Christmas Shopping & Lord Of The Dance

Today I met up with Ashley at Metropolis at MetroTown. Located in Burnaby, MetroTown is the second biggest mall in Canada, with 470 stores. Ashley is doing volunteer work at the gift-wrapping center. She does this every year. The money raised from doing gift-wrapping for mall shoppers goes to help local charities.

I met up with her after her shift was over so we can do her Christmas shopping. While most people buy the gift and then give it to the person, I do things a little differently with Ashley. I give her a budget and she gets to spend it on anything she wants. I do this for a couple reasons. The first is I don’t know what teenage girls are into now-a-days. The second reason I get to teach her about money and budgeting. By giving her a budget, she actually is aware how much things cost.

We went into a five different stores and she tried on a bunch of stuff. This year, Ashley is into clothes, which is a huge shift from a few years ago when all she wanted was computer and video games. The mall was packed with holiday shoppers. Ashley took me into stores that I have never heard of. One store, call Aritzia, seem targeted to teenagers – the store was packed with them. Ashley picked out three pieces of clothing. We’ll have to go back to MetroTown next week because she failed to spend her budget.

Michael Flatley’s Lord Of The Dance

After the shopping, I took Sarah and her parents to see Lord Of The Dance at The Centre, in Vancouver, For Performing Arts. I purchased these tickets nearly six months ago and had almost completely forgotten about them. Luckily, Ticket Master sent me an email reminder. Paul Mudhar and his niece joined us.

This is not the first time Sarah and I have seen Lord Of The Dance. When we were dating, I took her to Las Vegas to see Elton John. We also caught a showing of Lord Of The Dance and the Blue Man Group during that trip.

The Lord Of The Dance is the world’s most popular dance show. To date it has been seen by over 50 million people in 36 different countries. Michael Flatley’s claim to flame is he is the world’s highest paid dancer. He also holds the world’s record for high-speed tap dancing – 35 taps per second. How they measure that I have no idea.

For those who have never seen Lord Of The Dance, I highly recommend you go if it comes to your town. It’s a great show. Here’s a video showing the first five minutes.