I’m pretty addicted to travelling and it’s rare for me not to fly to Europe a couple of times a year, elsewhere in Canada once or twice, and usually some new country I’ve never been to before. Covid 19 made that impossible this year, and I was lucky that I’d travelled to Toronto in January and then briefly to Mexico in early February before the lockdowns began. Now, however, it’s been many months and I’m going pretty stir crazy. On the other hand, if you’re going to be stuck somewhere during a pandemic, British Columbia is a pretty good place to be stuck.
Some interesting facts about Vancouver:
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- The Lions Gate Bridge (a beautiful bridge once used for the Tom Selleck movie “Runaway” which featured homicidal mechanical spiders running across it) was originally built by the Guinness Beer Company.
- We have the second largest port in North America, second only to New York. Suck it, Los Angeles.
- We have 5 – count ‘em – 5 sister cities, namely: Odessa (Ukraine), Yokohama (Japan), Edinburgh (Scotland), Guangzhou (China), and Los Angeles (United States). Uh . . . sorry about what I said before, Los Angeles.
Oh, and we invented Ryan Reynolds. You’re welcome.
Les vieux maîtres de sort aiment raconter que la magie a un goût. Les sorts de braise ressemblent à une épice qui vous brûle le bout de la langue. La magie du souf e est subtile, presque rafraîchissante, un peu comme si vous teniez une feuille de menthe entre vos lèvres. Le sable, la soie, le sang, le fer… cha- cune de ces magies a son parfum. Un véritable adepte, autre- ment dit un mage capable de jeter un sort même à l’extérieur d’une oasis, les connaît tous.
'I totally saw this coming,’ Reichis growled, leaping onto my shoulder as lightning scorched the sand barely ten feet from us. The squirrel cat’s claws pierced my sweat-soaked shirt and dug into my skin.
The way of the Argosi is the way of water. Water never seeks to block another’s path, nor does it permit impediments to its own. It moves freely, slipping past those who would capture it, taking nothing that belongs to others. To forget this is to stray from the path, for despite the rumours one sometimes hears, an Argosi never, ever steals.