First day out an about

First things first.. Vancouver is huge. Huge! I walked around a tiny part of the Vancouver map, and I covered Rathmines to Dorset street easily, probably more.

This weekend is Celticfest in Vancouver. Its pretty shameless and awful, and actually makes me feel a little bad. This celebration of celticness is so trite, weird and inaccurate that I actually feel mildly embarassed. My own relationship with my national identity is complicated enough without people turning being Irish into a farce. The highlight of this was a place called Milsean. Yes, on the first day in Canada, I find a supplier of "authentic" Irish chocolate. Made to an Irish recipe apparently. Indeed. From what I could gather it was belgian Callebaut couverture, with boat loads of brown sugar and candy. Not that it wasn't nice. I just don't think it was in any way irish, and there was not a hell of a lot of chocolate there either.

As part of my bizarre interest in anything Canadian, I used to watch a show late on RTE2 on Tuesdays called Corner Gas. A canadian sit com set in rural Saskatchewan, its actually pretty funny. My first celeb spotting was 2 of the actors from that... Vancouver is known as Holywood North because of the amount of US film and TV production here. I encountered one film set myself yesterday. I'll keep ye updated as I spot more. 

Found a hot chocolate shop called Mink, where I had some Double Chocolate Stout with Salted Pretzel chocolate. Pretty tasty. And they had genuine Mint tea. Now if only the girls behind the counter had been interesting, but the overheard conversation was thoroughly vacuous, so I'm not sure I'll be back. Might be an interesting idea as a franchise though. The decor was good, and the chocolate was nice. Menu was probably a bit lite, but that might be a good thing.

I mention again, it was a really long walk. That is because I was looking for a games shop called Drexoll Games. And I looked at the map and didn't take account of the scale of things. I got a ferry at one point, (vancouver has super regular cheap river/inlet public transport) and asked the guy the way to MacDonald street... He looked at me and struggled and just said get a bus its about 20 blocks away... I chuckled internally to myself declaring all canadians dead lazy. I reckoned if I found 4th Avenue, it was just a straight walk from there. How far could it really be? I should remember that the Appian Way from Rome to the south of Italy was just one straight road.

I found the place eventually and felt pretty good about the walk. Got to chat to the owner and staff and even got a game of Brass in. Its the in thing here at the moment. They have only had it a month... (Europe gets some things way quicker than the north americans. And not just sarcasm.) (On that note vancouver is very like the US. The people are a good bit friendlier and the bus driver I will mention later was brilliantly unprofessional, but the cars, the infrastructure, the buildings are all straight out of holywood movies... Oh wait! Could it be that our views of america are actually our views of Vancouver, and not truely america at all?? :) )

The buses here are cool. They are kind of half tram, half bus. They are solidly connected to an overhead electric system by 2 arms that stretch off the roof of the bus. The bus can move about freely enough, as the arms seem very flexible, but the buses can't overtake one another, so if one stops at a busstop, they all have to stop. On the one bus I had, the driver was hilarious. Theres quite a bit of power in the engines of these things, and they'd speed up pretty quick, and then he'd need to slam on the breaks to slow down. Every time he did this he'd shout out a warning to the passengers to hang on!. The passengers called him sir too! Awesome stuff.

Still no Luggage. Should head down to reception now and see if it has turned up actually. May need to buy more clothes..

Later..