This morning, I slept in until 8AM, woke up, and walked over to the other AirBNB home to do laundry. At 11 AM, I left the AirBNB with my full backpack to attend the Vancouver Pride Parade in Downtown.
Attending the pride event was a great and somewhat emotional experience. For me, the event was a celebration of the triumph human rights over religious prejudice and closed mindedness. I was celebrating and showing my support as the question “Should religion be able to be used as a valid reason for discriminating against others?” was answered with a resounding “No!”
I walked over from the Waterfront skytrain station to the corner of Denman Street and Robson Street. As soon as I arrived, the first floats and groups were just starting to pass by the intersection. There were floats and marching groups from various organizations and companies including Starbucks, Safeway, The Liberal Party (political), Trojan, school districts, and many local businesses. Also, the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, marched in the parade this year as he has been doing for the last few years. The words I would use to describe the experience of the event was promiscuity, joy, self-confidence, and self-expression.
After spending a couple of hours at the pride parade, I began making the journey to Victoria. The journey to Victoria included taking the skytrain from Burrard to waterfront, transferring to the Canada Skytrain line, Exiting the sky train at Bridgeport, taking a bus from Bridgeport to the Vancouver Ferry Terminal, boarding the 90-minute ferry from Vancouver to Vancouver Island, and finally boarding a bus from the Vancouver Island ferry terminal to Downtown Victoria. Within a few seconds of getting off the bus, I was approached by a fellow backpacker named Joseph Unterschute (https://www.facebook.com/joseph.unterschute). He immediately approached me and we realized that both of us were looking for somewhere to sleep that night, and just decided to try to find somewhere together. Here is some information about Joseph:
- He is a Native American eskimo, and his family/community is located in the Yukon (remote area in Northwest Canada)
- He is 28 years old, has 5 siblings, and has an eskimo mother and non-eskimo father
- At the age of 19, he left the Yukon in the winter on a night when it was -63 degrees
- For the past few months, he has been picking cherries in British Columbia. He just finished picking cherries today and just arrived in Victoria
His initial suggestion based on some advice he received was to spend the night in “tent city”, an area used by homeless people to pitch tents and sleep for the night. Thankfully, I stopped by the visitor center near Inner Harbor and asked the lady working there what her thoughts were about staying in Tent City. The look of disgust on her face said it all. Instead she suggested that we board a bus to Thetis Lake and stay at the campground there.
From there, I met a Meetup group in front of a parliament building to hear the symphony and watch the fireworks. Some people I met included the following:
- Rogie: Persian mechanical engineering student
- Steve: Piano teacher from Seattle spending a month studying in British Columbia
- Miyu: 18-year old asian student spending 6 months studying at UVic
The area around the inner harbour was very crowded with people listening to the symphony. The symphony was floating on a performance stage on the water. The best seats in the house were people sitting in kayaks in the harbor just a few feet away from the symphony. At night, the outline of the legislature building lit up and the symphony performance ended with fireworks.
After the event, Steve, Joseph, and I began making our way to the bus stop which was headed to Thetis Park. We stopped on the way for a few slices of low quality, delicious pizza. Then, we waited at the bus stop for the 50 bus, which arrived at about 11:30PM. The bus dropped us off near the entrance of Thetis Lake. We found a nice, quiet spot right outside the park, which made a perfect free campsite for the night.
