2011 is the Year of the Rabbit in the Chinese calendar, and their new year is a month or so after ours, or whenever the first new moon of the year appears. My parents and I traveled to Vancouver, B.C., Feb. 5-7 to help all those Chinese-Canadians celebrate! Here are some of the photos we took.
The first picture shows a pagoda in a public garden in Chinatown, surrounded by tall buildings.
This is the view from our downtown hotel. We were on the 10th floor! There was a swimming pool in the basement!
There's a big parade on the Sunday closest to the Chinese New Year, and here are me and Dad before it started, looking for a good spot to sit and watch. Note the Chinatown gate in the background.
Since it was the Year of the Rabbit, there were quite a few kids wearing rabbit costumes.
Dragons chase away evil spirits to start the New Year with good luck, and we saw many dancing dragons. This one was warming up before the parade started, swaying to drum beats and cymbal crashes, and I liked its googly eyes on springs. The poor kid in back has to lean over the whole time!
We found a spot on the curb, Mommy and Daddy and me, and my friends Matisse and his dad Vince. Vince is from Hong Kong originally. He knows the best Chinese restaurant in Vancouver, and just what to order: sweet bean pudding and tapioca custard!
The parade started with a fellow just walking along, lighting and throwing strings of firecrackers onto the street -- bang, bang, bang! Then there were drums and dancers in colorful costumes and lots of people marching. This red fiery dragon was the longest one in the whole parade.
I really didn't want to leave Vancouver, or our fun hotel, but Mom and Dad enticed me into the car with promises of visiting a train museum. We drove an hour north to Squamish and found out it was much more than that. It was the
West Coast Railroad Heritage Park and it had dozens and dozens of restored train cars and several locomotives. I enjoyed climbing on this wooden one.
The park's showcase locomotive is a Royal Hudson steamie, a beautiful 4-6-4 (referring to the numbers of leading, driving and trailing wheels). It is housed in a brand new roundhouse. This is the biggest locomotive I have ever had the privilege of being close enough to touch.
I'm not even half as tall as one of the driving wheels! (Here I am with Mom, and that's me and Dad above.)
I do love trains. Even my favorite songs right now are train songs. You've gotta hear my medley of "Casey Jones," "I've Been Working on the Railroad," and "Freight Train." These tunes roll really well into one another.
And Dad just built a train table in our basement for an honest-to-goodness electric train! I'll post pictures of that soon.
P.S. Mom wants me to tell you she finished the
post about my potty training and added lots more scintillating details. Yeah, I bet!
It snowed again this past week, hooray! I got to go sledding and I discovered it's more fun to lie on my belly on our toboggan than to sit up -- then I don't fall off so much. I also realized mittens are a good thing, and kept them on my hands. Thanks, Grandma Gloria, for finding this warm and waterproof pair for me.
And then here's Mom on a snowbank when she was 2-1/4, with her Uncle Clark. She liked blue snowsuits and light blue mittens, too!
Dad might be older than I am in the snow picture (he thinks he's 6 or 7), but these other two are from when he was 2-1/2, the age I am now.
And for further comparison, here's a photo of Mom when she was just the age I am now. She had a six-month-old sister at that time in her life! Whew, I can't imagine a baby in our house. I'm glad to be the one ruling The Roost.
Which parent do YOU think I most resemble?
