More Victoria

One of my favourite culinary experiences ever is any sort of 'high tea'. It's a veddy, veddy mahhvellous invention, dahling. We went to the White Heather Tea Room in Oak Bay, as it's a local place, a quarter of the cost of high tea at the Empress, and there were other things on the menu for Trevor to try.

It was most excellent! If you're ever in Victoria, I highly recommend the White Heather!

We did go an park underneath the Empress, partly because it's handy, but largely because I wanted to go to the gift shop and stock up on Empress blend tea, which is actually pretty comparable to grocery store tea, at least in price. In flavour...amazing! Then we set out to walk all around the main downtown core.

"Darth Fiddler", a random busker downtown on the waterfront....Victoria's waterfront is populated with interesting and random things to look at at.

Urban decay

The inner harbour is dominated by the Empress (above) and the provincial legislature buildings. We visited Murchie's Tea room and shop, Roger's Chocolates, and many random and interesting stores. My favourite Chinese restaurant is still beside Fan Tan Alley (is it just my imagination, or does every city with a Chinatown have a Fan Tan Alley?)but we didn't eat there, because we were meeting Trevor's friend Dana for dinner at Fisherman's Wharf. We walked for about four hours - I really wish I'd had a pedometer so I could count how many kilometers it was - I was bagged!

I had NO idea that Victoria had a Fisherman's Wharf! Or a houseboat community! It was quite the revelation. :) Dana also took us on a scenic tour around some viewpoints and to a local market, which was really nice, partly because it was a great break from trying to navigate for Trevor. My memories of how the roads were laid out was a bit faulty, and lots of things have changed since I lived there, so we had a few hairy moments. It was nice to just be a passenger for a while.

Something else I didn't know is that Victoria still pumps raw sewage into the ocean. Ewww! How gross is that? I didn't actually realize that any North American cities still did that - I thought Halifax had been the last holdout, and they fixed that a couple of years ago. How, in this day and age, with all of our technology, and all the things we know about the planet and pollution and the circle of life, are cities still getting away with doing that? SO GROSS!

More to come...slowly but surely! My goal is to get through our very eventful summer before Thanksgiving comes. :)