Each native media outlet has latched onto the barge story line. In December, requests on social media had been made to brighten the barge with Christmas lights (it didn’t occur). Memes, just like the barge photoshopped as Vancouver’s subsequent luxurious condominium constructing — a dig on the metropolis’s notoriously unaffordable housing market, are mass circulated on social media. There’s even a preferred barge parody Twitter account.
“In Vancouver, now we have a novel humorousness, a novel sense of levity, if you’ll,” mentioned Donnie Rosa, the final supervisor of the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation.
In reality, the Park Board, which, in 2014, famously accredited the renaming of “Guelph Park” within the fashionable Mount Nice neighborhood simply south of downtown to “Dude Chilling Park,” in honor of an artwork sculpture that seemed like, properly, a dude chilling, noticed an identical alternative with the barge. On Dec. 15, precisely a month after the barge washed up on English Bay, the board erected a brief “Barge Chilling Seashore” signal.
“It’s been a tricky yr, why not deliver some pleasure to this vacation season?” mentioned Mx. Rosa, who’s nonbinary, noting the short-term signal price below a couple of hundred {dollars}. “The quantity of pleasure that it has introduced, I feel it’s cash properly spent.”
“I didn’t anticipate to see an indication, which I assumed was fairly humorous,” mentioned Mr. Simon. “It’s an ideal Instagram-worthy shot.”
And actually, if it’s not on Instagram, then it by no means occurred, proper?
“I noticed some tales in regards to the barge on social media and that’s how I knew I needed to go right here,” mentioned Jasnoor Kaur, a younger girl from Winnipeg, Manitoba, visiting her boyfriend, Ram Binner, who lives in a close-by suburb of Vancouver.
