So what's been happening? Last friday night, my housemate invited a bunch of his friends over to our apartment for a housewarming, to celebrate his birthday, to celebrate my arrival (any excuse will do really). Overall it went pretty well. Got to meet a whole bunch of new people (all pretty awesome folk from what I can remember!), find out a bit about Vancouver and the Canadian culture itself and swap tales of back home. The most interesting and fun part for me was playing up to the Aussie stereotype and go back and forth with it ("Crikey!"). It's the sort of thing that after having witness it happen with travellers back home in Australian surroundings, it was interesting to finally be on the other side of it. I absolutely loved it! Of course, when drinking games occur (which a person was surprised to find that we hardly play any back home) then the rest of the evening becomes a haze. Suffice to say, I lost this particular game rather badly (I think it was called 'Ride the Bus' or something). Next thing I know, I'm waking up in my bed and wondering where my pants are.
That saturday morning I was awoken to find my housemate, Ryan, scrambling to get downtown to meet up with a friend (the same one that met up with us at St Patricks Day) for ziplining across Vancouver. As part of the olympic celebrations that took place, one of them was a zipline set up over the city itself. It was free but it had a ridiculous line wait of something like 6 hours. I murmured something along the lines of "I'll be half an hour behind you" and plonked back to sleep. An hour later, a rushed change of clothes and a short bus ride later and I'm downtown trying to figure out where the hell they are. Ryans friend, bless her, had been waiting in line since 9am and with some clever banter with one of the supervisors, got me into where they were waiting in line. About 5 hours later in line (where we complained, bonded and made articulate observations about our surroundings) and we were hooked up in harness gear and climbing to the top of the zipline tower..
Top of the zipline tower
Admittedly, I was pretty freaking nervous going up because heights never fully agreed with me. But after you stop climbing stairs and get up there, then it just becomes rather breathtaking instead as you look out over the CBD. Unfortunately my iPhone was in our friends jacket so I couldn't grab any shots.. But it was awesome!
Zip.
Fly.
BAM - reach the other side.
That was fun.
After a well earned meal at Speakeasy afterwards (where I tried my first Canadian burger, which is actually just a normal burger but with bacon on it according to the menu) we walked around downtown..
.. Before making our way to BC Place and GM Place (AKA 'Canada Hockey Place' during the Olympics). BC Place is where the Olympics were held, and my god, the absolute size and scale of the place was purely epic! To know that just a few weeks ago all the stuff I was watching on TV took place at this location was awe-inspiring to me.
Right next door to it was one location I'd been hanging out for desperately..
It was awesome to finally be here. And lucky for us, there was the Detroit Red Wings visiting that night, so I got to see the streets surrounding it littered with blue Vancouver Canucks jerseys and White/Red Red Wings jerseys. The streets had an amazing amount of Canucks paraphernalia surrounding the arena and was overall really cool to see. Before we left I took a moment to think about how just a few weeks ago, Sidney Crosby scored an overtime goal to get Canada the gold medal in mens hockey.. Cool stuff for any hockey fan!
That evening we went to the Media Club to see a band called Postdata, which are the side project of 2 of the members from the band Wintersleep. It was a quaint and tiny venue, capacity about 150 or so max. Awesome intimate gig with some amazing vocals, awesome acoustic and performances by artists that were genuinelly loving what they did. One thing that amazed me about people that go to see live music in Vancouver is when the artist plays everybody shuts up and looks at them. It shows an immense respect for the performer(s) and I was utterly impressed that this was just another facet of Canadian culture itself.
\Afterwards, I got to walk through downtown at midnight (on our way home).. When the city lights up, it doesn't look anything like it does during the day. And unfortunately all my photos came out terrible and unfocused.. But I did manage to get one of Hudson Bay.. It's hard to put into perspective how big the Olympic banners they had were (due to how shit the iPhone camera is).. But hopefully you can get an idea..
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