Here is a day-by-day breakdown of my adventures in Vancouver so far...
Saturday - Arrive in Vancouver at 6:45 p.m. I go to my friend Liz's house, we go out for Ethiopian food (which is AWESOME!), then we go back to her place and watch "The Venture Brothers". Day Score : 8.5 out of 10.
Sunday - I'm planning on spending Sunday night at my cousin Kevin's place, so after breakfast, I ask Liz if it's ok for me to leave my luggage at her place while I'm roaming around the city for the day. She assures me that I'll be able to pick it up later. I go to Science World and spend a couple of hours poking around the exhibits. Lunchtime rolls past, so in a flash of inspiration, I decide I want to go to "Wally's Burgers"! (For those of you who don't know, Wally's is the my favourite place in Vancouver, and serves the best burger I've ever had in my life.
Wally's is about 30 blocks away from my current location, but it's a beautiful day and I've got nothing but time, so I decide to walk. After walking for about an hour and a quarter, I get to Wally's. At least, I get to where Wally's is supposed to be. In it's place, there's just a huge frigging crater in the ground. Wally's is gone. I nearly break down in tears, but instead, I just turn around and start walking back to Liz's place so I can pick up my things. The return trip takes almost an hour and a half.
The buzzer for Liz's apartment doesn't work, so I call her from a payphone a block from her place. When I call her, she says "Um, I kind of...did something". It turns out that she's got a new roommate moving in, and she gave this new roommate her key. Because of the ridiculous amount of security in the building, you can't open the front door, call the elevator, press a button
inside the elevator, or use the
stairs without your key. This means that she can't let me into the building or bring me my stuff, because if she leaves her room, she won't be able to get back in. Her new roommate is at work, halfway across the city, and won't be back until 2:00 a.m.
At this point, it begins to rain.
I call my cousin Kev, and he gives me directions to get to his place. The directions work like a charm (it's so nice to be in a place where the public transit system isn't a goddamn joke), and he has a couple of his friends over for supper. We eat burritos and drink wine and beer. This improves my mood immensely. Day Score : -500 out of 10.
Monday - After a lazy morning, I wander downtown to "Action Pants" headquarters, which is where Kevin works. They're working on a couple of super-secret games that I'm not allowed to talk about because I had to sign an N.D.A. before they let me into the building. Suffice to say that it's a cool place, but Kev was telling me that "Action Pants" just got bought by UbiSoft, and nobody's really sure yet what that's going to mean.
Kev and I go out for lunch with a couple of his co-workers. We go to a place called "Phat", and I have the smoked-meat eggs benedict with hash browns. So Good! After lunch, I walk down the sea wall and enjoy being in a place where "outside" isn't shitty.
For supper, we go to "Gyoza King", where I eat entirely too much sushi. Then it's time for me to make my way back to Liz's place to retrieve my luggage. To my surprise, I do this without incident. I can now change my clothes. This makes me happy. Day Score : 7 out of 10.
Now it's Tuesday. I woke up about 45 minutes ago after sleeping for something like 11 hours, so thus far it's been a good day. We'll see what happens when I try to go outside. Wish me luck.
ps Blogger doesn't let you use "!" in post labels. Good job, Blogger. One more stupid thing that pisses me off ever so slightly. I'm sure there's a great reason for this, really.
Labels: fall, scooters, Vacation (no really[exclamation point])
