Day 6 - Again Canada Day

I was woken up this morning at 6 and then again at about 7 by the baleful howling of seagulls. It's a haunting sound, not particularly pleasant - something like a dog being squeezed in a vice - but it's better than the sound of Sandra snoring which had woken me earlier in the night. We got up at 8 and had a "continental breakfast" (not sure what continent the Canadians were thinking of, but it was basically cereal and toast, and quite a nice change after the excesses of Moxie's Classic Grill), then walked, on legs still aching after yesterday's wanderings, down to the harbour area.

Our Canada Day celebrations kicked off with an unexpected and very enjoyable dance by five of the small harbour ferries to the tune of the Blue Danube waltz by Johann Strauss II. We then took in some of the sights that we'd missed yesterday, like the huge and impressive Fairmont Empress hotel, and the parliament building, both of which are among the oldest buildings in Victoria and yet are still only just over 100 years old (when we told the taxi driver who took us from the airport to our hotel in Vancouver that our town of Sandbach was mentioned in the Magna Carta in 1215 [our mistake; it was mentioned in the Doomsday Book in 1086], he seemed suitably impressed and said, "you must have a castle there then." I'm still not sure whether he was being sarcastic.)

We walked back across the harbour front, looking at the stalls that were being set up, some of them selling Inuit carvings and clothes, most selling tat jewellery. We examined the "Flavour Of Canada" area, which turned out to be a burger van, a pizza van, a van selling Hungarian bread, and a van selling curries. We chose a curry between us, and sat on the harbour listening to a frankly awful pair of street performers blaring their balancing act out over the PA system (a woman near us remarked, "they're still terrible when you can see them").

The weather was a bit better now, the snowy peaks of the Olympic Mountains in Washington State, USA, visible over Strait of Juan de Fuca (I'm not making these names up; Juan de Fuca was a Greek sailor in the service of King Philip II of Spain in the late 16th Century).

After a trip to the Visitor Centre and a brief interval to watch an excellent street juggling act, we walked back over to the Legistlature Lawn of the Government building, where white and red t-shirted folks were attempting to make a living Canadian flag. There was a guy up in the hoist of a fire truck shouting instructions over a tannoy to get the people in the flag to line up properly, it was quite funny. And then, when he'd got everyone arranged to his satisfaction, he started up, "O Canada..." crikey I choked up. Sandra too was wiping the tears from her eyes. It was a very moving moment with all these people dressed as their own flag, singing their national anthem.

With clouds gathering on the horizon, we spent the afternoon in the BC Museum, looking at natural history exhibits and First Nations histories. By the time the museum closed at 5pm, we'd been on our feet for 7 hours, so we came back to the hotel for a rest and to freshen up.

For dinner I'd picked out a Thai restaurant, which turned out to be shut, so instead we went to a sushi restaurant which we've walked past 6 or 7 times already. There then followed a display of chopstick wielding "skills" the like of which I've not seen before. I'm no chopstick expert, and I'm no sushi/sashimi expert either, but I was howling with laughter watching Sandra at work. I have to give her credit though. We were eating raw tuna, salmon, snapper, scallops and squid - not something everyone can stomach - and she was surely giving it a go, but when she picked up a piece of wasabi the size of a watch battery I had to step in. It was a really brilliant meal in the end, and relatively cheap, and it still gave us plenty of time to get down to the harbour area for the Canada Day fireworks. Walking down to the harbour we could hear people whooping and hollering, and you can't help but transfer English soccer hooliganism to those sounds. But it's not like that. These people are just revelling in the fact that they're Canadian, and this is their day. At one junction a drunk (and possibly stoned) lad accosted me and went on and on about what a great country Canada was, and how he was sad that he would never see me again - he was no threat whatsoever.

The fireworks were fairly brief but spectacular. It was a joy to hear people behind us at the harbour wall cheering and praising the fireworks, rather than slagging them off as I'm afraid people in England might. Am I too down on my own country? I don't know. I just remember thinking, as we walked back to the hotel through the crowds of joyful and cheering Canadians, that this is what England would be like if we'd won the World Cup.

And these guys get to do this every year. R-sum.