We had a super time at the Powell Street Festival that celebrates Japanese art, culture, and food, at Oppenheimer Park in Vancouver, where Japantown used to be before the WWII-related internment forced Japanese out of their homes, schools, and businesses.
I took nearly 700 photographs, and here’s a sample until I get around to making a Flickr album.
After stocking up at the Fujiya Japanese supermarket, we dropped by Burnaby Mountain for a picnic. Nothing like a fresh bento, some sushi, and assorted snacks!
Now that’s a view
The Tancho Crane ecosculptures are filling out
The amazing rose garden in full glory
Sapsucker
It’s in the high 20s here in the lower mainland of BC, so I beat the heat by wandering the Nitobe Memorial Garden at UBC for an hour or two.
Yumi and I took a 3 hour and 40 minute walk starting from SE Burnaby all the way to Deer Lake, around the lake and home again. We capped the glorious afternoon with delicious Japanese food at the Nikkei Seniors Centre restaurant.
For the photographers out there, all of these were shot with a Sigma 10-20mm ultrawide zoom on a Nikon D5200 body.
And if you want to be let in on a secret, for the first half of the walk or so, somehow the autofocus got turned off on the lens. But with a lens that wide, set at F8 with aperture priority, depth of field is massive so pretty much everything is in focus anyway, eh?
Deer Lake dock
Gull soaring over the beach with Metrotown on the horizon
Deer Lake Brook
Over two hours into the walk and Yumi’s still got lots of energy : -)
Nikkei Place
Fun festival at the Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre just up the hill from our place in south Burnaby, BC. The main draw for me? Japadog . . . : -)
It was also great to run into a gal pushing 100 years old that we met at a party about three years ago. She was out and about at the event with her walker, since she lives in the Japanese seniors’ residence there, and we had a good long chat in Japanese, mostly Yumi and Yuki, with me following along as best I could.
Here’s a post about that convivial, multilingual, multi-generational potluck.
Tofu.
I think tofu has an unnecessarily bad rep. You just have to know where to get the good stuff. And there are few places to get the good stuff.
I have never yet found any tofu in a major “western” supermarket that I liked. It’s rubbery. It’s tasteless. It’s ickilly smooth.
Here’s what I look for: It’s bought in an Asian market, preferably Japanese. It’s “momen,” or “momendofu” meaning it has weight and a non-icky, slightly textured consistency.
Once opened, you have to eat it in a day or two. If it lasts longer than that in your fridge, it’s got too many preservatives and who knows what other chemicals in it.
If you can serve it cold, cubed, with only a dash of quality soy sauce and sprinkled with bonito flakes, and it’s yummy — that’s my tofu.
If it’s some weirdness shaped into “hot dogs” or “hamburgers” and saturated with artificial flavours, yuck.
Yumi has the foyer display set up for Setsubun — you can see the Oni, or Demon, cowering at the sight of a box of roasted soy beans, knowing they will be thrown at him to drive him away… : -)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setsubun
I see Yumi’s foyer display is gradually transitioning from western Christmas to Japanese New Year’s. . .
We walked up the hill to the Nikkei Matsuri at the Japanese cultural centre on Kingsway in Burnaby. It was fun, and great food.
Nice bun(s)! : -)
“So I was hoping someone would drop a burger, when this cutie walks by…”
Yumi has the cutest Japanese sandals
Throwback Thursday — me wearing a Goodtimers T-shirt, heading out for my #Burnaby south slope walk today. The Goodtimers was a jogging club founded by a friend of mine in Tokyo in 1988. That makes this T over 25 years old!
It’s a bit musty, but nothing a good sweat won’t, um, cure 🙂.
