This post is kind of a practice post because I have hyped this blog shit up so high I am having performance anxiety about it. On the other hand I’m really liking the various social media feeds I have hooked in here as widgets so far. Any suggestions for others?
Nick and I caught a Bolt Bus up to Vancouver for the second time in about a month to go see his brother do his proposal presentation for his Masters at Simon Fraser. Devin’s description of the Simon Fraser campus was something like ‘a really pretty area with buildings designed to avoid letting anyone look at the views’. That seemed pretty accurate, really.
We tried to go see Birdman but due to some misunderstandings ended up walking through the rain for half an hour to a cinema that wasn’t showing it – so we saw Kingsman instead. I decided to ignore the technical problems with the plot (SIM cards don’t work like that!!!!) and thought it was pretty enjoyable. I’m sure the filmmakers think it was a super progressive film because they like totally had a girl as one of the main characters, but let’s just say it failed the Bechdel test really badly and that final scene was pretty cringe-worthy. The next night we needed to get dinner but it was raining and the overall motivation level of the group was roughly lets-stay-on-the-couch-and-starve. Despite these obstacles we managed to choose Suika, a Japanese place that was Foursquare’s first suggestion when I searched for ‘ramen’. It turned out not to be a sushi place as we had thought, and it was a little less vegetarian friendly than it could have been (we had one vegetarian in the group) but it was delicious. I had the watermelon cider, the corn kakiage and the beef ramen. Alpha pointed out on facebook that this was the place that had recently opened a second location…three hundred yards from my house in Seattle. Sadly I didn’t make it there before leaving town.
Tuesday, Devin and Kristina were headed down to Coupeville so we were now on our own in scary Vancouver. We slept in all morning before heading to Stanley Park, which was awesome – spent a couple hours walking around it together before catching a bus over to North Vancouver to see the Lonsdale Quay market Nick had read about. When we got there (far quicker than Google Maps had told us) it was time for a snack, so we stopped in at Tao, a vegan place. I had some decent juice and raw spaghetti squash, and Nick had some actually delicious raw borscht that would be worth trying to make at home. The market itself was disappointing because it featured a place called The Cheshire Cheese restaurant that was actually just a pub. We got a sampler of local beer from the Green Leaf brewing company on the ground floor (decent stuff, would drink again) before catching the ferry back downtown to meet Tyler, Lea and Evan for dinner at the Poorhouse.
The next morning we had high ambitions – we got up early (9am) to go over to the Bloedel Conservatory, quite near Devin’s house. I thought it might be boring but it was actually very well organized with a bird-watching booklet and lots of signs, so we ended up spending about 90 minutes there – would recommend! Our other commitment for the day was having some dim sum, and we’d looked up the Vancouver Chinese Restaurant Awards for 2015 to find that the dim sum winner was right next to our Skyway station – perfect! so we stopped at Kirin restaurant. Well worth the visit – we ordered about seven kinds of dumplings, plus (it turned out) duck feet, that I skipped but Nick seemed to kind of enjoy. The perfect end to our trip.