As you probably read in our last blog post, the Vancouver Canucks hockey team is playing in the Stanley Cup Finals at the moment. When we arrived in Vancouver, we were overwhelmed with Canuck paraphernalia EVERYWHERE. Even on the wet suit woman statue in Stanley Park:
As we were imbued in the Canucks spirit, we realized that we didn’t actually know what a Canuck is. Maybe a Canadian fish? A lesser-known shark? Someone thought it was a bird. Take a guess yourself before scrolling down.
A Canuck is…. Drumroll please… A slang term for a Canadian. None of us got a gold star for that one. We’ll get to the actual Canucks game a little farther on in the blog.
After getting settled in our lovely room at the Renaissance (thank you, Marriott Points!), we started walking toward the Gastown district for dinner. Along the way, we met Shamu, saw a water plane land (I am going to return to Vancouver and take a water plane at some point in my life) and saw a ton of street-side musicians getting their groove on.
View from our hotel:
One of the highlights of Vancouver was our dinner at Guu, a Japanese restaurant in Gastown. When we first arrived, the staff greeted us by all yelling ‘Welcome’ in Japanese. It was fun to hear all the different Japanese sayings that they would yell out at different points in the evening, and made us wish that Miguel was there to interpret for us. The marble soda that Emmie got enthralled us. It had an actual marble in it that we were convinced we could get out if we really tried. We never did get it out.
The next day, we went for a lovely bike ride around the sea wall of Stanley Park, where we saw a world-renowned collection of totem poles, the aforementioned wet suit statue with a Canucks jersey, a dance troop doing a music video to the song ‘I Got Hoes in Different Area Codes’ by Ludacris and I touched the Pacific (admittedly, whether I touched the Pacific or water in a bay is disputed. I hold that I was the first to touch the Pacific).
Intent on using our bikes as much as physically possible after trucking them across half of the US with us, we decided to go across Lions Gate Bridge to the Capilano Fish Hatchery.
Several steep hills and a few close traffic encounters later, we arrived at the Fish Hatchery, where we didn't actually see that many fish. But we did get this fish face photo and got to see a baby salmon jump out of the water!
And we had the distinct pleasure of seeing this lovely sign in the bathroom. Miguel, maybe you can add this to the crazy signs that you have in your blog! Emmie's interpretation of this is please throw leaves in the toilet, but do not attempt extreme walking from the toilet.
The Canucks played a great game that night and won 1-0 after a goal in the third period. We saw the game on a pretty tiny TV from far away in a great restaurant after 1.5 hours of walking around Vancouver looking for an open table. We ventured out into the streets after the game and found the biggest block party I've ever seen - we heard the next day that there were 100,000 people there. Maybe we'll make a video of some of the footage we got on Emmie's phone at some point. We heard some pretty great exclamations from excited fans - "It's my birthday B*TCH!" and we passed a very sad Boston Bruins fan dressed as a fairy who kept lamenting in a sad voice "I'm the Boston fairy...uhhhhhh..."
The next day, we got out our bikes again (we love those damn bikes) to head towards Granville Island, a quaint little peninsula right across from downtown that has tons of artsy galleries a public market, and a great boat dock.
Since our sit bones were pretty sore from the day before, we decided to take the Aqua Bus to the Olympic Village instead of biking over. Although there was surprisingly little Olympic paraphernalia at the village, we did get to see a dragon boat race!
The capstone of our Vancouver stay was probably our visit to the Chinatown night market. I'll let the photos of the chow mein and mini-donuts speak for themselves.
And now, on to Seattle! We're excited to be back in the land of m.p.h. signs, US dollars, and road signs with George Washington's profile.
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