Days 11, 12, 13, 14 (aka VANCOUVER!)

It's been days since I updated, and that's mostly due to the tight schedule we've had here in Vancouver.  How I ever believed 5 days would be enough, I'm not sure.  Here goes:

Day 11

We awoke early on our last morning on the Canadian, and headed off to have breakfast with the only other two young people in sleeping class.  We'd seen them often, but never had a chance to eat or chat with them.  The evening before, right after dinner, we stopped by their booth to see if they wanted to have breakfast with us the next morning - our last opportunity for social gathering before we pulled into Vancouver.  They were very friendly and pleasant, and it was fun to talk to people our age who were on the trip for similar reasons that we were.  After our final breakfast, we packed up and were ready to leave the cramped living spaces and lack of internet behind us.  At least, I was suffering from internet withdrawal. Once we arrived, we caught a cab to the hotel; we were momentarily thrown for a loop when the receptionist told us that Hotwire (yay) had booked us in a room with two double beds.  We'd have to upgrade, which we'd been considering doing anyway, to a single King.  Except that they didn't have a free King room for the entire time, so we'd have to switch part-way.  Not loving this, we asked for another alternative and found ourselves booking a Suite room for little more than the King room upgrade would have cost us.  Score!  It was even ready for us, at 10am (usual check-in being 3pm), so we took our bags up and crashed onto our non-moving sleeping arrangements.  Heaven.  Then the front desk called up to tell us that there were 'cards' waiting for us in the lobby - which I deciphered as the gift cards Mel (my Vancouverite friend) said she'd drop off.  Our day was set - we headed over to the Vancouver Art Gallery in the afternoon, and Bin 941 for dinner. 

We figured that it was about time for pre-gallery lunch, and set off to find a good sushi place nearby.  We ended up at Tsunami Sushi, a restaurant on the second floor whose claim-to-fame was a chain of boats, floating on a little moat surrounding a sushi bar.  Each boat had different plates of sushi on them, and little signs all around explained that certain plates cost a certain amount.  Before we knew it, we had a mountain of empty plates piling up in front of us - from rolls, pieces of sushi, salmon roe, even an elusive (and most expensive) 'red plate'.  I must say, the quality of the sushi didn't taste any more impressive than where I was used to in Toronto, but MAN was that salmon red.  Overall, a satisfactory and entertaining sushi lunch - the first of many, I was sure.

After lunch, we went to the Art Gallery.  Really, it isn't much different than any other art gallery I've been to; the most memorable thing we saw was the Emily Carr exhibit, which featured three modern-day Canadian Artists paired up with Carr and asked to interpret different periods of her work.  I admire Carr, even if I don't love her work the way I love Cezanne's or Botticelli's, and the work of the other artists in comparison was intriguing.  The other exhibits at the gallery were momentarily interesting as well, but some made Roger and I discuss the fine line between exhibitionistic tendencies and creative art.

That evening we headed out to Bin 941 for dinner, with no idea what to expect.  It was a colourful hole-in-the-wall 'tapas' parlour (the quotations will be explained later) that looked like a mix between the Red Room in Toronto, and O'Thym, the super-chic place in Montreal that blew our socks off.  Roger admitted that the decor looked like something you'd find in Barcelona, which certainly suited the vibe of the place.  We mulled over the menu and ended up ordering a starter tapas of Golden Beets with Pine Nuts and Truffle Sauce, followed by the Ahi Tuna plate and the Pacific Halibut.  The beets were sweet and tasty, made much more delicious depending on how many pine nuts you could spear to go with them.  The salty and nutty flavours of the nuts paired nicely with the sweet starchiness of the beets; the truffle oil (as I've been discovering) brought everything together in perfect harmony.  But the beets rated hardly more than passable once we tasted the Tuna dish, which was easily the star of the night.  Perfectly seared tuna chunks had the perfect balance of seasoned-grilled outside, and fresh sweet raw insides.  Fighting to be admired as well was its neighbour on the plate, the tuna tartare - a ceviche-like salad of flavourful tuna chunks, light in a way the grilled tuna wasn't.  On the other end of the seared tuna was a mildly flavoured roll of noodles, acting more like an understated compliment to the dish than anything that tried to steal the limelight.  Very, very tasty.  Finally, the Halibut showed up with a tart glass noodle and mango salad.  Honestly?  The noodles tasted like what I make at home - which is both complimentary and disappointing.  It was tasty, but not at all exciting.  The halibut was cooked nicely, but what stole the show of this dish was the greens it had been sitting on.  I'm pretty sure it wasn't spinach, but it was some dark green leaf that had a rich and wonderful flavour to it - reminding me of the vegetables in the seafood course at The Press Gang.  I really like restaurants that treat their greens and veggies with as much attention as the meat that goes with them.  However, we were a bit frustrated with this whole usage of 'tapas' to describe small plate sharers.  For all its scrumptiousness, I would not call Bin 941 a "tapas parlour".  But back to praise, we heartily enjoyed the Storm Ale pints of Stout that accompanied our food.  Very tasty, and not at all expensive.  Huzzah to the local breweries!  We turned down dessert in the end - I think we were a bit desserted out after the constant feedings on the train.  Finally, we walked back to the hotel, sufficiently stuffed, and tucked ourselves in for the night.

Day 12

Tuesday morning started with a search for the perfect breakfast food.  After having fairly regular breakfasts for the past 4 days, I was determined to start days off right in Vancouver.  I did a little searching and found a blog dedicated to breakfasts in Vancouver (I love foodies), which told us that a very, very impressive haunt was just around the corner from us.  So Roger and I hopped up the road to Medina Cafe and fell deeply and desperately in love.  The only downside, we could find, was that the menu had too many tasty things on it.  Roger intelligently commented that we could just come back again and try more of them.  So we did.  For Tuesday morning, he ordered the waffles (oh, their waffles) with Fig and Marmelade Confiture, with a side of Saucisson de Paris (duck sausage).  I ordered La Santé, ironically the closest thing to tapas we'd had the whole trip, which was a plate consisting of avocado, tomato and black olive tapenade, prosciutto, ciabatta toast, and a soft-boiled egg.  It amused me, as the plate ws put in front of me, that everything sat in its own little corner, waiting for me to assemble it how I chose.  It was so similar to something I'd have for breakfast at home, that I was delighted beyond the tastiness of the food.  Roger let me taste some of his sausage, which was excellent, and some of his waffle, which was also good... other than the fact that I REALLY don't like marmelade.  I was determined to try one of the other waffle flavours on our return.  After a breakfast of such magnitude, we were ready for anything that day.

We left the cafe and instead of turning left to head back to the hotel, turned right and headed north into Gastown.  We spent at least a couple hours just wandering through the old Victorian area, ogling the interesting architecture and mix of characters that peopled the streets.  On our way back, we discovered a T&T grocery store, which delighted both of us with its asian personality.  It was as if Sobeys and Toronto's Chinatown Groceries merged into a supermarket where you could order take-out dim sum, buy live King Crab (holy $#!+, they're HUGE), find an aisle marked "Western Cookies" and yoghurt called "YoBaby", and grab fresh sashimi, uni or roe from the "ready-to-go" section.  It was hardly a 5 min. walk from the hotel, and became our go-to for quick snacks.  Roger got a Lychee drink, a fried-bun and BBQ Pork sandwich; I got some dimsum (pork & shrimp dumplings), a very tasty cold mushroom and cucumber salad, and a coconut milk tapioca dessert.  We brought it all back to the hotel and feasted.

That afternoon, we headed out to Granville Island.  Up to and including this point, the weather in Vancouver had been all mist and rain.  It became apparent that the complimentary umbrella that the hotel kindly left in our suite was more than just an "in case".  I have also been amused by the amount of umbrella stands everywhere, hiding just inside most shops.  Rain is certainly a part of the culture here.  Anyway, we hopped off the aquabus onto Granville and peeked around.  In the weather, the visitors were mostly students of the Emily Carr Design Institute or employees of the market and surrounding shops.  After a fun tour of the Public Market, we strolled the streets of the Island, poking our heads in here and there.  We saw a store that sold incredibly beautiful painted silk shawls and wraps, a store that sold brooms (one of which was labeled "racing broom"), ceramics, glass, an enclosure with woodcarvers hard at work on a totem pole-like sculpture, and a sake store.  I'd been in the Sake store the last time I was here, but hadn't tasted anything.  Roger and I tasted three of their different kinds and learned that the sake rice used to make them was grown here, in Canada.  Neither of us had had cold sake before, and the taste was surprisingly pleasant and starchy - not at all what I was expecting.  After our sampling, we headed over to PICA for dinner.

PICA stands for Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts, and was recommended to us by my friend Laura.  The meal is cooked by the students, in a kitchen you can see into thanks to a few large glass windows in the dining room.  I was entertained by a guy scraping chocolate off a marble-topped counter.  I was even more entertained when a bald man in chef attire (who clearly looked like the teacher) came and tested the chocolate, then gestured something authoritatively, which led to the original guy taking the bowl of chocolate back into the depths of the kitchen.  This of course was all without sound and behind glass, which reminded me of when my sisters and I used to mute Soap Operas and substitute the dialogue for one of our own creation. 

Dinner there was excellent.  We had pulled pork bowtie pasta as a first course, followed by fish for mains.  Roger ordered the Sablefish, and I the salmon, and both of us were beyond pleased with how perfectly both were cooked - not at all over or undercooked.  I forced dessert in - I'm getting very intimate with the feeling of being stuffed - which for me was a light and airy chocolate eclair with raspberry coulis.  Roger had an apple crumble which was gone before I could ask for a bite.  I wasn't sure I'd be able to do anything but roll home after the meal, but there's no cure for fullness like exercise, so after the aquabus returned us to downtown, we walked all the way back up to the hotel - no more than 20 or 30 mins really.  It wasn't late when we got home, but my body still thought in EST, and 10:30 was quite late enough for bed.

(In an attempt to pace my update, I'll stop now and add more soon.  But not too soon.)