Coffee Art in Vancouver

Coffee Art
Original photo by Veerle Pieters

Today Heather took the day off and we headed to downtown Vancouver. We had some seriously amazing coffee.

Caffe Artigiano.

New favourite.
Goodness. So yum. So rich. And all done with froth/crema art. Gorgeous AND the best coffee I've ever had, I think.

And it was a beautiful day in Vancouver, after it had promised to probably rain. Yay, thank you for not raining.

That said, I'm looking at the weather forecast for tomorrow and it's not looking great.

However, we did get to the art gallery today where we saw a really interesting exhibit by Andrea Zittel called Critical Space.

She's originally from California and got a call to do some sort of stint at an artist studio thing (yes, I know that's exact correct technical term) in Berlin. Turns out it was in a basement. So she did an experiment. She blocked out all references to time and lived there for a week to see what would happen. A time-indexed surveilance camera took footage which she later reviewed to create a colour-coded hour-by-hour artistic room-sized spreadsheet representation of her time-without-time.

What she discovered was that she was so afraid of not working enough that she worked too much. She found that indicators of time (clocks, the sun, etc) were actually preventing her from working more. Not in fact chaining her to her work at all.

Take a look at her website; she's done many other interesting explorations of time and space and how we live. She made her own felted clothing to wear to her job at a gallery... but she only had money to make one item every six months. So she wore the same "smock" for six months until she had money to make another uniform.

Six months in the same clothes. A jail sentance? Or freeing?

We also caught the gallery talk on the exhibit, where I learned quite a bit more than I had by just reading through the posted notes, collection of felt smocks and series of space-saving apartments-in-a-box. She seems a real cross-over between the disciplines of science, innovation and art. What, really, is the difference?

We had a nice lunch on the patio of the art gallery (including some pretty outstanding strawberry rhubarb pie). I actually remembered to take a photo, except I did forget to bring my camera cable with me so I can't actually upload them at the moment. Boo!

We did a little shopping. Stopped in at the Rocky Mountain Chocolate company and tried some dark chocolate espresso bomb... Oi. Who invented that? They were trying to kill me.

We went to Starbucks, of course. I got my london fog and read through parts of Lonely Planet Vancouver and decided on my course of action for my day alone tomorrow. Then it was home for some fantastic eggplant pizza. I really enjoyed my day with Heather. I don't get to spend enough time with her.

Now off to bed I go excited about what tomorrow holds in store!