As Ali Bigdeli stood in his West Vancouver Persian food store, Alborz, recently, surrounded by dried yellow apricots and tiny green raisins, he talked about setting his Haftsin table, which he does every year ahead of Persian New Year. Known as Nowruz in Farsi, the New Year celebration is the most cherished of all Iranian [...]
Erika Thorkelson, a 31-year-old ESL teacher living in Vancouver, was one of the 4,000 people who gathered in the city earlier this month to lend their voices to the Occupy movement. A Facebook conversation with a friend in Ireland encouraged her to show up to join the people gathered around the Vancouver Art Gallery on [...]
A Vancouver community centre is aiming to broaden its multicultural appeal, starting out with an event marking the South Asian festival of Diwali. Staff at the False Creek community centre were pleased with the modest turnout of their first ever Diwali celebration, but acknowledged that there have been challenges in measuring the demand for culturally diverse [...]
Balancing rocks on one another to create a work of art might seem impossible but that is exactly what John Shaver does in and around Vancouver. Shaver is an independent artist who creates rock sculptures. He has been working on Ambleside shore in West Vancouver over the past year. Public art is a priority in Vancouver, [...]
Taralee Guild is a local painter who gets by “pinching pennies.” The recent Emily Carr University of Art and Design graduate commutes to her studio by bike and works 60 hours a week painting to save enough to buy new equipment and rent a room in a house by Trout Lake, a 20-minute bike-ride from [...]
It’s a drizzling Wednesday night on Commercial and East Broadway Street in East Vancouver. The glaring yellow streetlight illuminates about forty people clustered in loose groups at the Commercial-Broadway Skytrain station entrance. Seven native teenagers stand at a bus shelter bench tossing jokes back and forth and chatting. Some of them smoke; others pace back [...]
How many 93-year-old men do you know who can jog a mile, swim 20 laps, do squats and lead a 16-piece band in a sold-out auditorium? Meet Dal Richards, Vancouver’s Dr. Swing. Timeless classics in a brand new setting – that’s how Richards describes his latest album, “Dal Richards, Musically Yours.” It will be a vocalist’s [...]
Christie Lee Charles sings her baby girl to sleep every night. Unlike the usual mom, she does it in a language only a handful of people in the world know. Charles, 27, speaks the Musqueam dialect of the Coast Salish First Nations language family. She learned the language at the feet of her great-uncle and [...]
George Patrikeeff collects antique books, whispers Orthodox prayers, paints portraits of poets and drinks tea from a samovar on a glass veranda. Every half hour a mantlepiece clock chimes a melody reminiscent of the Russian “God Save the King” to help him keep track of the time. “My own home, my own country inside,” said [...]
By Laura Kane and Mohamed Algarf On a typical Saturday, French, Italian, Arabic and Mandarin echo through the classrooms at the University of British Columbia. These are not only the usual twenty-something students, but boisterous mature learners. “When they see all the white-haired people in the class, they go, oh dear, do I have to [...]
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