Canada Day

Friday July 1st Canada Day.

This is a big day for celebrations here in Canada, with the National Anthem of Canada is very much in evidence, everywhere.

O Canada, glorious and free!
O Canada, we stand on guard, we stand on guard for thee.
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

Downtown in Vancouver, the CBC station is being relayed live, all day, from the Jack Pool Plaza at Canada Place on the harbour. There's a big all day festive party going on in the Plaza. This is the Plaza where the Vancouver Olympic Torch stands. Over on the East coast of Canada, in Ottawa, Will and Kate fever still dominates the news reels along side the national celebration.
Here in Richmond the big celebrations are down here in, Steveston where the 66th Annual Salmon Festival is taking place. They began this morning at 10am with a Parade that began very close to us on Railway road and went on to 12noon.

All roads that the Parade uses are closed. We decide to give the parade a miss. So we headed down into Steveston at around 12. 3o pm. Steveston is heaving with people, despite many car loads already heading out of the little town as we drove in. We thought parking would be a problem but luck was on Nancylees side as she quickly slipped into a newly vacated parking spot where a few seconds before she had let us out.

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The dry cloudy morning soon gave way to a beautiful sunny afternoon. Even the apartments here are decorated with the red maple leaf of the Canadian flag with the occupants partying. A good majority of the crowd are dressed in red tee shirts and with all manner of Canadian logos. There were some in the crowd that bucked the trend though!
The Steveston community park is covered in stalls from all kinds of organisations. Things to do, things to buy, games to play. Live music is played in different areas of the park. Live acts to watch and laugh at........

........Demonstrations to watch. This Japanese Martial Arts demonstration, Kendo I think, was quite impressive and rather noisy.

There's a large Japanese community in Steveston They arrived many decades ago when the salmon fishing and canning was at it's height. They have their own large community center that stands close to the Steveston community center. Here there is an impressive and beautiful display of Ikebana flower arrangements and bonsai trees.
There's also a guy demonstrating the art of bonsai and some beautifully dresses Geisha girls demonstrating the Tea Ceremony as well as a display of Japanese calligraphy. The area surrounding the buildings are planted in the distinctive Japanese gardens style.

The Steveston Community Center is a large multi roomed center with a public library. It's well cared for and well used. Many different sized meeting rooms and an Arts and crafts exhibition going on was through this door. The large crafts display room had many stalls with some really beautiful items. I could have gone to town with the purse here. Beautiful jewellery, with earrings in my style. The art show was nice but not my style. They were also selling home made produce, cakes and jams etc.


If the Community Nurse turned up in this little number at home in the Boro. the whole street would know. I wonder what the traffic wardens would do!!!Probably still ticket them.

The line up for food with so many people milling around, as would imagine is pretty long. We opt for some Chow Mien as the line up is not so long while Nancylee or Dave take it in turns to line up for Philippine barbecue meat. Worth the wait! Later the salmon barbecue line up peters out a little and Nancylee states that we couldn't possibly come to a salmon festival without sampling it. So we did and it was good.

This Community Park is a kids paradise. Large structures to climb and play on and this impressive fun water park to run through and get wet in.

Of course not all the participants were kids! Quite a few were parents others were just big kids.

After nearly nearly three hours wandering around my knee finally gave up so I was installed in one of Stevestons lovely coffee shops in a comfy sofa, with a large coffee and a book to read while the fitter members of our party had a walk down to the water front. We had a sunny pleasant fun filled afternoon. Not far to drive home but the road system was still crowded.