Vancouver Trip Recap

My original intention was to blog notes at the end of each day of our trip like I normally do, but that obviously didn’t happen. Instead, here are some notes for me to look back on. Day 1 notes are here, and the wedding notes are here.

Sunday:

Sunday was spent eating and sleeping! We slept in a bit then made our way to Starbucks for coffee, and we also tried one of their breakfast sandwiches. I’d rank it a distant third behind McDonald’s and Tim Horton’s.
After that we headed over to Granville Island for a few hours. Sunday was wet and gray, but that didn’t stop us. We walked around the market, visited a bunch of shops, and ate lunch at Bridges. Sharon once again had the margherita pizza, and found it different but not necessary worse than last time. I had the fish and chips, which was excellent.
For dinner we walked up Granville Street to Vij’s. Arriving about 15 minutes before it opened, we found ourselves roughly 20th in line. We were seated right away, and were immediately impressed with the service – they were incredibly efficient! Sharon and I both really enjoyed the meal, though we were absolutely stuffed.
Before heading back to Triumf House, we stopped at Blenz for some tea and wifi. Well, wifi for me – Sharon read the Georgia Straight.

Monday:

Woke up early to check out of the hotel, and then set off for Sophie’s Cosmic Cafe. I’m a sucker for diners, and Sophie’s definitely did not disappoint. The food arrived quickly and was quite tasty, our coffee was refilled often, and the decor was incredible – the walls are covered with memorabilia! Very cool…probably my favorite food stop on the trip.
Because Sophie’s was so darn fast, we had a bit of time to kill after breakfast, so we walked around the neighborhood, checking out a bunch of neat little shops. Kind of reminded me of Whyte Avenue.
Our next stop was Gastown for a free walking tour. Sharon and I were, not surprisingly, the youngest on the tour. It was very interesting, but the tour definitely stayed in the tourist-friendly parts of Gastown. We saw some of the less friendly parts on our own though, as we made our way to and from the bus stop. It’s amazing how different things look just two blocks apart.
Our final stop before heading to the airport was WorkSpace, a shared work environment in Gastown. I’ve read lots about it, so it was great to check it out in person. I’ll be writing more about it soon.

It was a fun trip, but like all vacations, ended too soon. Sharon and I agreed that we’d like to explore more of Gastown next time. I also need to schedule some appointments with people – there are so many friends and colleagues that I didn’t get to visit!

My photos from the trip are here.

Congratulations Michelle & Steven!

Yesterday my friends Michelle and Steven got married here in Vancouver. They had a relatively short ceremony in the early afternoon, followed by a reception in the evening at Fortune House Seafood Restaurant. They both looked so happy yesterday, it was great to be a part of the festivities!

Yesterday was also a great excuse for a large group of my friends to get together again. It was just like old times with most of the gang here in Vancouver for the weekend! The wedding was the main event, of course, but we also took some time for lunch and to catch Tropic Thunder. It seems like forever since the last time we took up almost an entire row in a movie theatre. Good times!

Congratulations Michelle and Steven! Enjoy the honeymoon 🙂

Vancouver Day 1

When we got back to the hotel tonight, both Sharon and I were just exhausted. I remarked that we didn’t walk much further that we might have on a normal weekend in Edmonton, and she said yes, but we usually do so with a purpose. Today we did a lot of wandering, which while enjoyable, probably made us feel a bit more tired than normal.

We started by getting coffee and then trying to get an Egg McMuffin at McDonald’s, only to find out that they stop serving breakfast at 10:30am. Is that the case for all of them? I thought it used to be 11am. I suppose it was probably best that we didn’t get the greasy food after all. We made our way downtown, stopping for lunch at a salad place before walking to Stanley Park.

We spent a little bit of time in Stanley Park, but mostly headed right for the Vancouver Aquarium. Sharon was a little surprised to find it smaller than she expected, but she had lots of fun watching the sea otters (her favorite). The Aquarium was mostly as I remember it, except that the Beluga shows are all canceled on account of the new baby girl.

Our next stop was the Bentall 5 Cactus Club Cafe on Burrard and Dunsmuir, and it turned out to the highlight of the day for both of us. Similar to an Earl’s or a Moxie’s with something a bit extra, I really enjoyed the restaurant and the food. And I was especially happy to find that the restaurant had free wifi! Sharon will be posting a complete review on her blog once we return.

We did some wandering, at the Pacific Centre Mall and on Robson, before heading over to Chinatown for the Chinese Night Market. It was kinda neat to see, but man was there ever a lot of junk! I’m not much of a trinkets guy I guess. On our way back downtown Sharon found a dollar store and couldn’t resist making a stop. Again, not my thing, but she bought me chopsticks! Heh.

Tomorrow is the wedding and reception, so it’ll be a long day in fancy clothes and shoes. Should be fun though, and I’m happy that I’ll be able to help Steven & Michelle celebrate!

My photos are still uploading – you can find them here.

NY Day 1

I suck at coming up with titles for these kinds of posts, so I figure I’ll just go the boring route and number them (unless something really sticks out). I just uploaded 115 photos to my New York set on Flickr. I am kind of amazed at how much we accomplished today! I’m also ticked that none of my txt updates to Twitter worked. I know it’s not my phone, because other text messages were working. Stupid Twitter.

We started out by walking to Rockefeller Center to pick up our Explorer Passes. We saw the tree, and the skating rink, and stopped across the street at Dean & Deluca for coffee. We spent most of the rest of the morning wandering around Fifth Avenue, checking out some stores like Saks, FAO Schwarz, Barnes & Noble, and the Disney store. We also stopped to pickup tickets to the Sex and the City tour. Clearly, one of Sharon’s choices for activities! We went to Macy’s (which was a complete jungle) and stopped at Pax for lunch on the way back uptown.

I kind of wish we had something like Pax in Edmonton. London had the same kind of little places with fresh sandwiches and salads. Aside from Quizno’s and Subway, we don’t have anything really similar back home. Speaking of Canada, we stopped at Bryant Park where we found a giant glass dome advertising Ontario. Yes, Ontario. Inside were two people with snowboarding gear. Riiiight, because Jasper & Banff are in Ontario?!

Eventually we got on the bus for the SATC tour. It was a bit of a gong show at first, but once we got going it was alright. I actually wasn’t as bored as I thought I’d be, and there were clips of all the places we saw, so I could at least make sense of what our tour guide was saying. I think Sharon enjoyed the tour! Apparently our tour had an abnormally large amount of guys – seven out of fifty-five people or something like that.

The tour bus dropped us off at Grand Central Terminal, which was cool as we definitely wanted to check that out. The place is amazing! Lots of people bustling about, everywhere. We ate dinner at a pizza place called Two Boots on the “fast food” level of the station. Afterward, we finally used the subway to get to the Empire State Building. All the way up to the 86th floor observation deck we went, and it was quite a sight. Part of it was closed, unfortunately, but the views we had were still pretty amazing. A very touristy thing to do, but I’m glad we did.

Our final stop of the night was Times Square. It was everything I was expecting and more. Lights, buildings, people, excess all around. I loved it! We checked out a bunch of stores, including the really awesome Toys ‘R’ Us, the Virgin Megastore, and M&M’s World. Very, very cool places. We’ll be back there again for sure.

I’m pretty tired at the moment, no doubt from all the walking we did today. We spotted a souvenir shop at one point that had 18 postcards for $1. Thinking that was damn good, we bought them, only to find two blocks later another shop that was selling 30 postcards for $1!! I am determined to not get ripped off like that again! Heheh.

Though it seems like it’ll be hard to top today, I am looking forward to the rest of the week. I could spend months here and not run out of things to do!

Blog Break Observations

There seem to be a decent number of bloggers who take “blog breaks” or “blog vacations” every now and then, usually to catch up on life and re-focus on why it is they write a blog in the first place. Famed blogger Scoble recently returned from his latest blog vacation, and noted:

See, a good blog is passionate and authoritative. Lately I’ve been going through the motions. Just blogging to keep blogging.

Over the past week I focused on rediscovering myself. What do I like to do? This is my blog. It better be fun. For me. Or else I’ll stop doing it.

I agree – it better be fun for me. Fortunately, I’ve never felt the need to take a blog break, but rather, have been forced to at least twice because of server problems (which we are doing everything possible to prevent from happening again). This last time was the longest period for me without blogging, and so I made a number of observations:

I realized that one of the main reasons I like posting to my blog is because I am creating content. I like the idea that people are reading what I am writing.
I also realized that I don’t need my blog to create content. Even though I wasn’t posting to my blog, I could still post pictures at my Flickr account, or bookmark and tag links at del.icio.us.
I sometimes post things here about my life, or things I have done recently. The reason I do this is so that friends, family and colleagues can easily read my blog and see what I’ve been up to, even if we don’t get the chance to talk. Some of my friends have remarked that as a result, one tends to become cut off from social interaction and thus is harmed. I am pretty confident I have reaffirmed that isn’t the case, as during the blog break, I didn’t talk to anyone more or less than normal (except that I got a lot of IM’s asking when the servers would be back up).
As much as I like creating content, I think I have found that the main reason this blog exists, the main reason I post to it every day, is that I like to have a “play by play” for my life – for what I am reading and finding interesting, what I am doing, and what I am thinking. What was I doing two weeks ago? It sucks that I wasn’t able to post it to my blog, because now I’ll forget it. I like the idea that if something newsworthy happens tomorrow, I can look back in two years and remember what I thought at the time. That’s pretty powerful stuff to me. For instance, I can look back and see that on August 8th of last year I didn’t post anything, but that was probably because I was busy with my parents, who were in town. How did I remember that? Because I posted on the 7th about going to see The Village with them.
I figured that if I wasn’t posting, I wouldn’t be reading blogs as much either. In fact, I kept reading as much as normal. Maybe it was because I could tag interesting things at del.icio.us, or maybe it was just that reading and posting to blogs aren’t as linked as I had assumed.

I guess the main observation from my little blog break is that I enjoy maintaining my blog, posting new things, and having others read them. I suppose the true test will come when I take a voluntary blog break, instead of a forced one, but for now, I’m happy to continue blogging.

Read: Robert Scoble

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