the plan this weekend was to go up to vancouver, play tourist, and meet up with regularxpression since he was there for a conference (lucky bastard). anyways, we couldn’t get a hold of him so we just made do with being tourist.

we first went to the capilano suspension bridge, which is basically a bridge 400 feet across and 200 feet up in the air over the capilano river. the bridge itself wasn’t all that neat but once you got across there was a lot of nature to explore and even a treetops adventure where you walked high above the ground on bridges supported by the trees. it reminded me of the scene in return of the jedi where everyone was celebriting in the tree city, or maybe even the city where galadriel was in fellowship of the ring.

after that, we went over the stanley park and did some of the attractions there. the last place we went to in the park was the vancouver aquarium. we were lucky actually, because we arrived an hour before it closed, and they had a 50% off discount that starts 45 minutes before closing, so we bought tickets and ran like hell through all the exhibits. it was really really cool, because i had never been to an aquarium so i saw all sorts of huge and weird fish. there was also an outdoor section so we saw some sea otters, a couple of beluga whales, a dolphin and a sea lion. the sea lion was a terrifying experience because there was a couple right above the sea lion and they were taunting the sea lion, so the sea lion would every once in a while jump up and try and catch the girl’s head in its jaws. well they kept doing it and sticking their heads lower, and the sea lion kept going higher on the rocks … well you get the picture. we left before we saw any blood.

the part i usually want to check out in a city is the downtown, so we went down to take a look. there seems to be two major streets in vancouver’s downtown. granville which is like yonge and stretches throughout most of vancouver, and robson which is like bloor. they buildings on each street really remind me of the streets in toronto, and i was surprised that i saw a lot of toronto in vancouver when i didn’t see any resemblence in seattle. anyways, at this point i wanted to take more pictures but i ran out of batteries and film in one camera, and batteries in my second camera. what are the odds of that! so you’ll just have to take my word that the downtown stretch at night is just as bright and lively as toronto’s yonge/dundas and queen st areas. i also went to my first virgin megastores but was fairly disappointed by their prices.

anyways, it was a fun weekend and vancouver seems like a much better city to live in than seattle.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: best-of, travelling, vancouver