Our flight was unexciting, which – in my opinion – is a very good thing. There was no humour that I could detect, but that too, is likely a good thing. Well, other than our running joke that *here* was the furtherest West I’d ever been.
Shminux was kind enough to pickup Sean, Sarah and myself at the airport and cart us off to our temporary residence: The Listel Hotel.
Driving around a foreign land for the first time is always interesting: traffic-lights flash green at many intersections, this is to indicate that it’s a pedestrian controlled intersection… not a protected advance like here in Ottawa. Confusing? Yes very. I’d’ve easily had an accident within minutes of arrival if I didn’t know. Good thing I wasn’t driving.
The next thing I noticed was that Vancouver has electric trolley buses, so they have two power poles, which means there’s two wires suspended above the lane – and a fantastic mess of insulators and joiners and guides hanging over the intersections where the lines cross.
This mess is neatly paralleled by the mess of power lines that seem to traverse many alley-ways. Very curious…
We checked into our hotel, unpacked, vegged a little and crashed the hotel WiFi. Alimentation was rapidly becoming a priority so we grabbed a bite at Tsunami Sushi (don’t worry – I had the beef teryaki – and it was good. Very good.)
S&S were feeling kinda wiped, since it was about hour 20 of a 27 hour day, so they when back to the hotel and I met up with Yohimbe for a drink at Lennox. Afterwards, it was rapidly approaching 6PM, I walked with him down to the harbour-front train station… Wow:
Ferry? Check!
Cruise Ship? Check!
Helicopter? Check!
Mountains? Check!
A few minutes (and a lot of photographs) later, Sean and Sarah met up with me and we began to wander down Water Street into Gastown. Old town areas are very cool to me, much to see, much to photograph. Sadly the steam clock appeared to be broken, I suspect I could’ve fixed it – but I didn’t think that’d go over well with the natives. Eventually hunger struck again, and we selected Steamworks for dinner.
(I was trying to get an ‘action shot’ with blurred people walking past with the neon sign burning through, but the nearby vagrants were perseverant and odoriferous, so we didn’t hang around very long.)
As we meandered back to the hotel, the evening light was making photography very fun and interesting. Please peruse the galleries for more pictures.
Before we even made it to the hotel, André & Tanya called to invite us for Gelato! He didn’t have to say much to convince us to come!
Over 200 flavours! Delish!
I’ve made a snazzy Google map of our trip, check it out:
More Vancouver posts to come soon!