Seen at the Bay in Metrotown.

Ok, snowed-in Metro Vancouver commuters: you can’t complain about the weather here.

With all the clamour about using cloth bags instead of plastic bags rising in recent months, more and more people are buying the recycled plastic heavy duty supermarket bags from Save-on Foods (and its stepsister PriceSmart Foods), Superstore and even smaller supermarkets like the three-store Tropicana Foods.

With Vancouver City Councillor Tom Stevenson proposing an investigation into plastic bag alternatives, I am personally hoping for a plastic bag ban throughout the GVRD, er, Metro Vancouver area.

I already use a combination of Saveon, Michaels and Telus bags; however, I often forget to bring the bags with me until I am already at the checkout. Thus, I end up with more plastic bags every third time or so when I shop. Unfortunately, while I never shop except for food and a few other essentials, the majority of people shop far more and thus use up far more plastic bags – not to mention the excess packaging and, quite frankly, the useless bric-a-brac that the actual product most often is.

Thus, a plastic bag ban would force all of us to re-think at least one portion of our materialistic existence. It would force people like me, who try but fail, to try harder and not fail so easily. Besides, if it was so easy for generations before us to live in a less disposable society, why can’t we do it? We’re smarter these days, have broader life experiences, and we’re not as naive as our grandparents.

The CBC site already has 42 comments on possible ban, with many that deserve further investigation:

Trevor (Vancouver): …The garbage bag issue needs to be addressed as well. Personally, because I eat out so much I don’t have that many grocery bags and I re-use them all as garbage bags. Sometimes I even run out!

[Though Trevor is in favour of a ban, I wonder, really, who runs out of plastic bags turned into garbage bags. I never seem to have my garbage bag bin under control: in fact, my garbage bags seem to multiply faster than I can create garbage. Is this really a serious issue for other people? Here's another comment that blows this argument out of the water:]

J (Vancouver): [D]on’t use the ‘what will I use for my garbage’ as an excuse to not support this initiative. There are many biodegradable garbage bags on the market. If your local grocery store does not carry some, ask them to. I can stick mine right into the compose bin. Mine cost about $6 for about 100 kitchen bags.

Bunny (Vancouver): While it might be easy to keep a stash of cloth bags in a vehicle, as someone who doesn’t use a car to shop I am not going to be carrying a cloth bag everywhere on the off-chance I pick up some groceries.

[How was it done in the days before widespread plastic bag usage? Did people carry cloth bags with them everywhere on that off-chance? While the current onslaught of bags are bulky, how about those net-like ones? Do we buy too many small items that would fall through the netting? Anyone have experience with these? How about Morsbags made out of old bedsheets - can these not be folded to take up less space?]

JT (UK): Banning is a knee jerk reaction that is only desiring to attract support from the public. Developments have already been made with plastic bags – look at Mountain Equipment Co-op. Their cornstarch bags are strong enough to be reuseable and are also biodegradable.

[Does anyone know if these cornstarch bags are in use anywhere else? But wait, would they still be treated as plastic bags: good for only a few uses? Does that mean we may save turtles from choking on plastic but still use up huge amounts of resources to constantly create these bags?]

Cathy (Kamloops): Remember when nobody wore seat-belts? We wouldn’t think of going out driving without one now. Why not retrain the public to use cloth shopping bags! We are good monkeys – we can be trained!

[Oddly enough, I met a young man last week who still refuses to wear seat-belts. I think that the recycling idea has yet to catch on. What are parents teaching kids these days? As a sometime child educator, I always see kids flagrantly wasting paper, either throwing away an entire sheet for one mistake (in pencil) or not even throwing away paper in a well-marked recycling bin. Can we really be trained?]

Gisele (Burnaby): I think it’s in Sweden that you can bring back your shampoo/detergent/soap bottles and such to be refilled. That’s where we should be as a community. It’s always struck me as weird when I see Bio-degradable, earth friendly detergent in a non-refillable monster plastic jug.. how dumb is that!?!

[Even in environmentally questionable Japan, you can buy your favourite brands of shampoo in plastic pouches instead of bottles. Simply refill the shampoo bottle you already have at home, then throw away the pouch that, while still not ideal, at least uses less plastic. Are there any local brands that you can refill? Ah, the days of glass milk bottles...]

Art Vandelay (Vancouver): More pandering to the hysterical extreme environmentalists. Why is it that the leftists want us to live like third world savages? Should we carry our groceries home in a wooden box on top of our heads? No, because that might kill a tree! Boo Hoo! Let the FREE MARKET decide it plastic bags should be replaced with something else. Why bring the heavy hand of government in to satisfy a vocal minority brainwashed by the false religion of global warming?

[Third world savages? Anyone want to comment on this? On a similar vein, a Jeff of BC wrote "Enough of this green stuff already."]

iain macleod (langley_bcca): [T]otally bogus. The plastic bag issue is just another way for big business to sell another product for almost 100% pure profit, e.g. their new cloth bags.

[Mind you, we got our bags for 99 cents each or for free (Michaels) and we won't be buying any more. However, I think the Morsbag way, chopping up old curtains and bed sheets and sewing them up into bags you hand out for free, is a nice way around this. Plus, it also solves the bowling alone problem if you can form work bees (another old-fashioned idea that would solve modern problems).]

Tom Chattaway (Surrey, BC): People re-use plastic shopping bags; where they have been banned, the sale of plastic garbage bags has risen so there is no net reduction in plastic usage. South Africa, instead of banning plastic shopping bags, passed a law requiring them to be thicker and stronger so they could be re-used. We should consider that, and design trash cans to fit them. These improved bags should sell for a fair price, and not be subject to special taxes.

[What do people here think of these thicker, stronger plastic bags? The supermarket bags we have are made of plastic and are stronger.]

Andrew (Richmond): There are plenty of places, most of them within supermarkets, which take plastic bags for recycling. Start by educating the populace before trying a ridiculous ban or, worse, a money-grabbing “fee” of some sort.

[Does anyone know if any local stores recycle plastic bags? They are not allowed to join the other household recyclables in some areas of Metro Vancouver.]

Neil Williams (Vancouver): Bags serve another purpose for me, its proof I paid! Many times I have stopped in at safeway for say, a carton of milk. If you don’t use the bag, the security assumes your stealing the milk. Same thing when I used a reusable bag, they assume your a thief. Or the time we were going camping, and just wanted all the groceries in the cart loose, so we could load everything directly into the cooler in the car. Even the manager came down for that one.

[Has anyone else had this problem? Or does this guy just look like a shoplifter? I haven't had this problem (I always assumed you just showed the fresh receipt if stopped), but I know other people get nervous about being treated as shoplifters.]

Though I don’t know if agree with Global BC’s chief political reporter Keith Baldrey on other issues, I do agree that Vancouver is not quite the primadonna it used to be anymore. Just like no one is paying any more attention to Paris Hilton, Baldrey pointed out in last week’s Record* editorial (links to article not available):

The fact is the population explosion to the east and to the south of the city has shifted the focus away from Vancouver, with the result that communities such as Surrey, Langley and Richmond are increasingly much more dominant in the political arena.

The CUPE strike in Vancouver was irrelevant to the vast majority of Lower Mainland residents. The dispute did not receive intense media coverage, as even Vancouver-based news outlets are increasingly cognizant of the fact that most of their audience lives outside their city borders.

While I don’t think that the suburbs get quite that much attention in the media just yet (unless it’s negative attention), it’s good to see that the suburbs are becoming more important to merit an editorial telling Vancouver what’s what.

Sure, the suburbs definitely need a better transit system – anyone who snarks out on drivers hasn’t walked (or taken the bus) a mile in their shoes. Three hours to get from Surrey to Burnaby – if you’re not sleeping in a ditch beside the Skytrain station – is ridiculous.

And admittedly, the suburbs need to lose their SUV-soccer-mom-white-bread-and-nothing-but-television culture in order to wrest some of the cosmopolitan rep from Vancouver. But there’s plenty to be wowed about.

Culturally, the suburbs have excellent restaurants, fantastic libraries (the Burnaby library system, for example, is arguably better than the VPL in terms of quantity, especially if you take the Central Branch out of the equation), and some up-and-coming museums with great public programs (I won’t toot my horn, but check out the Delta Museum’s Fraser River Delta
Historical Cruises next June now that you’ve missed the Tri-City’s West Coast Chocolate Festival). With increased interest from their constituents, cultural organizations can improve their services to a Vancouver-level quality, or, hopefully, to a New York-level some day.

Readers from the suburbs, have anything else positive to add about our disdained suburbs?

*Also called the Royal City Record, The Record and the New West Record.

The Maple Ridge Museum started a blog on September 7, with a series of posts about their fair municipality, including the trivia behind the name Haney. Good work!

Our other local museum blogs to check out are:

• The UBC Botanical Garden’s Botany Photo of the Day.
• The West Vancouver Museum Blog
• My former baby: The PMS Museum’s Blog!

Persepolis: Faithful to the comic book both in script and look, delightfully black and white, see it before Disney buys it and f*cks it up. Also, does anyone dip their boobs into cold water for ten minutes a day? Does it work? And where in Vancouver can you buy fresh jasmine blossoms for your bra?

Dead Time (aka Kala): We loved it! Until the last five minutes! Oh, it was wonderful until then: super creepy, decrepit Jakarta exteriors with fantastic interiors, crawling ghosts in loincloths, film noir lighting, burned corpses and a Ring-like curse! Enough of the exclamation marks. A narcoleptic reporter finds himself divorced, jobless, a murder suspect, and a mob kidnappee, all in two days. Then he finds out he’s privy to a secret, which, if shared with others, will kill all but one of those who know the secret. We’ve decided that should we ever buy the DVD, we’ll show it to our friends until the end of the second kidnapping scene. A perfect ending right there – why’d they have to go and ruin it?

Iska’s Journey: Can we get any more depressing? The day after seeing this, I was standing in another VIFF line discussing it with a stranger. “She wasn’t even good-looking, what did those pimps want with her?” The moral turns out to be, it don’t matter whether you’re good-looking or not, human traffickers just see a piece of meat to sell. Two scenes in particular were beautiful: the orphan kids “swimming” and the raindrops on Iska’s face.

Island Etude: Ah, the scenery – Taiwan never lived up to its Formosa name as much as in this movie. When I lived there, we joked that Taiwan’s east coast was the place to down bottles of tequila and eat the worm as the sun rises. Turns out, according to a character in the movie, that on the north part of Taiwan, you can see the sunrise and the sunset. For anyone who cares, the male lead was hot. Oh, and I kinda hoped the graffiti guy was cute behind his mask, too.

La France: The only movie I saw with the director in attendance, the song pieces caught me off-guard. It also had an attempted rape scene, brining this year’s film festival rape count to five. What I got from the movie – I was battling a cold at the time and couldn’t really appreciate the film – is that if you eat mystery mushrooms you pick in the woods and then you collapse, put pond scum on the back of your hand and you’ll get better. What the hell was that?

Out of Time: Admittedly not for everyone, but hey, the loud-talking girls three seats in front of me can lick the corn kernels out of their asses. One day, you’ll be old, you dumb bags, and you’ll see that you’ll need the Clapper too. I liked Out of Time. On the surface, the often-depressing story of four long-established shops dying slowly in Vienna’s consumerism shows five very dedicated small business owners struggling as they try to keep their butcher shop, button shop, apothecary and leather repair shop afloat. It’s cringe-worthy to watch these poor people looking out at passersby wishing them to come into their stores; it’s even worse when the loveable drugstore owner looks through the shelves of Spanish leather and wonders if he should stop ordering that, or when he wonders why his clients aren’t picking up their orders (the customers are older than him). Ultimately optimistic (and a good lesson for those of squandering our youth on foolish decisions), the film’s message can’t help but strike a chord with environmentalism. Repairing coats and luggage for added years of use; using a basin of water to shave instead of letting the faucet run; the message only falters with the butcher’s admonishment to a young mother to feed her baby sausages as soon as possible so the kid wouldn’t end up a vegetarian.

During the last week, I’ve built up quite a repertoire of interesting blog posts and new links from Vancouver’s bloggers. Time to close a few tabs on my laptop, so without further ado, have a look at these:

• David of Loud Murmurs recently became an “online advocate for an improved transit system in Vancouver” in a recent article for the Westender. Read about the story behind the quotes here.
• Our own Miss 604 wrote that the Surrey Reptile Refuge, open since 1992, is now closed due to lack of funding. How sad that another organization that helps unwanted pets is in limbo! Earlier this year, the Greyhaven Exotic Bird Sanctuary had to leave its home and, though open, needs to find a new location. Hopefully the Surrey Reptile Refuge will find some way to open again soon.
• Also on Miss 604, guest blogger Raul of the Random Thoughts of a Student of the Environment blog (aka Hummingbird 604) rounds up Vancouver’s Mexican restaurants. Just like sushi in Vancouver – where it’s hard to find anything truly good and not frozen among all the fake, awful sushi places in Vancouver (I lived in Japan so I can be snobbish) – good Mexican food is quite rare. There’s even a card game called The Nacho Incident about Canada’s lack of good Mexican food. From the game’s description: “As Canadians have long suspected, Mounties have been arresting anyone caught with quality Mexican food since the 1970s.”
• Malta-transplant Darren Barefoot blogged about strangers reading your supposedly anonymous blog using From the Grey Box as an example. This made me into an additional stranger reading the now less-anonymous blog too. Written about items found in a local apartment building’s giveaway box, the writer seems to be jolly and optimistic making the posts fun to read. Oh, and enthusiastic about the items. Yay for less cynicism in the world!
• Finally, Monique of So Misguided links to another Vancouver blogger, this time a local perfumer who writes about her trade. Ayala Sender writes SmellyBlog about her company Ayala Moriel Parfums. Lately it seems to be updated about once or twice a week, which is perfect as some of the posts tend to be on the long side.

Enjoy reading!

(Above photo is of a Mexican restaurant, though not in Vancouver or even Metro Vancouver. It’s in Metro Vancouver’s honourary international suburb, Bellingham. Lorenzo’s is near the Bellis Fair Mall, good enough to make the drive, and represents the good Mexican food that rarely makes it over the border.)

Reminded by Oana of ianandoana.com (and spurred on by the Georgia Strait’s mention of the Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days), I bought my Vancouver International Film Festival tickets tonight.

4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days is one of the “must-see” films – finally! A Romanian film is the must-see film! A Palme d’Or winner, the films looks at a frantic girl trying to get an illegal abortion in the waning days of the communist regime. It’s supposed to be “harrowing” (according to the Herald Tribune), but a story that happened to a lot of Romanian women (and still happens in places where abortion is outlawed).

Also recommended is the cartoon version of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis, itself a Cannes winner. If you haven’t read the book, Vancouver’s civic strike is no excuse. Use your Vancouver Public Library card to take it out from any other municipality’s library. Heck, take the Skytrain to the Metrotown branch of the Burnaby Public LIbrary. The comic tells the story of Satrapi’s childhood in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution.

I also guessed and bought tickets for five other potential goodies:

• Dead Time: an Indonesian “ghost story with a political subtext.” Really, I bought tickets for it because an Indonesian friend and fellow horror film buff told me how creepy Indonesian horror films can get.
• Iska’s Journey: a Hungarian film about Romanian street children. It’s set in a Carpathian town, so the scenery will probably make me nostalgic. Even if it is about street kids.
• Island Etude: a Taiwanese film about a young man who cycles around the island, this is definitely a movie I am seeing for nostalgia’s sake. I’ve hitchhiked down and back up Taiwan’s east coast, drove a scooter halfway down and painfully back, and took various buses and trains around the beautiful island. This movie promises that, plus the quirky characters I too probably ran into. The movie also seems to have spawned an inordinate amount of interest in cycling around Taiwan, always very dangerous proposition.

La France: This one is something to fill my afternoon after a morning of volunteering for VIFF. A French woman dresses up like a man to look for her husband during WWI.

• My Winnipeg: Another one to fill up an afternoon after volunteering, this one is a surreal nostalgic look at Winnipeg. I have never been to Winnipeg and, hence, have no nostalgia for Winnipeg. But if I ever get the drive to make my surreal nostalgic film about Taiwan, I want to get some ideas.

As I sit here baking, I am reminded of a post by Travis of Unvarnished:

Seriously, Vancouver. Come ON. You’re a smart city. You’re good looking. You’ve got so much going for you, but you’re throwing it all away with this absolutely disgusting weather.
…..
I can understand, you’re Vancouver, you’ve got this “rainy” rep to protect, but OK, we get it, fine, you’re so BADASS and DAMP.

Ha! Go and read the whole post while you sip lemonade and mist-spray yourself with bottled tap water, Vancouverites.

It’s supposed to get back to normal on Sunday.

Two weeks ago, we went to see chefs Annie and Dolly Watts (above) of Davie Street’s now-closed Lileget Feast House hosting an indigenous cooking class in the Granville Island Public Market. Held twice a month, the cooking shows take place after the market closes in the Edible BC store.

Up to sixteen students watch the makeshift class in the store’s small space, then sit down at a table to sample the five or so courses with a BC wine that complements each dish. We also got a ten-percent discount during the after-hours shopping as well as a black Edible BC tote bag and, for this class only, an autographed copy of the Watts mother and daughter team’s new cookbook, Where People Feast.

The three-hour course also left plenty of time for the participants to meet one another over the meal. We mostly chatted with Monique of Vancouver blog So Misguided, a speed reader and a nice extrovert. We also enjoyed meeting the friendly Edible BC staff, including co-owner Eric Pateman.

The menu was:

• Wildman Salad with fresh blackberries and poppy seed dressing and a glass of Nk’Mip 2005 Pinot Blanc: my companion Matt of Onomatopoeia complained that the dressing used up too many pans and that the blackberries’ grit bits bothered his teeth. All the wines of the evening came from the Okanagn’s aboriginal-owned Nk’Mip Cellars.
• Stuffed Duck Roll with local cranberries, roasted yam and feta salad and a glass of Nk’Mip 2005 Riesling: rather difficult to make and an overnight process, this duck dish, however, would make a great Thanksgiving or Christmas dish.
• Hagul Jam, or Clearly Salmon Soup, (see photo below) with a glass of Nk’Mip 2005 Chardonnay: this clear salmon soup, until the advent of metal cooking pots, was made in wooden boxes into which cooks dropped burning stones. In the Gitk’san language, Dolly explained, “Hagul Jam” means “Slow Boil.”
• Pacific Macaroni and Cheese with fresh Dungeness crab and bannock crumbs and another glass of Nk’Mip 2005 Qwam Qwmt Chardonnay: hardly indigenous as the name implies, but who’s holding Germans to only eating sauerkraut or the English to their boiled flaccid vegetables? Let the people experiment. Rather delicious, I would have called this something snobbier, like Rigatoni alla bannock. One of my fellow diners picked out every single pea; usually I too am picky and shun celery. But I found that the celery did what it’s supposed to do for once and enhanced the flavour without bullying its way to centre stage.
• Yel’iss or Sopalali Mousse with Nk’Mip 2005 Riesling Icewine: we’ve always loved sopalali mousse, in fact, this cooking course was partly an excuse to find a soapberry supplier. Unfortunately, it’s an acquired taste for most white people. One lady vociferously refused to touch her glass. Once we convinced her that she could mix it with the blackberry syrup at the bottom of her glass for a sweeter taste, she did finish off her glass. I’m a failed wine drinker, yet I overly appreciated the ice wine, downing my companion’s glass in addition to my own.

All that was missing from the feast was oolichan oil, though does make an appearance in Watts cookbook, along with another favourite of mine, pine tree tea.

We’ve decided to attend more of these yummy cooking shows when we get the chance. Chef Don Letendre of Opus Hotel’s Elixer is almost sold out on October 9 and Vikram Vij’s class on November 13 is sold out, but there are many other classes available.