My friend Trina was right: I absolutely loved Vancouver. It was a perfect blend of European an Western, very walkable city with beautiful old and new architecture. It’s the city striving to reach out to the future, full of high tech (fully automated subway cars, interactive kiosks, even high-speed hand dryers that look like mini tanning booths!) yet sporting weird wooden poles interlaced with wires in the alleyways.

We took the Greyhound bus both ways. It was actually a very pleasant trip albeit a little “incident” on our way back when the driver got scary angry at some people who apparently drank alcohol on the bus.

Anyhow, we managed to stay in a beautiful hotel, Georgian Court located right in downtown. Every day we would go discover something new and there wasn’t nearly enough time to see everything. What we did first thing was to take the tour bus around town noticing places we want to come back to. The things we saw in Vancouver: steam clock in Gastown neighbourhood, that chimes every hour using steam pipes, Chinatown complete with its gates, Stanley park (although from the bus) and the “Olympic logo” statue, market and the whole Granville Island, magnificent views from Vancouver Lookout tower and just everything we could see by walking on our two feet.

Steam clock in Gastown from Zlata Zubenko on Vimeo.

We ate a lot of sushi. Sushi places are like Starbuckses in Seattle-on every corner. Inexpensive ($25 for BOTH of us and so much we couldn’t finish it!) and very, very tasty. There is a large Asian community in Vancouver and so the food is very authentic.

Unfortunately, the 3-day weekend was over way too soon and I am still experiencing a withdrawal.

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