About Me
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Canada!
1:59 AM | 
Posted by
John and Jess
So it has been a few days. One of them, Jessica and I headed up to Vancouver from Bellingham to see the city. The journey itself was mostly uneventful, except for the intensity of questioning by the Canadian border guards. Being that we came from Illinois, they either took some sort of interest in us or they are just substantially more unfriendly than the US border guards. When entering into Canada, we had multiple checkpoints that asked us to declare any firearms, explosives, etc that we may happen to be carrying. That seemed pretty standard. The young lady who examined our passports at the final booth checkpoint gave us a pretty good interrogation. It went something like this:
Guard “Where are you all coming from”
Us “Illinois”
Guard “Thats a long way to go to visit Vancouver (suspecting tone in her voice)”
Us “Well we're on a road trip this month. We've been staying with a friend in Bellingham and we thought we'd come up here to see Vancouver as this is the only opportunity we have to do that.”
Guard “What is your business in Vancouver?”
Us “We were planning on walking around the city to see the sights, Olympic stadium area, and get some of the sushi that is plentiful here for lunch. We also here that there are some very scenic parks around the city.”
Guard “I wouldn't go all the way to America for sushi.”
Me “We drove about 20 minutes.” (woops!? Don't be rude to them, but that wasn't the greatest interrogative statement...)
Guard “I thought you were from Illinois”
Us “We are staying at a friends in Bellingham this week. Since we're leaving tomorrow we thought we'd come up to Vancouver while we can.”
Guard “Have fun coming through the traffic jam on your way back.” then mumbles statements about traveling, safety, and such, and let us through. There was about 5 cars in front of us at the border on the way back, during 'rush hour.' I don't think this person has ever been within 50 miles of Chicago, LA, or New York.
That was actually a pretty tense conversation, and we were forewarned about it. It was very strange where she chose to attack our statements. All in all crossing the border was a lot more unnerving than we had anticipated. Once in Canada, we had an awesome time looking at the similar but different home construction and infrastructure setup. The city of Vancouver itself had a grid of streets, and to our surprise when we tried to use street names to get to our destination in the downtown area, no street maintained a name for more than a couple miles. With no turns, or other indications of any sort of change, the streets that we happened to travel on changed names multiple times on our journey. It took a little while to figure that one out! They have green, blinking green, yellow, and red lights for traffic. Apart from those items, the city was quite awesome. The bay situated in the urban zone had heavy traffic of seaplanes which we saw taking off and landing. That was very cool to watch. We got up close to the shipping yard with thousands of giant containers. There was heavy traffic on the bay of ships of all sizes. Huge barges doing their business with the shipping yard, small boats cruising around, and the seaplanes giving tours of the city. We even spotted giant piles of sulfur and some other mineral or rock where they used belts to just load up ships directly from that harbor with the raw minerals. Around the city we were able to see many mountaintops.
We spent most of the day walking around the Hastings St. area of the city. Our first stop was a maple syrup shop that sold more varieties of syrup that I could imagine existed. They have us samples of a medium syrup, and it was quite maply and delicious. The jade shop a few stores down had all sorts of jade statue trinkets. They also had a huge jade boulder that had a beatiful green sheen to it. They had taken it and moved it essentially as is into their store. The collection of (super-expensive) beautiful jade statues of elephants, inukshuks (a native rock statue formation), eagles, and other designs was phenomenal. The third store we came across had a huge collection of native wood art. The totem poles, wood cut eagle and other animal designs, boxes, statues, and other wood carvings as well as a few paintings that they had were marvellous. In the upstairs of the shop, we watched one of their artists carving a dolphin design into a large wooden chest. While walking around Jess and I browsed many other types of stores with various themes and items; none of them were as spectacular as those first three.
After all the browsing of shops, we found ourselves in the middle of the Olympic park. So we headed straight for the torch, which is undergoing some kind of renovations to establish it as a permanent structure in the city. The whole park area construction was very cool and stylish. They designed it to have a lot of unique bench type areas where many people can experience solitude while looking at views around the city. The digital orca statue was very cool, and the statement about the piece by the artist was quite profound. After a day full of browsing, we found ourselves to be super hungry and headed to the nearest sushi place. It was very inexpensive, both of us ate delicious sushi rolls to fullness, all for about $12. A great way to end the spectacular day.
We have a lot of catching up to do, we will work on it tomorrow and catch everyone up on the latest goings on-
Love,
Jx2
Guard “Where are you all coming from”
Us “Illinois”
Guard “Thats a long way to go to visit Vancouver (suspecting tone in her voice)”
Us “Well we're on a road trip this month. We've been staying with a friend in Bellingham and we thought we'd come up here to see Vancouver as this is the only opportunity we have to do that.”
Guard “What is your business in Vancouver?”
Us “We were planning on walking around the city to see the sights, Olympic stadium area, and get some of the sushi that is plentiful here for lunch. We also here that there are some very scenic parks around the city.”
Guard “I wouldn't go all the way to America for sushi.”
Me “We drove about 20 minutes.” (woops!? Don't be rude to them, but that wasn't the greatest interrogative statement...)
Guard “I thought you were from Illinois”
Us “We are staying at a friends in Bellingham this week. Since we're leaving tomorrow we thought we'd come up to Vancouver while we can.”
Guard “Have fun coming through the traffic jam on your way back.” then mumbles statements about traveling, safety, and such, and let us through. There was about 5 cars in front of us at the border on the way back, during 'rush hour.' I don't think this person has ever been within 50 miles of Chicago, LA, or New York.
That was actually a pretty tense conversation, and we were forewarned about it. It was very strange where she chose to attack our statements. All in all crossing the border was a lot more unnerving than we had anticipated. Once in Canada, we had an awesome time looking at the similar but different home construction and infrastructure setup. The city of Vancouver itself had a grid of streets, and to our surprise when we tried to use street names to get to our destination in the downtown area, no street maintained a name for more than a couple miles. With no turns, or other indications of any sort of change, the streets that we happened to travel on changed names multiple times on our journey. It took a little while to figure that one out! They have green, blinking green, yellow, and red lights for traffic. Apart from those items, the city was quite awesome. The bay situated in the urban zone had heavy traffic of seaplanes which we saw taking off and landing. That was very cool to watch. We got up close to the shipping yard with thousands of giant containers. There was heavy traffic on the bay of ships of all sizes. Huge barges doing their business with the shipping yard, small boats cruising around, and the seaplanes giving tours of the city. We even spotted giant piles of sulfur and some other mineral or rock where they used belts to just load up ships directly from that harbor with the raw minerals. Around the city we were able to see many mountaintops.
We spent most of the day walking around the Hastings St. area of the city. Our first stop was a maple syrup shop that sold more varieties of syrup that I could imagine existed. They have us samples of a medium syrup, and it was quite maply and delicious. The jade shop a few stores down had all sorts of jade statue trinkets. They also had a huge jade boulder that had a beatiful green sheen to it. They had taken it and moved it essentially as is into their store. The collection of (super-expensive) beautiful jade statues of elephants, inukshuks (a native rock statue formation), eagles, and other designs was phenomenal. The third store we came across had a huge collection of native wood art. The totem poles, wood cut eagle and other animal designs, boxes, statues, and other wood carvings as well as a few paintings that they had were marvellous. In the upstairs of the shop, we watched one of their artists carving a dolphin design into a large wooden chest. While walking around Jess and I browsed many other types of stores with various themes and items; none of them were as spectacular as those first three.
After all the browsing of shops, we found ourselves in the middle of the Olympic park. So we headed straight for the torch, which is undergoing some kind of renovations to establish it as a permanent structure in the city. The whole park area construction was very cool and stylish. They designed it to have a lot of unique bench type areas where many people can experience solitude while looking at views around the city. The digital orca statue was very cool, and the statement about the piece by the artist was quite profound. After a day full of browsing, we found ourselves to be super hungry and headed to the nearest sushi place. It was very inexpensive, both of us ate delicious sushi rolls to fullness, all for about $12. A great way to end the spectacular day.
We have a lot of catching up to do, we will work on it tomorrow and catch everyone up on the latest goings on-
Love,
Jx2
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