20130902 TAIWANfest in Downtown Vancouver

Today was the big day - A's performance with Tzu Chi, her Chinese school where she learns Mandarin Chinese with her birthday twin, Jasmine.  A had been going to a couple of practices, watching the performance on video, and listening to the music very often for the last few couple of weeks.

We showed up about 10 minutes late for her 11am meetup in front of the Art Gallery.  She got right into the pre-performance practice and was given a head dress made of fake leaves and pipe cleaners.  We waited about 1 hour for the show to start and see her 7 minute performance.  She and Jasmine did great and they were right in front and looked like they knew what they were doing.  However, A had not really done as much practicing as we would have liked, but it really looked good up on stage.  She made us proud.

R did not have as good a time.  His normal 2 hour nap lasted only about 20 minutes before he got woken up by all of the noise and excitement of downtown Vancouver.

After the show, we wanted to get something to eat with A's grandparents and Kathy.  We tried to go to the Imperial Restaurant as Lynn said that the Victoria Restaurant at the Hyatt was closed.  In fact, it may have been the reverse.  We ended up at the Bellagio Restaurant which seemed busy.  But the service was terrible and the food was mediocre and expensive.  A memorable moment was when R and his grandmother walked into a plate glass at the patio.  Admittedly, the glass was hard to see with all of the scenery at the Waterfront/Convention Centre/cruise ship.  No one was hurt, but I am pretty sure R was bumped into the glass.  I was also embarrassed when A's grandmother bought some ice cream from an ice cream parlour and dropped it off right in front of A in the restaurant.

We walked a bit around Canada Place with the kids, grandmother, and Kathy.  There was lots of people around and the Disney Wonder cruise ship docked at Canada Place.

After that, grandparents and Kathy went home.  And we walked back to Pacific Center where we parked.  We tried to do some shopping but this mall was not kid friendly and there was a lot of renovations since I had last been there so I was quite unfamiliar with the mall now.  We walked outside of the mall to get our bearings and noticed that the TAIWANfest was much larger than I thought.  We walked about 4 blocks of the festival but I did not find it all too interesting.  But I did have a bad experience with one vendor booth giving out paper cutout dragon boats.  I will post my nasty email to them later.