i'm currently in nelson, traveling solo... staying at a hostel and i'm sick any nelsonites posting on here??
awww...too bad, i just moved back to victoria from nelson a week ago! it's a great town. i miss it a lot. what are you doing out there?
i'm pretty much just bumming around... that's funny, i'm headed towards victoria, too. eventually! i'm going to penticton today.. going to pick some fruit in the good ol' okanagan. then victoria. woohooooo what do you do there??
well i just finished high school in nelson, and i didn't do much of anything else. it's a great place for kayaking. you can kayak to the other towns along the lake. careful about the weather, though. winds pick up out of nowhere. lots of hiking and mountain biking, too. nelson's great for just bumming around. you can live so cheap there. i found the whole "hippie" scene really sketchy, though. not much of a hippie scene, more like a bunch of jerks who took on the hippie fashion statement as a cover for their laziness and lack of hygiene. they're just like any other social group of sheep. they do what's expected of them. they talk about babylon and the spirit (and have no clue what they're saying) and go to rainbow gatherings and smoke pot and play drums (often quite badly), but they have no substance. there's nothing behind it but a desire to fit in to something and still appear enlightened and liberated. there's a lot of theft and drugs and delusions and babies with no fathers and general grossness. it's really quite sad and disillusioning. when i say "hippie scene," though, i mean all the dirty dready patchy-cord-wearing slow-talking pot-smoking people who hang out in front of the holy smoke and by the waterfall at the market. the town itself is a hippie town of the truest spirit, not at all what's represented by this sad group of people. the people in nelson look after each other. when a popular yoga instructor broke her neck in a skiing accident, the whole town rallied around her and organized an auction, raising thousands of dollars to send her to a treatment facility in vancouver and take care of her two teenaged daughters. people are really laid back and outdoorsy, and there's a really holistic, healthy attitude about nearly everything. half the yards are planted with organic vegetable gardens, all their coffee is fair trade, and there are tons of charities. people don't do garage sales, they do free bins. there's a daily soup kitchen at at least one church. this town of 10 000 people even has a gay pride parade, fer fuck's sake! i LOVE nelson. it's a beautiful place. i can't wait to go back. how are you doing out there, anyway?
gee, nelson sounds cool. well, the last part you said about it did. my friend wants to move there. and if it's a hippie town, sounds like i'd fit right in.
crazy description - we have a Nelson in New Zealand that sounds a lot like yours - the 'hippie' culture, the friendliness, the kayaking (though ours is sea kayaking)... good times.
nelson's great for just bumming around. you can live so cheap there. i found the whole "hippie" scene really sketchy, though. not much of a hippie scene, more like a bunch of jerks who took on the hippie fashion statement as a cover for their laziness and lack of hygiene. they're just like any other social group of sheep. they do what's expected of them. they talk about babylon and the spirit (and have no clue what they're saying) and go to rainbow gatherings and smoke pot and play drums (often quite badly), but they have no substance. there's nothing behind it but a desire to fit in to something and still appear enlightened and liberated. there's a lot of theft and drugs and delusions and babies with no fathers and general grossness. it's really quite sad and disillusioning. when i say "hippie scene," though, i mean all the dirty dready patchy-cord-wearing slow-talking pot-smoking people who hang out in front of the holy smoke and by the waterfall at the market. Dude, I have never heard someone describe the "hippy-crites" in Nelson so well. I just read your post out loud to my boyfriend and we laughed our asses off. Especially the thing about the drumming. My boyfriends been drumming since he was 9 and is honestly one of the best drummers I've ever heard. He's amazing on the djembay too, and whenever he goes down to the market, all those guys give him shit bitching about shit like " Sorry Chris, if you're not going to play traditional african beats, then you can't play in the circle.... " JUst bullshit like that. The funniest thing this one guy said though was " You can't play the drums cause you're not african... I am the best drummer becasue I went to Jamaica and was blessed by jah!!!" Meanwhile my boyfriends half african. Whatever though. Nelson is a magical place there's just some people that you learn to ignore. I lived there for a while, but I found the city a little too crazy too be in all the time so I moved out to the valley. THere's definatly no other place I'd rather be though.
I don't live there, but I love Nelson so much! My family used to have a cabin in Kaslo, (around 45 min from nelson i think). So many interesting people there.
I found your generalizations about the hippy scene in Nelson really judgemental. I used to live in Nelson, mind you only for about a year. I was also concieved there tho, or somewhere in the valley. Thats why my name is Crystal. I'll be back before it gets cold. Neway nelson is one of the most open minded, friendly, magical places I've ever been. I like hangin with a bunch of dirty, smelly, stinkin, rotten hippies. At least they accept me for who I am. It's pretty easy to make sweeping generalizations, eh?
I wasn't talking about all of the hippies. I totally agree that Nelson is one of the most magical places around.... that's why I live here. I was talking about this one certain group of people who appear to be hippies, but are actually just apathetic, greedy mooches. The kind of people who are constantly asking you for stuff, but never give back anything, even if they have lots of it. Like this one guy who was at a rainbow recently and was asking people to "bow down" when entering his energy field. I'm not down with that, but people like that are totally out numbered in nelson. If I came off as putting everyone in nelson down, I'm sorry. I just thought that that post hit these certain people (not everyon) right on the head
^^ what she said. there's no need to be defensive. i was talking about the hippie-crites - the people who adopt the hippie stereotype but behave in a way that goes completely against the peace-love-respect mentality they claim to practice. long, long ago, before this site was abruptly wiped out and rebuilt and all the old posts were lost, there was a thread about nelson that i started when i first moved there. the first reply i got was from a girl giving me the heads up about a hippie-crite guy named sky(e) who does bank card fraud. he stole 2000 dollars from her and stole from several of her friends, as well. a week later, i met skye. he was hanging out in front of the holy smoke, selling pot. see, the holy smoke sells pot to adults, but they won't sell to minors. skye buys it in the store and hangs out in front, selling it to the 13-year-olds who get turned away. he looks just like all the other hippie people. he talks about "jah love" and all that, which he neither understands nor practices. he's a hypocrite. he's a thief. there's no excuse.
oh and about kaslo: oh. my. god. i spent a weekend there over may days and i couldn't believe what a gorgeous town it was. it's absolutely stunning. the jagged, snow-capped mountains in the distance, the lake, the beaches, the funky little old cottage-houses with their dense little gardens, the antique buildings downtown...i was literally squealing in awe. it was just so beautiful. much more attractive than nelson, but also much smaller and without that uniquely metropolitan community. it's just an isolated little village. but i'd totally live there - at least it's flat enough to bike around town! what's it like to live there?
I remember that post and when i was thru in May i flat out asked Skye about it and he denied it. I think I'm a pretty good judge of character....maybe not...but um When i lived in Nelson Skye was always really really kind to people that had nothing. He'd smoke them down all day long and share his food with them an stuff. The sketchpads i met there are named Lance, who followed me from the fluid screaming at me like he was possesed until I was so freaked that I ran back to the bar. And this cat Dreamweaver who regularly stole weed and redistributed it, threw a drum in a fire at a gathering and touched this girl inappropriately in the park. Everyone else was cool. Man I love that town. I guess I'd rather bring people up than put people down I dunno. its sokay tho to each their own.
i didn't see much, but it's available if you know the right people. had my first real acid trip in nelson, actually...
