We were quite lucky that we didn’t have to organize accommodation for Vancouver, as Johanna – a former study colleague of Tobi – left Munich a few weeks before us in order to live in Vancouver for a year. So we wrote her a few weeks in advance and of course she said it’s ok for us to sleep on the floor. It even became better, as she moved to a new apartment 5 days prior to our arrival which had a convertible couch. Luxury, ey?
After a long but beautiful drive through the fantastic landscape of Canada, we arrived at her location and she directly introduced us to the typical Vancouver Monday evening life. We went to the beach just a few blocks away, which offers countless free activities for locals. Volleyball, Beachball, picnic areas and Yoga, just to name a few. As we didn’t have dinner already, we chose one of the thousand Chinese restaurants nearby and of course we finished with a beer. Just like in Bavaria. Johanna also told us everything we need to know about Vancouver. As we also figured out the next day, the main thing is the following:
Vancouver is quite famous, not just because of the Olympic Winter Games five years ago, but it doesn’t have a lot of touristic attractions to offer. So not comparable to LA, San Francisco or Las Vegas. It’s more a hub for tourists and backpackers who take off to discover the wilderness of Canada from there. On the other hand, it offers a lot for locals, why we chose to participate to that after we discovered Downtown and the surrounding areas the following day. First we walked over Granville Island and its cute market, visited the Waterfront and the Canada Place with the Convention Centre (which looks a bit like a copy of the Opera House in Sydney), saw Gastown (which has the oldest gas clock in the world) and walked along Stanley Park.
The next day Johanna had a free day, why we drove with her and two of her friends along the beautiful coast line between Vancouver and Whistler to the Chief, which is a mountain we wanted to climb. Unfortunately, we were unlucky with the weather for our whole time in Vancouver. Like along most of the west coast, there were forest fires around Vancouver and that’s why Vancouver was covered with smoke clouds the whole week. Therefore we didn’t see anything of the famous coast line instead of some shapes in the smoke. The hike was great anyway (even though quite exhausting with 600m elevation change within 3km), because the smoke gave the area a quite mystic touch. In the evening, Kerstin and Johanna went to a Yoga lesson, while Tobi had a powernap on the beach 🙂
Johanna took us to her campus the next day, which is said to be one of the nicest in Northern America for a reason. After Johanna showed us her office and gave us some hints for exploring the campus, we went off. We saw the botanical Gardens, the Biodiversity and Anthropology Museum. But everything only from the entry, as the admission was really expensive. Don’t they get enough money from the students anyway? We continued walking around after having lunch together with Johanna and were really impressed. One can only dream of having such a nice campus in Germany. In the evening we all met at the Canada Place for a free Open Air Cinema to watch “Despicable Me”. Friday was more a relaxing and organisation day. After a lot of comparing we finally found a good flight from San Diego to Washington D.C. We met again at the Campus in the evening, as there was a presentation going on. Every second Friday, one grad student presents one topic, which could be anything but related to his studies. Quite funny idea, and that’s how we learned something new about time travels. Afterwards we finally wanted to try the most typical Canadian dish, Poutine. The traditional one is French fries with gravy and cheese, but there is a bunch of variations available as well. E.g. chicken, vegetables or even an extra portion of French fries 😉 It’s actually really good but extremely heavy and afterwards one feels like having eaten a few stones.
On Saturday, the big Khatsalano Mucic and Street Art Festival was going on in Kitsilano, so directly at Johanna’s place. While we were walking around trying free tastings, it even started raining. We didn’t expect that we’d be happy about rain once on our trip. Having had another beer with some other study colleagues of Johanna, we went to Downtown in order to watch a free Stand Up Comedy show. Another friend of Johanna managed to get 6 free tickets for the show and invited us. It was a really cool experience, especially because we understood almost everything, our English actually seemed to have improved 🙂 You see, we had quite an anti-tourist program, but got a really good inside view to the life in Vancouver, which might be even better! Vancouver definitely got part of our Top 5 city ranking so far!
Unfortunately that was already it. Our time in Vancouver was over and we left Johanna driving back to the States going back to L.A. along the coast. It was awesome to see a known face from Munich! After the (sorry) asshole at the border control finally let us back to the states, we drove to our first stop, Seattle. But as always, that’s another story.