My favourite Indian festival, Vaisakhi celebrates the founding of Sikhism and it's also a bit of a harvest festival. The Vancouver parade starts at the Ross Street temple, west on Marine Drive, up Main Street, over on 49th Avenue, down Fraser Street, and over 57th Avenue back to the temple.
Main and Fraser are closed to traffic, and stages are set up on the road with cultural performances and the obligatory speeches by politicians. But the greatest highlight of the parade is the food. All the businesses and houses along the parade route set up tables out front, offering a variety of scrumptious delights from freshly fried pakoras to tasty curries and fruits and all the chai you could possibly drink. Not only do they expect nothing in return, the generousity extends beyond the sidewalk as people from some houses even bring food into the crowd to hand out.
The crowd thickens as the parade approaches, until finally when it's just a dense sea of people swarming about parade floats. Only once the parade has passed does it become clear what has happened: a very large proportion of the crowd joins the parade to make their way back to the temple. After the parade is gone, all that remains is the army of volunteers that sweep up the litter which inevitably ends up overflowing all the garbage bags placed up and down the street; an hour later there, is no evidence that anything out of the ordinary had occurred.
Typical house along the parade route |
Coolers full of food |
Biggest pot of chai I've ever seen |
49th Avenue |
My favourite Indian restaurant in Vancouver |
Paneer |
Mary-Ann |
Punjabi dance |