Greetings from Vancouver

I'm a week into my vacation and I feel utterly relaxed. I left 90 degree weather and arrived to 65 degree weather and I'm sitting at the kitchen table in Py's apartment. There's an absolutely amazing view of English Bay from here (the photo above is pretty much exactly what I'm looking at right now, if you add in a few more clouds) and I've got a mug of tea. These are good conditions for blogging, my friends. (Even if I've only got a tiny little netbook at my disposal! It's cute and functional but dang does it make me feel like I have giant fingers!)


On my first day, we went to Wreck Beach and listened to music and waited for the sun to set. Actually before we did that, we went to Japadog and I had a spicy cheese terimayo; Py has a photo of me looking positively gleeful but you'll have to wait until he uploads it to see. But anyway, back to the beach.


This guy showed up with a shovel and started digging an enormous hole--eventually he ended up planting a bunch of tree trunks in the ground, as you can see above. I dunno if he was out for some exercise or what, but...okay! It looks kind of neat.


This was as close as we got to sunset, as eventually it just got toooo cold. So we adjourned to Chutney Villa and ate entirely too much food. But it was delicious. And then the good eating continued:


One of my Flickr friends is always posting shots of awesome looking food on her stream, and she happens to be from Vancouver! And ever since I saw her photos of Sun Yee Cafe, I knew we had to go check it out. And we did! This is really far out from where we are, but it happened to be on the way to Rice Lake, so we hopped in the Zipcar (man, what a brilliant service) and drove over to East Hastings. Sun Yee Cafe is kind of an HK style coffee shop and they have absurdly cheap prices. Py got the chicken chop above and I ordered a lunch special of stir fried beef and hor fun noodles (which I neglected to take a photo of). What arrived was an absolutely enormous platter of flat noodles. ENORMOUS. Like, enough for 3 people huge. And that was $6 or $7! It included a drink (lemon tea for me!) and because we had no idea that the portion sizes would be so enormous, we also ordered an appetizer of fried squid:


Salt and pepper style. Delicious, especially the bits of spicy chili. A bit tough, but for the price, I'm not going to complain. We rolled out of there with leftovers and made our way to Rice Lake for a much needed walk. Rice Lake is pretty, but it was starting to drizzle when we got there so we probably didn't get to experience its full glory. Nice for a walk, though!


On another day we went to Stanley Park and saw a couple of raccoon families--I love raccoons! They are so cute and make the best noises.


There were a couple of young ones which were extra cute; you can see a short video that Py made. I cannot for the life of me remember the name of the place we had dinner that night but they had a very reasonably priced set menu which included the new-to-me "tofu cheese". I think it was pretty much cream cheese (possibly mascarpone) and tofu, topped with honey and strawberries and it was surprisingly good. Not enough tofu, though.


Apparently I arrived at the tail end (no pun intended) of the wild sockeye salmon season; from what I've been reading, they've had the largest run in 100 years. Lucky me! I picked up this gorgeous salmon fillet for something like $7 CAD; do you know how much this would cost in NY???? Probably triple that amount.


We made a really simple dinner with it; the salmon was just salted and then pan-seared for a crispy skin. It was amazing, and I'm not sure I can ever go back to eating farmed salmon. (The roasted potatoes and sauteed sugar snap peas were tasty too, but man, that salmon.) Just what the doctor ordered!

Tomorrow we're hopping on a sea plane (exciting!!) and going up to visit our friends' marina. Hope I get to see some seals!