The Capital

I had this idea to take my mom on a daytrip to Victoria for her birthday. What I didn’t account for, was the travel time plus how early things closed there. We took the noon ferry, and was able to get lunch before everything started to shutter for the day.

Just a note to self in the future: The ferry is 1h45m, the express bus to town is ~45m, the bus back to the ferry terminal is 1h10m. On alternate days, there is no 8pm ferry. In total, we were gone 12 hours, and a good 6 hours were spent in transit. Day trip? Doable, but we should have gotten on an earlier boat.

Here’s a caveat about hanging out with my mom: She claims to have no opinions, but if I just went ahead and picked something she doesn’t like, she’ll be visibly displeased.

For lunch, I picked a bland restaurant that I knew was the most inoffensive choice, as she is not a big fan of… flavor. We had croissan’wiches and coffee downtown at The Dutch Bakery & Diner — a cute little place with classic diner vibes and mediocre everything. The food was OK. The service was OK, the stained glass light panels were S tier.

By the time we got into an Evo to make the 8 minute drive to where there was a garden tea house, we were too late. The place closed at 3pm, and we were unable to get afternoon tea and desserts. The good news was the garden grounds remained open, and we took a long walk around.

I have been slightly obsessed with the idea of gardens lately, but didn’t personally want to garden with real soil and plants. Rather, setting up this site with the skeleton and ethos of a digital garden got me interested in the layout of real life ones. I was pleased to find a sunken rose garden, as was mom when I noticed that she disappeared with her phone to take numerous photos of the place.

There’s something a bit abandoned about this place. It wasn’t untended to, yet it wasn’t in perfect, lush shape. It had just the right amount of antiquated wildness that made it feel like it was from another time and place. I suppose this was the look and feel I wanted for my digital garden — not polished, but robust nonetheless with a touch of otherworldliness.

Also, the weird disgruntled cat or perhaps angry hyena statue added to the mystique.

When I took the above photo, Solen came by to take a peek. He said something to the effect of me wielding that camera = good aesthetics. I think maybe, when I’m inspired not by work but by life, I see things in a pretty, symmetrical way.

This probably applies to the whole garden thing I’ve been thinking about a lot. It’s all a balance of colors, shapes, and textures and how they interact with each other.

Needless to say, I was pretty happy about that statement. Aesthetics is kind of my thing.

If there’s one thing my mom loves, it’s animals. As we descended the hill of a garden that’s way bigger than any of us anticipated, we spied a deer chomping away at the shrubbery. Not long after, we saw an ominous shape padding towards us. At first I thought it was a raccoon, but the tail immediately flicked skyward when it heard us beckoning it over revealed it to be a massive unit of a cat.

His name was DJ Joey, and I suppose this was his garden. He had half a shaved butt with a scab healing, and he was very down to have neck scratches and ample pets. Further down the path, we came to an opening where there were yet more deer just grazing the day away.

Even though the island is not actually that far from the main land, the different vegetation and docile wild animals made everything there seem like some kind of quaint European storybook.

Everything was cute. It was so fucking stupid cute. I loved and hated how cute it all was. Hated it mainly because I knew we didn’t have enough time to spend there as I initially wanted. Loved it because I knew I could just come back soon.

The terrain of this garden was quite different to what we’re used to seeing in Vancouver. It was much more dramatic with bulging rocks protruding from the ground, dried tall grass inlaid with wildflowers, knobby trees that were bent and twisted as if they ached from boneitis. Solen and I both said, “Wuthering Heights,” at the same time while walking. Neither of us have ever seen the moors with our own eyes, yet we just knew this garden had the right vibes.

I said that if we ever wanted to make a version of Wuthering Heights on a budget, this would be the perfect location.

I’m not even going to try and explain how obsessed Solen is with the bit of capital cities. So of course, we had to take a photo of him in front of the parliament building festooned with the biggest Canadian flag I have ever seen.

My mom didn’t seem to understand the joke at all.

I wish we had more time, but all in all, it wasn’t a wasted trip. Mom had fun, and that’s basically the primary objective I had. I suppose my expectations were slightly higher in terms of how many activities we would do there, including going to Sidney which we had to can because we happened to go on a day where there was no 8pm ferry. The place itself was no disappointment, only my lack of understanding of spacetime was.

And so, even as our trip came to an end, I managed to get some pretty fire photos at the terminal and on the ferry itself. My favorite of the entire day was man-Ophelia laying peacefully outside the window as we sailed to the setting sun.

Aesthetic af.