Wow!  Vancouver, we love you!  You are so hip and continental and laid back and metropolitan all at the same time.  And your food….no way a person can resist the food here.  Our restaurant budget willpower lasted about 15 minutes…

Our first day exploring Vancouver, we started with dim-sum lunch in Chinatown.  Dim-sum is not a favorite for Wyatt and Dennis, but they tolerated it for me and Maya.  One reason I like it is because you get to order so many different things and just have a few bites of each.  We then poked our heads into a Chinese garden that turned out to be really beautiful and interesting.   Chinatown turned out to be an appropriate first stop for us because Vancouver is made of an extremely diverse population, with about 40% of the residents being Chinese and another ~20% of other asian descent.  

In fact, one of the things I loved most about Vancouver is how international it is.  As we walked down the street or were in a museum, we rarely heard English speakers with an American accent.  We heard all kinds of foreign languages and accents and it added a layer of interest to the whole visit.  

After lunch and the garden our first day, we decided to get a feel for the city from one of those ‘big bus’ tours.  Other people may think they are too touristy, but we have done them in several cities and think they are a great way to spend a first day getting a lay of the land, learning all kinds of interesting and historical facts from the guide, and deciding where you want to spend more time.  As a bonus, because the weather was “not so good” they gave us an extra 24 hours.  There were maybe a few clouds in the sky….

We started out at Stanley Park where we had a view back on the downtown skyline and could see seaplanes taking off and landing in the harbor.  It was a Saturday and the park was jam packed with bikers (as in, you really had to watch out so you didn’t get run over…Vancouver is REALLY into biking).  We walked a ways down the seawall and saw the historic lighthouse.  We then spent some time looking at the totems and learning about the history of their stories and the First Nation people who carved them.   

Our second day we headed straight to the Granville Market, another great public market with so many tempting food stalls and artisan shops.  Dennis and I could have spent the whole day there wandering through the markets and finding good reasons to spend money.  We had a whole city to see, though, so got a delicious lunch overlooking the wharf and then spent the afternoon in the science center, which had a mirror maze that we all got confused in, before walking across town to a restaurant the boys had picked out. 

Unfortunately they didn’t have the tuna that Wyatt had hoped for, but Maya was BLOWN AWAY by the Shirley Temple.  Canadian Shirley Temples are WAY better than ours.  No contest. They have orange juice in them.  But, we didn’t know this or expect it, and in this fancy restaurant not only did Maya’s Shirley Temple have OJ, but it also had super fancy Luxardo maraschino cherries, the colors were layered and not stirred (for a cool ombre effect) and I swear I could also smell and taste a bit of almond flavor in her drink.  Maya was in love.  I was actually concerned for a minute that she’d accidentally gotten a grown-ups drink. 

Our third day we ventured outside of the city to Capilano Park.  Capilano is a beautiful park with huge old-growth trees.  The real draw, though, is the suspension bridge that spans a ravine over the river below.  It’s a 500 foot bridge that is 230 feet in the air, and you walk across it with about a hundred of your closest friends.  And it moves.  It really does sway back and forth and get bouncy out there.  Part of the fun was watching the reactions of the other people walking across…everything from outright panic to pure wheeeeee!  I’m sure you can guess which end of that spectrum our kids were on.  The park also had a cool bridge that was cantilevered over the side of a cliff, and a set of bridges high in the trees.  We spent a lot of time talking to the rangers who had an owl and a falcon with them.  Turns out the feathers we picked up in Salt Lake are probably not kestrel feathers, but some kind of hawk.  Overall it was a cool place, but we really wish we had gotten there first thing in the morning because it was just too busy.

After Capilano, we escaped the crowds (relatively speaking) and went back to Stanley Park to bike all way around the loop, as we’d seen so many people doing during the weekend.  We stopped a few times to walk out on some rocks at low tide and enjoy the view…since it’s a loop you get great views all way around the harbor and sound.  We ended at Stanley Park Brewery, which had just opened the previous month, and Dennis was a happy boy.   Maya got another Shirley Temple.

We rounded our stay in Vancouver out with a visit to the art museum which had a  Giociometti exhibit showing…haunting and grim, but gorgeous all the same.  We also took the kids to the biggest climbing gym they’ve ever seen, stopped in a chocolate shop on a whim and learned all about the cocoa process, and had dinner in a very cool pub in a very sketchy area of town.  Maya had another of the amazing Canadian Shirley Temples.  On the way home from that pub, our taxi driver also made sure we knew that if we decide we want to move to Canada, he has the connections to help us make it in.

Good to have a plan B, #amiright?!??!?