![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Apr. 5th, 2015 12:01 pmThe White Spot on West 13th and Cambie by City Hall has closed down! It was always, ALWAYS busy. There's a big sign up saying rezoning application for an 8 storey building with 133 residential units. Depending on whether White Spot owned the building or not, they either made a killing selling the restaurant building and parking lot to developers, or whoever owned the building and leased it to the restaurant has made a killing selling it to developers.
DAMN Bashar Al-Assad and Islamic State. I was in a shawarma place downtown the other day picking up a yummy falafel plate and there were these beautiful framed posters on the wall of souks and mosques and desert scenery. I asked the man behind the counter, who turned out to be the owner, where the pictures were from, and he looked upset and said, "Syria". And then gave me an impassioned speech about what a beautiful place Syria is, and how his children (who were born here in Canada) look at the images of devastation on the TV news and think that's the country they come from, but he and his wife know the truth. The poor guy probably still has family back there.
Anyway, after I talked to him I went looking on the intarwebz for pictures of Syria's architecture before the war and found this with lovely "before" pictures and very sad "after" pictures. One place where you'll find only "before" pictures is the Four Seasons Hotels website, as they have a hotel in downtown Damascus. Which presumably remains unbombed, or they'd have taken down the page, one assumes. It's a little creepy, actually, talking to that man and then looking at the relentlessly cheery hotel page and learning that you can have spa treatments at the Four Seasons Damascus. But if it's open, it's providing employment, I presume.
Stolen Child" by Loreena McKennitt gives me the creeps. Well, technically it's by William Butler Yeats, but McKennitt set it to music. Time to listen to something else, methinks.
In other news, YMW is speaking to me again, now that the threat of a vet visit has receded.
DAMN Bashar Al-Assad and Islamic State. I was in a shawarma place downtown the other day picking up a yummy falafel plate and there were these beautiful framed posters on the wall of souks and mosques and desert scenery. I asked the man behind the counter, who turned out to be the owner, where the pictures were from, and he looked upset and said, "Syria". And then gave me an impassioned speech about what a beautiful place Syria is, and how his children (who were born here in Canada) look at the images of devastation on the TV news and think that's the country they come from, but he and his wife know the truth. The poor guy probably still has family back there.
Anyway, after I talked to him I went looking on the intarwebz for pictures of Syria's architecture before the war and found this with lovely "before" pictures and very sad "after" pictures. One place where you'll find only "before" pictures is the Four Seasons Hotels website, as they have a hotel in downtown Damascus. Which presumably remains unbombed, or they'd have taken down the page, one assumes. It's a little creepy, actually, talking to that man and then looking at the relentlessly cheery hotel page and learning that you can have spa treatments at the Four Seasons Damascus. But if it's open, it's providing employment, I presume.
Stolen Child" by Loreena McKennitt gives me the creeps. Well, technically it's by William Butler Yeats, but McKennitt set it to music. Time to listen to something else, methinks.
In other news, YMW is speaking to me again, now that the threat of a vet visit has receded.
