Victoria, Full of Queens, and Looking Quite Marvelous

We had a lovely time in Victoria. The Helms Inn down at the foot of Beacon Hill Park, just near the harbor, lived up to its ranking on Booking.com. The king size bed was large and quite comfortable.

To my delight, they even had TCM in the hotel. When we flicked on the tube, My Fair Lady was showing. It was almost at the end.

Red had never seen it, so I explained some of the plot and characters to her. "It was the Academy Award winner from the year I was born," I told her.

Then afterwards, by a most wonderful coincidence, Robert Osborne introduced a featured screening of a Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy movie---Rose-Marie (1936), which is in fact the defining MacDonald-Eddy "Northern genre" flick. It is the one in which MacDonald is a Montreal opera singer out in the Canadian wild, and Eddy is the Mountie out to get his man. They meet and fall in love.

This is the one in which they sing The Indian Love Call to each other. I had been waiting to see this movie for years. We could not have asked for a better welcoming to Canada.

As it happened, the celebration of Pride, which we had encountered already in Portland and Seattle over the last month, rolled into Victoria right with us. At our lunch out in quaint Oak Bay, our popular hip cafe featured a "Pride Benny" special (Benny, we learned, is Canadian for Eggs Benedict, which is a popular brunch item at least in BC). The toppings for the Pride Benny special were listed as "Leeks Gouda Bacon Thyme," with the first letter of each ingredient in bold type in the menu.

After brunch we drove over to the beautiful modern campus of the University of Victoria ("UVic," as it is known locally) and went into the gorgeous campus bookstore to browse after an hour or two.

Inside on the bookstore, they were showing the World Cup match between Costa Rica and the Netherlands on big screen televisions. I sat down in the comfortable chairs and watched the match until its end, rooting for Costa Rica. The CBC television commentary of match was quite different from Univision.

I decided to pull for the Costa Rican side.

"Go North America!," I said, with polite assertion, raising a loose fist in a gentle non-threatening way, no higher than the height of my chin.

One of the coolest things about going to university book stores is you can see all the books that are published by their own university press.  It can give one an idea of what the research is like there.

Not surprisingly, the store was also resplendent with Pride-related books standing on a large display table---how to be gay, how to love a woman (for women), how to raise a transgender child, and such. I perused as many as possible to get the substance of their themes.

I also wandered into the spirituality section,  a single shelf along one aisle. A good portion of the books there appeared to be by atheists. Eastern religions were well represented ---Taoism, Buddhist in the middle shelves, as was Islam. A few books on Judaism sat on the topmost shelf at eye level. The sole Bibles were a few generic paperback copies of the Revised King James version on the bottom shelf, somewhat hard to notice unless one crouched all the way down. Next to them, Christianity was represented by a slender volume about Jesus authored by Deepak Chopra.

By contrast, the women's studies sections was a nice solid aisle. I loved pouring over the titles and reading the blurbs. I spent most of my time there reading from Brazen Femme, which purported to " a manifesto of the unrepentant bitch." The cover showed the semi-clad torso of a young woman sitting on a stool, her legs apart, and her band cradling a pocket knife jammed into the stool in front of her crotch. I found many of the essays quite tantalizing, and almost purchased the book, but I had already spent my self-imposed book-buying budget while we had been in the San Juans.

That evening there were music events along the harbor in honor of Pride. We took a water taxi ride up towards the music pavilion, right near our hotel.

The parade itself was the next morning. It beautiful sunny day, perfect for such an even.. The route was right along Government Street, along the waterfront and up to the foot of the provincial Legislative Assembly, where along the street, the dark monument to city's namesake stands with crown and scepter, greeting all visitors who come by land and water.

Right there by the waterfront is the opulent grand Empress Hotel. Its tall outline has been the crown of the waterfront skyline for a century. It is owned by the Fairmont chain, the same as the hotel by that name on Nob Hill in San Francisco, where Red and I recently were fortunate enough to have dinner.

Before we had even arrived in Victoria, Red discovered that the Empress serves an Afternoon Victorian Tea. She very much wanted to go, so she booked reservations for us online.

It was marvelous. As we arrived, we walked up the walkway of the the lush lawn, which was resplendent with rainbow flags leftover from the Pride parade. Inside the tea room was like something out of My Fair Lady. The tea---we both got their special Empress house blend---was indeed delicious.

The serving tray had three plates stacked with goodies, both savory and sweet, including cucumber  and cream cheese sandwiches, which are a must. Everyone there seemed to be having a very good time.

"Who's that woman in that portrait?," Red asked me, looking up at the elegant framed painting along the side wall, of woman wearing a crown. It appeared to be from the early days of the hotel.

"Don't know," I said.

"There's one of a man on the opposite wall," said Red, pointing the other way.

When our tea server came back to check on us, I inquired about the woman in portrait. Before even I had even finished asking my question, the server replied, "Queen Mary."

Using Red's iPhone, we figured out that the portrait of the man was surely George V.

"He looks like the Tsar," Red said.

I smiled at the innocence of her comment.

"Well, there's a reason for that," I said, raising my cup to take another sip of tea.

After I put my cup down. I proceded to wax unabashedly for a few moments about the House of Romanov, Haus Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha, and the intricacies of various causes leading up the advent of the Great War, and the destruction of the old order.

Red found it all delightful to listen to, as we munched our delicious deserts on the top tray.