July 26, 2003

Today was the closest we've been to normality. A family we'd met on Salt Spring Island invited us over to their house for lunch. Alix and Brian had three children - Anna (6), Will (3) and Reid (1) - who had lots of toys.
Charlotte and Emily had a fantastic time playing with all of the toys in their garden, and seemed to ignore the food so that they could continue playing. One of the best toys was their climbing wall - Charlotte and Emily loved climbing all over it - it seems that in Emily we've got a bit of a natural.

It was really relaxing, and when the waterslide came out, the giggle-factor went through the roof. All in all, we had a great afternoon, and the children really enjoyed playing with other children, and more toys than would fit in any number of rucksacks.

On Saturday night, in Victoria's Beacon Park, we went to the Lumina Festival. This is quite unlike anything we've ever seen before. For a start, it was a family oriented festival starting at 9 o'clock in the evening - but the reason for this is that it's a lantern festival. The park is given over to static displays of lanterns, and art performances such as bands and dance groups (it certainly brought out the hippies of Victoria, who happily wandered the park with their babies wrapped to their bodies in the African style sarongs).


Thousands of people fill the park, and many carry their own home-made lanterns. Before we arrived, I thought a lantern was either those red 'Chinese ball' style ones, or those Z-spring paper ones you buy from Ikea. But the people of Victoria have other idea's. In the weeks before the festival they seemed to have spent their time thinking up the most amazing lantern shapes. There were birds, fish, kayaks, whales, globes, horses, buses - basically you name a shape, and somebody had made a lamp in that shape. And it wasn't just "a fish", but specifics such as "a trigger fish" or "a killer whale".


Anyway, pictures tell a thousand words, so I'll let the pictures describe themselves. As you can imagine the children both loved it, and didn't have a problem staying awake until 10:30, and even managed to walk back to the hostel through the whole of downtown at the end.
An unforgetable experience.