Follow-up on Fashion, Kathmandu, Oscar, and The Vancouver Movie Drinking Game

Based on some facts I learned today, fur­ther clar­i­fi­ca­tion is needed on Van­cou­ver Fash­ion. First of all, my notion that there are 4 dif­fer­ent sea­sons, and that you need dif­fer­ent clothes for them is incor­rect. Here, there are really 2 sea­sons. 2 1/2 if you want to be char­i­ta­ble; cold and rainy, and warm and dry. You can get away with one rain jacket year-round if you layer other items of cloth­ing (sweaters, fleece, other jack­ets(!)) under it. That explains the ‘no leather jack­ets invited’ ele­ment of fash­ion here. As for the rest, I chock it up to West Coast vs. East Coast. Nev­er­the­less, Matt and I both sus­pect that there will be a back­lash against the ‘every day is casual day’ atti­tude in the local work force. That said, he thinks it will just be for Telus employ­ees where he works; I think it could be a move province-wide, but don’t quote me on it.

Great Food on The Drive
Speak­ing of Matt, last night he and Oana intro­duced us to one of the best lit­tle restau­rants I’ve been in since we got here, the Nepali Restau­rant, Café Kath­mandu. How to describe Nepali cui­sine for the unini­ti­ated? It’s kind of like Indian, but lighter and with many sub­tle and fresh ingre­di­ents, like mus­tard greens, or fenu­greek. There was a melt­ingly tasty cur­ried goat, some fiery hot sauces (as condi­ments) as well as tooth­some lit­tle veg­etable dumplings, which you could dip in either a corian­der sauce, or a tomato-based sauce. It was a real treat, and another rea­son to return to the multi-cultural culi­nary strip of Com­mer­cial Drive (or ‘The Drive’, as it’s some­times called here). We’d been to a pretty good Viet­namese restau­rant when we vis­ited a year ago, and I’d had a nice meal at the bohemian ‘Wasubeez’ Café, but Kath­mandu is def­i­nitely a rea­son to return to The Drive again and again. I can’t wait to see what we’ll dis­cover there next time.

The Oscars, West Coast Style
This was my first Acad­emy Awards Tele­cast that I’d ever seen from this side of North Amer­ica. Since it is broad­cast live, the show starts here at 5 on Sun­day, and ends around 9:30. Apart from Jon Stew­art doing a fine job (although I’ve noticed that crit­ics seem to already be pil­ing on their cries of dis­ap­point­ment — gee, that didn’t take long), the biggest impres­sion this time shift made on the whole affair was that it felt far more like another big tele­cast that takes place on a Win­ter Sun­day, roughly from 5 to 9, has a lot of guess­ing about who the win­ners would be and has expen­sive com­mer­cials: The Super Bowl! Next year, I think I want to do an Oscar party. Espe­cially if I’ve seen any of the films that were nom­i­nated or won (which I hadn’t, this year), and espe­cially if one of the nom­i­nees was shot in Van­cou­ver. Sta­tis­ti­cally, there’s a good chance of that, since so many movies are shot here.

This leads me to my last thought: Is there a Van­cou­ver Movie Drink­ing Game? (i.e. If you rec­og­nize and get agree­ment that the cur­rent shot is from North Van­cou­ver look­ing at the sky­line, take one shot, etc.) Help me folks, because I’d hate to be the one who came up with that one. Thank good­ness that office cen­tre (the con­verted cathe­dral) in Toronto that shows up in every mid to low bud­get Sci­ence Fic­tion (Tek­war, Land of the Dead, Mutant X) movie and series since 1985 is not not here or we’d all end up with alco­hol poisoning.