little excited. After so many years building up a following in Ireland, they are now touring on the back of a new album, Burn The Maps, and are trying to break into new markets in Europe, North America, and even onto Australia in the coming months (check out the tour schedule at the above website, and check 'em out if they come to a town near you - highly recommended!).
Anyway, needless to say, they were awesome. I heard one person describe them as being like Coldplay, but with violins, but that is being grossly unfair. They rock out with a wall of sound, and do the loud-quiet-loud power chord thing, with the electric violin and other occasional string instruments thrown in add a little Celtic touch, and provide interesting extra layers and textured elements of sound, and with frontman Glen Hansard charming the audience with witty anecdotes and idle chatter between songs it made for a great gig. As to be expected, there's a substantial Irish population in Vancouver, and a fair-sized proportion of them were in the audience that night. This raised the atmosphere and vibe of the bar to an extra level, with virtually every song being a major sing-along anthem, with some hit singles in particular whipping the crowd into a frenzy (myself included). I brought my housemate along as well, and think there's a new convert to the Frames fan-base now.
Saturday was a big adventure. Since I've arrived here, I've wanted to make sure that I took advantage of my time and saw lotsa stuff and did loadsa activities, rather than waste my time away, which I did do to a certain extent in Ireland and Scotland. Surfing the net, I found a hiking club that operated out of Simon Fraser University here, and got in touch with them a few weeks ago. A trip had been organised for a day-hike in the mountains half way between Vancouver and Whistler, just outside of this small logging town called Squamish. Destination was a place called the Stawamus Chief, reputedly the worlds second largest single piece of granite. We're talking an elevation of almost 600metres at the peak, and all-in-all an 11 kilometre round trip. Once again, the weather was unseasonably perfect - sunny, blue skies and 11 degrees, and not a whiff of a breeze in the air.
There was 36 of us in all, quite a large group really, and we all car-pooled it up the 45 miles out of town. This is really well organised, and cheap as chips too. $2 membership fee, share gas between 5 car-poolers, and the cost of lunch (or bring yer own from home) - that's it!!
The scenery up there is absolutely, stupendously amazing. Just a short hour's drive out of town, and you've got crisp mountain air, with forested hills as far as the eye can see, and snow-capped peaks on top of that. Then, as you gain elevation and approach the peak, you get out-of-this-world, amazingly-good, there-ain't-enough-adjectives-in-the-dictionary-to-describe-how-good-it-is views over aforementioned mountains and the Burrard Inlet waters. There are 3 peaks in all, and as each one is reached, the jaw drops slightly further in sheer wonderment. Not forgetting the beautiful waterfalls cascading down from the mountain tops thru the forest, lashing down with freshly melted snow.
The hike itself was pretty easy, with some parts being moderately difficult, having to use chain-ropes hammered into the granite to pull yerself up thru steep ravines and over slightly treacherous paths up some cliffs. But the effort is well worth it once you get to the top. I've got some pretty classy snaps of me sitting on the edge of a cliff with a 200-foot drop directly below, and the snowcaps of Garibaldi Mountain in the background. Amazing.
I've made a couple of good friends out of the hike as well - in particular a French guy named Olivier, as mad into photography as me. So it was a highly enjoyable day - getting out and about in the British Columbia wilderness - I gotta do this more often.
Dateline: Friday 18th March
Unless you've been living under a rock recently, you'll know that yesterday was St Patrick's Day - the biggest, most famous national day of drunken debauchery celebrating the nation of Ireland.
Here in Vancouver, the past week has been a riotous celebration of St Pat's, with a week-long "Celtic Fest" carnival from the 11th to 17th. As I like to do from time to time, I signed up as a volunteer for this community festival, working a number of shifts in a number of guises. Sunday was the big parade, with some 50,000 people showing up with a perfect blue skied sunny day to watch a menagerie of floats, clowns, pipe bands and Irish and Scottish dance troupes make their way down Granville Street. I was employed as one of many 'crowd controllers'. It's kinda strange to think that I was in Dublin this time last year, watching a parade that took almost 1/2 a day to weave its way 1/2 way across the city, watched by several hundred thousand people, and now this year, a "bumper" crowd of 50,000 watch a 10 block 2-hour event.
Later that evening, they had me selling Festival Cdee's and T-Shirts at a jammers-packed Irish pub, with a live band doing just-barely-so-so covers of traditional Irish folk and rock tunes. Then, on Tuesday, I was doorman at a multi-media presentation - a slide show and commentary of a Canadian vet-cum-photographer and author wife's time in West Cork during 3 successive lambing seasons. The visuals of the rugged, wild, Irish coastline and countryside and back-county culture made me kinda homesick in a way, and had me reminiscing about my times there.
Finally, last night, at the culmination of the festival, the biggest event of the week (excludig the parade of course) was held at the 1000 capacity Commodore ballroom, with more Irish and Scottish dancers and pipe bands, and 3 bands, The Whiskeydicks, Three Row Barley, and The Ecclestons. Y'know, it was kinda funny - I had free tix to this, was not working, and it was St Paddy's Day - but I couldn't get into it. This is normally bread-and-butter party-hardy time for a guy like me, but there was no vibe for me. Everyone else was having a BALL!!
Maybe this could be a reason. With no disrespect or offence intended for my North American pals, but one thing I have noticed over here, is that everyone is soooooo desperate to be Irish, and any vague connection they can clutch at to claim Irishness, they will. It's like "my grand-daddy's neighbour's milkman was Irish, so that makes me Irish". It all comes across as a bit desperate, and fake. I don't claim to have any Irish heritage whatsoever, but having lived there, and experienced the real thing first-hand, there is just no comparison. The real Irish are soooooo proud to be Irish, and no-one parties harder than those folk, god bless 'em!
I hope that rant wasn't too offensive!!
Anyway, that's my past week and a 1/2.
keep in touch,
tony
