Canada Day... don't eat the cookies!

July 1st is Canada Day! It's Canadian Independence Day, my replacement for the American July 4th, however no one I talked to here knows what actually happened on July 1st. Who cares anyways; it's a break from work! Before I realized that it was a holiday (I am still learning how to be a true Canadian), I volunteered at a science conference in downtown Vancouver. It turned out to be great though! It was my third day of volunteering and all I did on July 1st was show up and sit through two hours of speakers. The best part was that they fed us all Canadian flag cake. Sweet!

Afterwards, I met up with the Mexicans and we walked around downtown where there were a lot of people celebrating. We stumbled across something that was a little different than the Provo I am used to. Yup, it was a protest against drug prohibition. I suppose that the way you protest is by selling and consuming as much marijuana as possible in big groups outside the art museum, because that is what this was. I wonder if it works... Either way, it looked just like the pictures I've seen of Woodstock. It was marijuana being sold in all of its forms, from seed to hash to brownies. As exciting as this was, I didn't stay for long enough to get really good pictures.



(don't eat these cookies... bad!)

That night we watched the fireworks over the bay from Jericho beach. They weren't terribly close, but the overall view of the city, mountains, and water was better than any firework show I have seen in the states (excluding D.C. from the Capitol terrace).