Marie is back on the blog, and today she is on Granville Island!
Granville Island is probably my most favourite place in all of Vancouver. When I was a kid, I would come here with my parents, and while they were enjoying the Granville Island Brewing Company, I was being enchanted by the Kid’s Place. Everything about that place is amazing, from the special child-sized door, to the indoor playground, to the arcade and candy shop, and of course stores selling anything and everything a kid would want, from puzzles to princess dresses to magic kits to stickers. I was particularly into the velvet-covered pencils they had in one store, to little Nadya they seemed like the utmost luxury in graphite products.
When I was a teen, and there was still a bus that would take you straight from White Rock to downtown Vancouver, Granville Island was a place I loved to visit with friends, because there was so much to see and do, but it still felt safe to my sheltered small-town self. We would people watch, buy cool stickers, and enjoy all the amazing food from the market.
Those were also the early days of me bringing out what was at the time my dad’s DSLR, and I thought I was getting some pretty incredible shots. But hey, that’s the way it goes with learning. If you’re doing it right, your best work this year is kind of hard to look at in a few years’ time.
Now that I am a grownup, I am on Granville Island the most in September, during the Vancouver Fringe Festival. For a couple of weeks of the year, Shane and I turn into theatre nerds, and see around 10 independent plays. Being the scheduling aficionado that I am, I try to pack two to three 1-hour plays into an evening, so we often go over to Granville Island right after work, and stay there until bedtime, trying to fit in a meal somewhere in there. Fringe plays are just so fun, because if it’s a good one, you will talk about it for a couple weeks, but if it’s a bad one, you will talk about it forever. Either way, it’s a win-win. Last year we saw one about Josephine Baker that absolutely blew our socks off.
On this day with Marie we were planning to see my last Fringe play of the season, but figured we could squeeze in a quick shoot beforehand. Marie, being her bewitching self, showed up in this colourful outfit that I would never have considered putting together, and yet, it works!
