the adventures of pinkaholic girl

vintage shopping is fun

Steve Irwin is dead! OMG! We found out today while browsing in a funky gift store in gastown. The owner – with tattoos and fishing hat – was thrilled to have customers, and talked our ears off. We didn’t believe him when he told us, but others at the hostel verified it’s true. Death by stingray to the heart. What a horrible way to go...

Back at the start of the day, Alison and I enjoyed a surprisingly edible hostel breakfast at 8:30 (noisy lawyer again making an appearance), then headed off to Grouse Mountain. It’s touted as the “top” attraction of Vancouver and you need to take a ferry as well as a bus + cable car to get to the top. You’re supposed to be able to get views of Washington State on a good day.

Being a public holiday, all Vancouver public transport fares were $2.25. Bargain! The ferry ride is pleasant, but the mountain is very overrated. Once we were at the top, the highlight was the grizzly bear habitat where we saw a bear reclining. It was very cute.

I had a frozen popsicle with frozen yoghurt. It was tasty, and much cheaper than Haagen Dazs which cost $4.50. (bleh!) The views from the top of Grouse Mountain were partly obscured by cables, so it wasn’t that nice, and definitely not great value for $30 :p Maybe if you have kids and stuff it would be better, but nothing at the top seemed worth it for us.

Back at ground level, we wandered our way through gastown and Chinatown and found some awesome vintage stores. I didn’t buy anything – owing to the huge amount of luggage I already have – but I was tempted.

Vancouver’s Chinatown appeared to be dead when we wandered through. We attributed it to Vancouver being a much sleepier town than Sydney. We saw the narrowest building in the world according to Ripley’s believe it or not (Jack Chow’s insurance, only 1.8m wide, where you stand at the window on the street to get service) and the Sun Yat Sen Chinese gardens – the public ones – because we felt cheap after the $30 Grouse Mountain affair.

We ate lunch at a BBQ restaurant which had actual asian people in it! Only when we sat down did we realise that the menu was entirely in Chinese. We felt sheepish and rude having to ask for an English version. It was super cheap though at about $6 each – Vancouver eating seems to be a lot cheaper than Sydney. There was a cake shop selling lots of fresh goodies too. Mmmm....

Wandered back through gastown in the afternoon. It’s like the rocks in Sydney, lots of tourist souvenir stores amongst cute and funky one-offs. We met the crazy Canadian shopkeeper who had the CUTEST soft toys: mouldy toast, peanut butter and jelly sandwich, happy toast, bananas – and a joke gift of a tampon soft toy. There was all sorts of wacky stationery from Japan too.

We walked back to the hostel and FINALLY got to use the internet. Hooray! I booked my flight to France, at 21 british pounds.

We went for a wander up Davie st for dinner, there’s lots of very cheap restaurants but there seems to be some fairly dodgy people who just loiter on street corners for the fun of it. As a result, we resolved to eat dinner earlier tomorrow. We’re also going to shop on Robson St and cycle around Stanley park tomorrow. Should be fun!

posted by d @ 1:28 pm