Pillow Fight

Anyone going to the Pillow Fight in London on Friday?

Fast food, a nudist beach and a novel

Wednesday, I visited Granville Island, but like many other places I tried to visit in Vancouver, the main gallery at the Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design was closed due to the weather. I consoled myself with an apple green bubble milkshake (tapioca pearls!) and concluded it was too cold to be outside, so decided to go to the cinema. Fast Food Nation, directed by Richard Linklater, was the film I chose and then cried while watching.

Thursday, I headed to UBC, to visit the Museum of Anthropology, where stunning totem poles and masks and other articles related to First Nations culture were stored. After that, I climbed down treacherously slushy steps and over a fallen tree to reach a nudist beach. Wreck Beach was beautiful - a deserted beach covered completely in snow, with a forest for a backdrop. Sticking up from the snow were various pieces of wood, which looked quite odd. I walked down to the sea and found a stretch of sand, where the tide had just washed away the snow, and there were purple shells and bright orange and red logs there. As the sun got lower in the sky, I headed back to the UBC for a pint.

That evening, I reached 50,000 words of my NaNoWriMo novel and concluded that what I gained the most from participating in NaNoWriMo this year was a great travelling companion. The novel forced me into coffee bars when it needed words added and up mountains and skyscrapers when it needed me to find inspiration, but the best thing about travelling with my novel was that I rarely felt alone.