Saturdays tend to be sort of a quiet day for me: usually I do the laundry first thing, catch up on e-mail, and maybe head downtown for a little shopping. Today, as I was walking around in the downtown core, I thought to myself, "Boy, there's a lot more zombies than usual lurching around down here." (And really, there aren't usually that many in the first place, in spite of what my friend Laurie would say about the general population.) Upon returning home, a little investigation on the internet revealed that today was the 2008 Vancouver Zombie Walk. "Oh, well then," I thought, "that explains everything."The 2008 what?
The first Zombie Walk took place in Sacramento in 2001 as a promotional stunt for a B-movie film festival, and somehow the idea has gone internationally viral since then. For no good reason that I can imagine, Canada appears to score quite highly in terms of zombie walks, and somehow I can't quite bring myself to add that to my list of reasons for Canada being the best country in the world.* Nonetheless, should anyone wish to seek out an exciting part-time career with the walking dead, further information can be found at http://www.zombiewalk.com/ and http://www.crawlofthedead.com/
-Sid
*Although, to our credit, people were pretty calm about it. I think that in a lot of countries someone would have been tempted to add realism by shooting the participants in the head with a shotgun.
Oh, so it's actually an annual thing? Hmmm, last summer there were a lot of "undead" walking around Robson St one afternoon, I was giving someone a tour of the city and the visitor was amazed. Fine day to pick for a tour showcasing Vancouver!
ReplyDeleteSeriously, artfully created zombies would blend right in to the local* population, so one almost wouldn't realize there was a special event going on.
* changed the word "native" to "local" so no one would think I was being non-PC and dissing our Aboriginals.