Celebration of Light 2011 (China)

Vancouver hosts an international fireworks festival every year, where representing countries put on a competition of sorts in English Bay on the west side of the city. 

Vancouver Celebration of Light

For 2011, there were three nights planned, hosted by China, Spain and Canada.  We decided to go into the city on July 30th for the experience...  Driving into the city was strongly discouraged, so took the bus from the house, to the local Skytrain station, and took the train into the city.   Owen and Molly were so excited to ride on the train!

 
We had a nice afternoon walking around Canada place and Gastown.  Here's Owen on the pier watching some seaplanes take off in the water..

There is a Steamclock in Gastown, which is one a the few functioning steamclocks in the world.  Owen was just enamored by this clock and the mechanism.

We were fortunate to be walking by at the hour, so here's a video of the chimes....

After this, we took a bus across town, which ended up stopping service about a 1/2 mile from the bay as there were so many people starting to collect in the area and they had several blocks in the city closed to all taffic.  This is when Allison and I started to wonder if it was a smart idea to be down here with the kids....?  We pressed on and made it to the beach just before 7 and there was still over 2 hours to go until it was dark.   We found one of the last open spots in the grass and sat for a while taking in the scenes....

Here's a few fun shots of Molly dancing for us.... shake a little to the left...

And a little to the right....

And then giggle like crazy...

It was getting to be after 7:30, which is not too far away from bedtime, so we had to play this carefully or risk major meltdowns...  The quantity of people coming into the area at this point was increasing substantially, so we decided to start walking back toward the busline and get something to eat for dinner.  Thankfully we found a great little pizza shop right off Davie street and enjoyed a quick bite.  Owen was so sad to have missed the fireworks.....

While we were sitting there having dinner, there was a nonstop wall of people walking toward the beach.  Later we found out that this event was attended by over 250,000 !!

One of the pre-show highlights was an airshow put on by Pete McLeod in his Red Bull Aerobatic plane.  Unfortuntately, we missed this by about a half-hour, but we heard the plane. 

After getting some food, we continued to walk out of the bay area to where we could catch a bus again and re-trace our steps back across town, ride the skytrain back to Coquitlam and catch the bus home.  What a great experience and good time we had!