Week Nineteen

Please note photos have been removed due to lack of hosting space. You can find all my Vancouver photos here.

No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you, I did skip a week last Sunday. But then it was my birthday and my parents and brother were in town so I figured I could do with a week off. And of course because they were here I did a lot more touristy things than I had been doing previously.

As well as the Downtown area of Vancouver and some shopping we walked along the waterfront and I showed them the Olympic Cauldron and some of the sculptures there and around the new conference centre (it was night and none of my pics of the area have come out well – I’ll have to go again during the day as there’s a sculpture of an Orca whale by Douglas Coupland I want to have a decent picture of).

We also went over to Victoria on Vancouver Island for the day which was quite an epic journey – skytrain, to bus, to ferry to bus again, but it’s a gorgeous place and definitely somewhere I want to explore at greater length. We didn’t do much there other than walk around the waterfront (and a had a huge ice cream I was unable to finish) and admire the birds and the seaplanes. Pics of the ferry journey and Victoria below:

We also visited the Anthropology Museum on the University of British Columbia campus (which looks gorgeous). They had sections both inside and outside of First Nations artwork and artefacts as well as European ceramics and artefacts from Australasia and elsewhere. A sampling below:

We also did some exploring of the Gastown area and walked around Canada Place, getting a close look at one of the cruise ships docked there and ready to head up to Alaska.

We also went to the Aquarium which is always a worthwhile visit. We saw both the demonstrations with the Beluga whales and the Dolphins which were excellent, despite the fact that the glorious weather we’d  been having turned into near constant rain.

We also went on a cruise around the harbour (in the freezing rain!)

We also took a walk around the Lost Lagoon at Stanley Park and as well as the normal birds, ducks and swans we managed to see four racoons, which is  a record for me. Very cute and completely unafraid of humans.

It was a really fun week and great to explore some areas of Vancouver I hadn’t been to yet. I am slowly working my way through a list of places to see. Still no news on the job front but I’ve applied to lots of various places and am waiting to hear back.

Till next week…