Vic 2 Van, part 4 - Victoria a Go-go

[jamesq]

My first day in Victoria was taking care of two items of vital business: Checking onto the hotel and fetching my race kit.

The hotel, as I alluded to earlier was better then I expected. Let me explain why I thought it would be crappy.

There are two things going on in Victoria this weekend. The first is the continued Titanic exhibit at RBCM. The second was the Royal Victorian Marathon. The race typically attracts just shy of 10K people - a lot of them from out of town. This occurred to me about three weeks ago when I realized I had not yet gotten a hotel room.

Tourism Victoria had a deal for the Titanic exhibit - hotel room and tickets at a variety of hotels. There were four tiers of hotels and they ranged in price from "steerage" to "Gilded Age Dandy". I checked all of the hotels. There were only two that had a room available on Friday and Saturday nights. One was a B&B (and being a man, I have a natural aversion to B&Bs) the other was the Embassy Inn. Which is a block from the museum and right at the starting line for the race.

It seemed perfect, yet it was among the cheapest of the hotels, and it actually had a room available. This set my paranoia off. Clearly, (my paranoia reasoned) I must not have complete information - there's something I don't know that other people do know and it's causing them to avoid this hotel. What's wrong with it.

Now my hotel room needs are light. Give me a quiet comfortable bed and I'll ignore a lot.

So I check into the hotel and find it to be clean, quiet and well managed (I'm going to say manyra is responsible for this). My vague fears wear unfounded. My guess is that I caught the reservation system at a good time (i.e. within a few minutes of someone else canceling their reservation).

So the room was good and ideally located. They are now my go to hotel in Victoria.

Next up, fetching my race kit. This was largely uneventful, though I am happy to report that I got a really good long-sleeved running shirt.

By this time it was getting to be around supper. I wandered up to Yates street to find my favorite Victoria restaurant - Syn. They had changed their name to Platinum Bar and Grill. I sat down and was a little alarmed to find that the menu had changed along with the name - and not for the better. I ordered some food and settled in to a good book (Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West - considerably different from the play). My food arrived and it was bland and unexciting. Looking around, the place now had about half the clientele that it had previously. No surprise there - they took a really really good restaurant and turned it into a mediocre one. I predict it will be changing again soon. Hopefully it will return to it's former stature, though it may become one of those revolving-door locations that host a different restaurant every year or so, making money for contractors and tradesmen, but not so much for restauranteurs.

During my travels I encountered one of those snippets of conversation that is both TMI and also vaguely intriging. "I'm bleeding like a stuck pig and it feels like my vagina is strangling my uterus, yet here I am still at work" said the lady waiting at the horse-drawn carriage stand to her unseen friend on the other end of the phone.

I was briefly tempted to go buy her chocolate, but decided that trusting to the forgiving nature of strangers with severe cramping was not wise.

Now it was time to play. I wanted to see a play (one of my mission101 goals is to see plays in five different cities. I've managed Calgary and London, and I figured I'd try Victoria). The play I saw was The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie and it was about a teacher at a girls' school in Edinburgh and the lives she fucks up.

I'm a little put out that they weren't playing ther second play of the season, Scotland Road, because it has a Titanic theme. I'm a little bewildered too, it would have made a lot more sense to have this play during Victoria's big Titanic fest.

The play was kind of meh, but the performances were very good. At no time did I think any of the actors gave a false note. They all performed with Scots accents that were neither too thick too understand, but definable enough to seem Scots (and not somewhere-kinda-sorta-UK-ish). Hannah Boutilier in particular gave an awesome performance that indicated a huge emotional range. In a few years, when she's hit it big, I want everyone on my friends list to remember where they heard of her first.

The other thing I noticed is that actual school girls in Catholic school girl uniforms are not erotic in the slightest. I suppose I should be happy with that observation as the alternative would be alarming. Women in Catholic school girl uniforms in the other hand, hot hot hot!

Then it was off to bed.

Saturday was, of course, Titanic.

I skipped breakfast and wandered over to RBCM. Already there was a huge lineup for tickets. But I already had my tickets, courtesy of Tourism Victoria and the hotel!

When you enter one of these Titanic exhibits, they hand you a "boarding pass" with the name of an actual person onboard Titanic. My guy was Ernst Persson, a 3rd class passenger from Sweden. "ugh", I thought, "my guy is dead again." Last time I did one of these things (In Seattle a few years ago), I got one of the stokers, who did indeed die. Odds were good that Mr. Persson wouldn't survive either, being a male from steerage.

Just so you know, the crew suffered the highest percentage of fatalities. Conversely, every second-class female survived. First-class females would have been equally safe, except two of them went down with the ship. Ida Strauss would not leave her husband. Bess Allison would not leave the ship without her missing child (which was taken by her maid and survived, unlike mom, dad and sibling).

The history presented was good and accurate. The artifacts were noteworthy and nice to look at. In particular, they found the case of an importer containing samples of perfumes. You could actually still smell the faint scent of the fragrances, despite the case sitting on the bottom of the north Atlantic for ninety-odd years.

Duxfordgirl and evilscientist went to this exhibit a few weeks ago (I was hoping to see it with Chantelle, since she's the only other Titanic geek I know). She was not terribly impressed by it, so my hopes were low. I was pleasantly surprised. The amount of artifacts was about equivalent to the Seattle show. It improved on the Seattle show in two ways. First, every "room" of the exhibit had a volunteer showing off some aspect of the ship or answering questions (and if I lived in Victoria, I'd have so volunteered for this). They were all well-informed and happy to share.

Next, there were actors roaming the exhibit. When I was there the two actors were playing Captain Smith and Molly Brown. Molly Brown in particular had a great little piece of theatre that told a lot about her story as it intersected with the sinking. She was also spot on in appearance and mannerisms.

I didn't see if Captain Smith had a show. I suspect he did as I heard clapping from one of the other exhibit rooms.

My guy Ernst? Survived by swimming to collapsable B. His female companions? Died. So much for my guesses.

I bought some Titanic junk (a tee and a poster), grabbed a ticket to the IMAX show Titanica and ran off to grab some lunch. When I returned, I managed to get the best seat in the house for Titanica. For those of you who don't know, when you go to see anything in an IMAX theatre, you want the center seat in the rearmost (highest) row. It's where they aim the speakers and you look straight at the center of the screen. Everyone else in the theatre was dumb and tried hugging the edges for some reason (even thought he staff was telling them not to).

Good show, following the exploits of the Keldysh on its first expedition to Titanic. Ironically, there are now explorers who have spent more time on Titanic at the bottom of the ocean, then the people and crew who actually sailed on her.

It was now four in the afternoon and I still had some time to kill before supper and bedtime. So I wandered over to the theatre and caught a showing of The Kingdom.

The Kingdon is really good. Maybe not quite great, but still well worth your time. This movie was a drama, a thriller a police procedural and action-adventure. And it does them all well. The actors were all very good (ranging from Oscar winners to some solid journeyman actors, I'd have been surprised if they weren't).

Most surprisingly was the fact that none of the characters, including the terrorists, were two-dimensional. All were fully realized. Even if you didn't know what their hopes and dreams were, you knew that they had them.

Go see it.

After that I went out for supper (having some mediocre sushi this time. Fuck) then returned to the hotel room for an early night in.

I managed to get a good night sleep and woke up with plenty of time to make the race (especially given that the race started beside the hotel's parking lot). The rain ended just prior to the race. And it stayed away until after I finished. The race was good (and I describe it a bit better here) and I'm glad I did it. I might even do it again sometime. A full marathon is not in the cards though - that's just a little too foolish, even for me.

Now here I am, on the ferry to the Vancouver, where I will visit my friends and go to restaurants with decent food.

In the meantime, I'll sit here and type. And watch all the women on the ferry who were obviously in the same race as me. They all have nice legs and they're limping.