{Snapshots of Saturday} - Vaisakhi Parade

It's been a great long weekend so far and thankfully the rain held off today for the Vaisakhi Parade that celebrates the birth of Sikhism. Of course, this area has a large Sikh community and they were out in full force for this celebration today! One guy that we were talking to said that there would probably be over 100,000 people out today for the Surrey parade and more than that again downtown for another parade.

It was an amazing celebration of religion and culture. There were people offering you unbelievable food every time you turned around. The very first plate I got I enjoyed the most and it was a chickpea curry and a flatbread to go with it. Delicious! The colours were amazing and orange seems to be the predominant colour though I'm honestly not sure of the reason. At one point during the parade someone came around with orange pieces of fabric and asked us to cover out heads and I think it was because of the religious aspect of the parade. The sights and sounds were fabulous!

At one point someone came up with a TV camera from the multicultural station to interview me. They just asked what we thought about the parade and how important it was for cultures to celebrate together. They asked if I thought the Indo-Canadian community participated enough in other types of celebrations as well. I think I said "It's great" about 4 times during the short interview, but it really was! A few people also filmed the boys, particularly Kyle, in the stroller watching the parade. It was great to be able to share in a different type of cultural celebration and people were very friendly stopping to explain things to us periodically and to give us food!



On our way home, I was really happy when George asked if I wanted to stop and get my new cell phone! We have been talking about it for a while and just haven't done it. We managed to get that in this afternoon ad I stopped for my Vanilla Latte at the Starbucks that was next door to the cell place!

The only thing I didn't get in today was a trip to the scrapbook store. I had a coupon and they have a scratch sale on today. Oh well, not the end of the world as I don't really need anything anyway.

We've got the boys sleeping for a bit and I'm making candied sweet potatoes for dinner at Tracy and Brian's tonight with mum and dad. We're making things easy and just getting a couple of bbq chickens and doing the extras. No turkey and that's fine by me! Too much work! Who am I kidding, we'll be doing turkey on Monday with George's family anyway! Better go do my sweet potatoes!

Colleen