Skywatch Friday ~ Last Friday in March

Hello and welcome to Friday's Skywatch post,

It has been raining so very heavily now for what seems like forever. It makes it difficult to go anywhere. But today it stopped raining and the sun came out. I couldn't get away early but in the late evening I went to the grocery store for a few items and snapped these night photos.

It was much warmer than it has been in a long while and it felt so good. You can see some of the apple blossoms are out in full force but haven't started to blossom on other trees.  I'm hoping it will be sunny more frequently soon so I can get out and enjoy the blossoms more fully and during the day too.

A few years ago I learned that many of the city's cherry trees were gifts from Japan.  In the early 1930s the mayors of Kobe and Yokohama in Japan gifted 500 Ojochin variety cherry trees to the City of Vancouver, British Columbia.  The trees were meant to honour the Japanese-Canadian veterans of WW1.  A few years later, Bunjiro and Kimi Uyeda, a local business owner and philanthropist couple, donated another 100 cherry trees to the city's park board.  The citizens and visitors alike have been enjoying the blossoms ever since. Today we enjoy thousands of cherry trees all over the city and they are in full bloom from late March to about the end of Apri with some areas starting earlier and some starting later.  Right now there is a Cherry Blossom Festival going on. I've never attended myself because it's often still cold and blustery and it's also a very busy time for me in general.  But the moment the sun shines and I have a few spare moments I get out and take some photos.

You can tell the weather was warmer as people are walking around without heavy jackets. It was so nice not to feel the chill when I went out. I don't need heat but I do like the temperature to be a bit higher than frigid, lol. I snapped this photo of the pretty tree with Christmas lights. The tree will likely remain lit all year long. 

During Covid, the city put seating in many streets all around town so people could visit outdoors instead of in their homes. After things got back to more or less normal, the city decided to continue with these outdoor seating areas and they've become a nice place to rest or visit, or both. Sometimes they have live free music. I noticed they added several tables and chairs on the opposite side of the street (the side on which I'm standing to take a photo).

On Wednesday the sun came out and brightened the day a bit. I managed to capture a bit of blue in the sky.

Thanks for joining me on Skywatch Friday.