Day 1 - Again Vancouver

So here we are in Vancouver once again.  Though the sky is overcast, it's warm and shaping up to be a decent weekend.  The smell of the sea is in the air, never a bad thing.

I'm finding that this first entry is usually the hardest to write, because I'm so tired when I sit down to write it.  My body thinks it's nearly 5 am, but locally it's just coming up to 9 pm.  It's Friday night, the start of a long Canada Day Bank Holiday weekend, and there's a party kicking off on the beach front outside our hotel.  Right now I hate all Canadians.

But you can't hate em for long.

We drove ourselves to the airport this morning, and parked up using the incredibly efficient and reasonably priced Meet and Greet facility (I perhaps shouldn't say that until I've faultlessly picked up my car again in three weeks [Update: the car was indeed faultlessly picked up]).  The only two niggles at the airport were me losing my phone (I didn't lose it, I'd just put it in a pocket I never usually put it in), and an over-enthusiastic person at the check-in desk who objected to us being just 1.5 kg over the baggage limit, and insisted we transfer that amount to our hand luggage.

But that was it, and three hours later we were on the aeroplane and heading to 40,000 feet, where we stayed for the next 9 hours.  We flew north over the UK and then across Iceland, Greenland ("How do you know it's Greenland?" "Because I know the islands, eh?"), Baffin Island, and finally, after five and a half hours, over mainland Canada.  I will never tire of looking out of the aeroplane window at the harsh but beautiful landscapes we fly over on these trips.  I'll try and take some pictures on the way back.

We landed on time (our body clocks thinking it was just after 10pm, when over here it was barely mid-afternoon), waded through a turgid passport control that is surely over the top for such an affable nation as Canada, then caught a taxi to our first hotel of this holiday, the ivy-covered Sylvia Hotel overlooking English Bay.

Dropping off our cases, and wanting nothing more than sleep, we dragged ourselves out to have a quick look around and buy some booze and water.  We didn't get quite this far west when we last came to Vancouver, and it turns out that there is an astonishingly large choice of places to eat, with a very eclectic mix of cuisines.  In just one street we saw sushi bars (lots of these), burger joints, pizza houses, and places selling Greek food, Vietnamese food, Chinese, Persian, and even Irish and English foods.  Having picked up a bottle of wine and some water, we came back to the hotel, dropped them off, then headed over to a Japanese restaurant called kadoya.  There we sat on a balcony eating the most ridiculous amount of sushi and sashimi (we just have no frame of reference when ordering), and watching the chaos of the Friday evening rush hour outside.  Our taxi driver had told us it was busy because this year Canada Day (July 1st) falls on a Monday, so it's like a long Bank Holiday weekend and everyone wants to go away somewhere.  Sandra pointed out that most of the chaos on the four way intersection below us could be sorted out if the Canadians would invest in a few roundabouts, and she was right.

Then back to the hotel feeling bloated and tired, where Sandra read for a bit before turning in, and I wrestled with the new-look Flickr site trying to get photos loaded in an order that makes some sense.  Have a look here.

Tomorrow is jet lag day, so we'll be taking it slow, and strolling around the apparently magnificent Stanley Park, which we missed out on last time.