There’s a tasty cultural experience awaiting visitors to galleries and museums across Canada, where top chefs are designing artful menus.

A lazy beach stint is fun, but sometimes you want more. Here are a couple of unique educational vacations when you want to move from looking to learning:

1.    Stay at a Subarctic Research Station

In mid-October, Vancouver’s Chinatown was added to the roster of National Historic Sites (NHS) of Canada. One of Canada’s oldest and biggest

Emily Carr, Tom Thomson, A.J. Casson, Paul Peel, Marcel Dzama. These Canadian artists weren’t born that way. They were created with the help of an art-loving public and critical raves. The next wave of superstars is already on the scene. Here’s where to spot and to buy Canadian art for would-be collectors:

Museum of Inuit Art, Toronto

Born and raised a down-to-earth Winnipegger, Hollywood movie star/writer Nia Vardalos (star and author of My Big Fat Greek Wedding andco-writer ofLarry Crowne with Tom Hanks) arrived home this past summer to make a movie, spend time with family and show her six-year-old daughter some family fun, Winnipeg-style. “It was like re-visiting my youth,” she says.

This November, for the first time since 2008, the Pangnirtung Tapestry Studio at the Uqqurmiut Centre for Arts and Crafts in Pangnirtung, Nunavut, will be releasing a new collection.

Canada’s wild landscapes have inspired generations of artists, none more so than Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. They became synonymous with our lonely lakes, fall foliage and snow-covered fields and tundra.

In the midst of Nova Scotia’s fiery fall foliage season, legions of fiddles, harps, accordions, bagpipes and step-dancing tunes ignite Cape Breton Island’s rugged countryside during the annual Celtic Colours International Festival.

One tech blogger called crafting this year’s “hot geek hobby,” even citing quilts made out of the blocky pixels of video games. But the real thing – stitching together pieces of padded fabric into geometric works of quilt art – is enjoying another popular resurgence.