This weekend was the Chinatown festival - a street festival with all kinds of food booths and entertainment. In the event information, they were advertising a walking tour of the area, so we went for that (though they didn't say where or when). It took a bit of looking and asking before we found the place where the tour started, but we persevered, stumbled on the place, and paid our $5 for the tour, which started in half an hour. In the mean time, we walked around a bit, and became slightly overwhelmed by the hustle & bustle, and the volume of noise - the performance stage speakers were loud enough to hear a few blocks away! But we stuck around, saying that we could abandon the tour whenever we wanted. Well, turns out that we were the only ones on the tour - so much for anonymity! Apparently they were not getting as many people on the tours as they expected - we let them know why!
The tour turned out to be much more about culture and food than about the architecture and history that we were expecting, but it was a whole new experience, getting us into some places where we would never go! We got to see some of the 'benevolent society' buildings, which these days are basically community centres, but started out as a place for people from a certain area of China, or certain families to come together to support each other, and sometimes for them to live in. The tall one pictured above is one of the more well-known ones, and very tastefully preserved.
This is the narrowest commercial building in the world - just 5' deep at the ground floor, and 6' deep at the 2nd storey bay windows. If you look straight up above the pedestrian, you'll see a vertical line where the colour changes - that's the edge of the building!
The tour also offered us a chance to sample foods at some of the more popular bakeries, butchers, and restaurants. We got to try steamed buns with BBQ pork inside, sampled some tea at a very formal Chinese tea house (and could buy some at $99 for the large canister), and found our new favorite BBQ pork - that stuff is addictive!!
Marble lions at the entrance to the Chinese Cultural Centre.
A classical garden - built in 1985 by 52 master craftsmen from China, the first garden of its type built outside of China.
It's a beautiful, tranquil place in the middle of a busy part of the city, and a nice end to the afternoon.
2 comments:
Can the classical garden be toured outside of the festival times? It looks beautiful.
Sheri-Lee
Yes it can. There are two parts - the formal garden, where you pay to get in, and the free park (which is where we were). We'll go back for the formal garden sometime when it's not so busy - the tranquility is somewhat broken when the crowds are clamouring for the best photo ops.
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