Victoria – Day 1

I thought I would visit the Royal British Columbia Museum today.

I had a leisurely lie in and got up about 9:00. Had a leisurely shower and hit the streets about 10:00. First stop was breakfast. This was very nice especially the orange juice which was real and came from oranges – i.e. freshly squeezed – and wow couldn’t one taste the difference.

Having satisfied my hunger I set off to the museum along Government Street. It was a grey overcast Sunday and perfect museum weather. Unfortunately for me half the population of Victoria thought so too! The queue to get in would take about an hour – according to the museum guy who was directing people to the “overspill queue”. I watched a video presentation on a large screen made up of a relief model of BC which went through various facts about the province. It gave many examples continent by continent on how big it is, graphically showing how many countries would fit inside BC!

Having decided to give up on going to the museum, I’ll come back tomorrow; I headed back to the hostel. On the way I noticed several roads had been closed off (observant aren’t I?) mainly due to the quantity of police vehicles and fire engines scattered about. There was no emergency it was just the shutting off of a few roads in order to allow a march to take place. I have no idea what the march was about, but it did entail lots of policemen in dress uniforms. It also occupied four of the ladder tenders the fire brigade had at their disposal in order to string huge Canadian & British Columbia flags across the road. If I ever secretly harboured arsonist theft tendencies then now was the time to exercise them! (I haven’t so I didn’t.) I wandered through the little throngs of people who were gathering to watch and eventually ended up where they were all going to march off from. (This was also a bit of a giveaway by the sound of bagpipes striking up “Scotland the Brave” a few times. I’m not sure what relevance that has either.)

I watched the detail of Victoria’s finest “march” off – well it was more an amble actually - and I was also amused to see that everyone broke step to avoid the pile of horse poo in the road. It also amused me to see that the only ones really taking this seriously were the women, who were actually marching properly complete with the full arm swing. After the blue uniformed boys walked off, it was down to the good old Mounties. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police do not wear the red tunics, big hats & baggy trousers normally – only on ceremonial occasions, such as this. The Sergeant-Major did actually say to his company “right then, let’s do better than that”, and they did as they managed to all come to attention together and march off in step. (They didn’t have to avoid the poo as they were marching on the other side of the road!) I did notice that the women in the company were taking it rather seriously too.

After watching the last of them march off I returned to the hostel for some tidying up. This consisted of emptying out my rucksack and sorting everything into piles & then into bags – i.e. shirts, trousers, underwear, as opposed to one bag of “clothes”.

Having done this I rewarded myself with something to eat and then caught up on the driver updates I had downloaded yesterday. Having done that I headed for bed; grateful that the nightclub over the road was shut on Sundays. Another thing with this hostel is that most of the people I have spoken to here - Marc from Quebec & Dave from Nova Scotia – are here to work and not just passing through or travelling somewhere. They have travelled west in order to work through the winter intending to head back home in the spring. The hostel is obviously cheaper than the hotels to stay in. By the time I’d finished chatting to Dave it had got quite late and I was rather tired.