Saturday, March 22, 2008

Vancouver Trip - Day 1

I'm writing this from a corner coffee shop called Cafe Artigiano. The hotel we are staying in is obviously used to catering to businessmen who are only in town for a day or two - because they tried to charge me 16$ PER DAY of internet access. No thanks. Free internet at Cafe Artigiano!


Our flight out of Evansville was supposed to leave at 8:40am, but there was heavy snow in Chicago so we had to take an earlier flight at 6:00am. Everything went pretty smoothly, aside from having to kill about 4 hours in the extremely busy Chicago airport. The Chicago>Seattle flight was about 4.5hours, and the Seattle airport was a breath of fresh air compared to Chicago. Much more calm.


We reached Vancouver at about 5pm, and took a taxi to our hotel. We have a very nice room on the 23rd floor of the Marriot Pinnacle, with a panoramic view of the water, mountains, and city. The room isn't especially big, but we only really plan on "sleeping" and cleaning up there. With a king-sized bed, the room is well equipped for our needs.


For dinner, we went to a resteraunt called "The Keg" which was just a few blocks from our hotel. You'd expect a place called The Keg to have a good beer selection, but their menu didn't even have a beer list. Their highlighted beers were Heineken, Molson, and Coors light... neato. The Keg made up for their small beer selection with some amazing steak. I ordered the largest size, because it was about 4 bucks more and I always enjoy leftovers. This steak must have been 2lbs. I'd estimate it was 2.5-3in thick and cooked evenly. Marbalized fat throughout the cut. The leftovers are sitting in the fridge and will make a great steak sandwich.


We decided to end the night by getting some liquor and relaxing in our room (we had slept about 2 of the last 48 hours). Apparently in Canada, there is some rule restricting the sales of alcohol on Easter Weekend. We probably walked 2 miles and followed 2 sets of bad directions to find a liquor store that was actually open.


Finally, we were about to give up our search, and stopped into a grocery store to get some random supplies for our vacation. We were greeted by a bitch security guard who was probably on her period. She gave us some very blatant attitude, and started making fun of us to one of the cashiers as we were walking away. Luckily for me, Mary didn't put up with her bullshit and called her out while we were paying for our groceries. The cashier was extremely nice, gave us a 50% discount on our groceries, and directions to one of the only open liquor stores in the city! The whole time, that bitch security guard just stood there quietly avoiding eye contact. Thats what you get, you stupid bitch.


Alcohol is about 2x as expensive as it is in the states. After going as far as we had to find alcohol, we felt obligated to follow through, and now we have a 45$ bottle of Jose Quervo.


We finally arrived back at the hotel, and were so tired we couldn't even enjoy the spoils of our journey. Regardless, it was definitely a great experience that we will remember.


I'll be back tomorrow morning with more updates!

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