Monday, August 2nd
Monday we let ourselves sleep in again to get some rest. Once we were up and ready, we headed out and walked the several blocks to the Elbow Room, a breakfast and lunch diner that specializes in attitude. The owners are super blunt and use raw language if they feel they need to, and the place has quite a reputation for being a fun place to eat. We did enjoy the food, and I was told to “move your tush” when they needed me to switch tables and then told to move the same body part in more explicit language once we were done with breakfast. The food was good and unusual – I got the cinnamon roll French toast. The meals were about standard size for home meals, which felt small for a restaurant, especially when the bill came to almost $40 with tip. It was a good experience, but I would not need to do it again for that cost.
We headed back to the hotel to get outfitted for the day, including snack crackers to keep me happy. We swung by a 7-11 store to pick up an all-day transit card. They cost $9 each and let you ride any public transportation you want all day long. We walked down to a bus stop on Granville Street and waited for a bus. And waited. And waited. It turns out that Monday was “BC Day,” a regional holiday, and some of the bus lines only ran every 20 or 30 minutes. We had some odd entertainment in commenting on the mannequins in a store called Dare to Wear. You can use your imagination and probably will not be too far from the truth. Anyway, a bus came along and we caught it to Granville Island.
Granville Island, as mentioned in the last post, is a shopping and street-performer district. We had gone to see if we could find James Hawkins from the night before. We found him after only one false start (looking for a book store we never did find), and he was delighted to see us. I’m glad we got there on the early side – around noon – because he was almost sold out of his books. He gave us a book, and Mer bought another, and he was kind enough to sign them both. He recommended some more things to see, and even went so far as to give us his phone number if we had any questions. Again, what an extraordinary person.
We came out of the book store to see a large crowd gathered around a man who was addressing them through a PA system, and he was telling two men to stretch out a chain. He seemed funny, and it looked interesting, so we stopped. He was a street performer and magician, and he already had his hands handcuffed behind him. He had the two men, at whom he poked good-natured fun, test a long chain to prove it was real. Then, he had a girl from the audience search him for keys, with some wink-wink humor along the way, and she tested his handcuffs. Once the girl had verified that he was not carrying any keys, the two men from the audience wrapped him up in the chain. He then stepped into a bag held by the girl, and she tied it gently around his neck. She then counted down sixty seconds, and as time ran out, he stepped out of the bag, free from the chains and handcuffs and wearing a pink tutu. Why not? It was very entertaining. We gave him $10 and considered it well spent. We wandered around the island for a few more minutes, but it was crowded and the maps were not very good, so we kept not finding the stores I wanted to see (like a silk weaver place). So, we left and went back to the bus stop.
I don’t remember where exactly we got off, but it must have been Granville Street somewhere. We made our way north along Granville Street, which has four blocks of it blocked off as a pedestrian zone, which is nice. We headed down to Waterfront Station, which is a bus/train/ferry station, and used our all-day passes to jump on board the Sea Bus. The Sea Bus is a passenger ferry that takes 15-20 minutes to cross the northern bay to get to North Vancouver. Once we got to North Vancouver, I wanted to get some hot chocolate for the sugar, liquid, and calories, and eat my crackers. We swung into a place called The Coffee Bun, which sells sweet buns coated with a dusting of coffee. I ordered my hot chocolate (and got an odd stare for getting one when it was 75 degrees out), and then I decided to try a chocolate coffee bun as well. I split it with Mer. As an aside, the store was run by Asian immigrants, and on the counter was a notepad with the header “Is Anything Okay?” (presumably instead of “is everything okay?”). Mer and I loved that, and have been trying to work it into our lexicon.
The chocolate coffee bun was quite good (the coffee was very light), and my crackers hit the spot. While I ate, Mer called her friend Beata.
Meredith taught English in Romania for a year back in 1995-1996. Mer and her roommate, Laura, became good friends with a family there who had a 16-year-old daughter, Beata. Beata had come over to the U.S. once in 1999 or so, but that was the last time Mer and Beata had seen each other. In the meantime, Beata married the older brother of a classmate; her husband’s name is Ionut (pronounced “Yo-NEWTS”), which is Romanian for “Johnny.” Ionut and Beata emigrated to Vancouver about four years ago, and had a son, Andrei, over two years ago. Since they were in Vancouver, Mer and I wanted to catch up with Beata and Ionut, and meet Andrei.
Mer got in touch with Beata, and she told us they would pick us up where we were, Lonsdale Quay. We sat next to a fountain where we were all to meet, and we people-watched (including watching a man with a huge snake – ugh), and listened to the free music from a band nearby. It was most pleasant. Beata and Ionut and Andrei showed up after about 15 minutes or so, and we all walked back to the car. Beata looked much the same as I remembered her. I had met Ionut once in Romania back in 1997, but I had forgotten. Andrei was very cute and was very well behaved. Beata and Ionut had made the decision to raise Andrei speaking Romanian and Hungarian in the home, and figured he would pick up English and so be trilingual. That is very cool, but meant I could not communicate with a two-year-old. That takes you down a few pegs!
Beata and Ionut wanted to show us North Vancouver, so we piled into their car and Ionut drove us to Lynn Canyon Park. Lynn Canyon boasts a canyon, a very pretty river, lots of trails, and a suspension bridge that is about 150 feet above the canyon floor. Mer had been hoping to see the bridge and cross it as a test case for the more famous and much longer and higher Capilano suspension bridge, which is the longest and highest in the world. Because of the regional holiday, the park was packed, including the bridge. On the plus side, the extra people made the bridge sway less because of the extra weight, but on the bad side, crossing the bridge was very slow. I was scared crossing over, but did manage to get over without too much trouble by putting my head down and watching my feet. On the far side, Ionut wanted to show us the small river in the canyon, so we hiked down a very pretty hiking path for about a half mile to a place where we could see and climb into the river. It was very very clean, and very cold, and quite shallow where we were. I climbed into the river and jumped from rock to rock, but was not anywhere near as agile as Ionut. At one point Ionut even grabbed Andrei and jumped from rock to rock out into the middle of the stream, and did so without the least hesitation. We all splashed about for awhile and enjoyed the sun and water and trees, and then we headed back. Crossing back over the bridge was not much fun at all. People kept stopping to look around and to take pictures, and I was stuck on the bridge. I was so scared I thought at one point I might start crying. Finally, the log-jam of people moved on and I was able to get to land. I was covered in a damp, cold sweat. That pretty much ruled out the Capilano bridge. There was no way I was going to pay to be that terrified.
After Lynn Canyon, we all headed over to Whytecliff Park, which is a seaside park with lots of trees and exposed rock by the ocean. It was breathtaking. While Ionut and Andrei played in the park playground, Beata, Meredith and I wandered around the paths. Beata took us right up to the edge of the ocean, and she was nimbly jumping from rock to rock. I’m pretty confident in my footing most of the time, but I was a little nervous that one slip could be very painful or fatal. I was also worried about Mer, who does not always have the best footing. We were all fine, and the views were worth it. We wandered down to the small beach, and we poked around on the rock on one side of the beach. It was low tide, so we could have walked out to a huge mound of granite and climbed it (there were quite a few people on it already), but I was content with the scrabbling that I had already done. We caught back up with Ionut and Andrei, and we all got back in the car and headed over to Horseshoe Bay, where the major passenger and car ferries go out of. We wandered the small beach for a few minutes, and then went to Ya-Ya’s restaurant, where Ionut proclaimed they had the best fish and chips around. Mer got the fish and chips and seemed very pleased, but I got a wood-fired chicken sandwich that really was good.
After supper, we walked down on a pier and looked at the massive ferries for Victoria Island, and then got back in the car and headed east to Deep Cove. Deep Cove is a quiet little bay town, northeast of Vancouver but still reachable by bus. It was very pretty and very quiet. We wandered out onto the pier with Ionut while Beata and Andrei played at Deep Cove’s playground. We spent about fifteen minutes by the water, and then wandered back toward the small town. Ionut asked if we wanted ice cream, to which I immediately agreed. Canada has lots of Italian ice cream places that serve real gelato. We got some ice cream from the local store, and brought some back for Beata. It was a great treat, especially surrounded by water and mountains.
By this time, it was well after 9:00, and Ionut insisted on driving us back to our hotel. We got to drive across the Lion’s Gate Bridge, so we got to see and cross it without walking it. The drive through Stanley Park was also very nice. We said goodbye and made plans to see each other again the next day. Mer and I went right to bed, having had another busy walking day.