Land of the Never Rising Sun(Thoughts from Places: Vancouver)

Didn't look like this while we were there

In recent years it has become a tradition of sorts to visit my extended family somewhere on the west coast. This year was no exception; I completed finals, packed my bags, packed them again and prepared to head over to Vancouver, BC, which is where a majority of my extended family resides. It's also where my parents spent their formative years and so we have been going back ever since I've been really young.

I have never really found airports to be stressful, mainly just the places where you wait for hours on end and it ultimately makes you tired more than anything else. But I would argue that this flight over from Boston to Denver ranks very high on my stressful airplane experiences list, second only to the time we ran out of fuel in the middle of a field in the middle of the night(not joking).

Denver International Airport is very long.

The weather in Chicago(whence our plane came) was apparently abysmal and thus that flight coming in was over an hour late. Which would normally not be a problem except we needed to make a connection in Denver, Colorado and we had a little bit over an hour between our originally scheduled arrival and our connecting flight. The short of it is that after sprinting 3/4ths of a mile in under 4 minutes(the fastest I have ever run anything, incidentally) and a gate agent that made me want to pull a Draco Malfoy(My father will hear about this!!!), my parents and I finally made it up to Canada.

There be beavers. 

Totem poles...

Having lived in the Northeast my entire life, Vancouver(which is in the Pacific Northwest) always seems kind of quirky interesting, not least of all because they have a zoo(?) in the middle of airport. The name also seems to invoke images of copious amounts of totem poles as well, which are things you will never find in Massachusetts. So that's always interesting.



My brother joined us shortly thereafter and then we went to a wedding(which seems to be a trend lately). Most of the time I spent eating or sleeping, two activities that had gone to the wayside as of late. Vancouver has excellent Asian food on which we all happily gorged and most of the time allotted to eating was spent in the company of my lovely family members. We had Hong Kong style banquets, congee, wonton and noodles, dim sum, sushi, bubble tea...basically ALL the Chinese food as seen below.

Food.

Food.

Food.

Honestly, I don't really know how I am going to go back to school food after being in Vancouver for 10 days; I've gotten so spoiled. I would say that we spent about 85% of our awake time eating but we did do some other things too. We saw the Trinity Holiday light contest which was really spectacular(albeit probably not too eco friendly). We did some shopping in the Asian malls(malls that have predominantly stores from Asia or catering to Asians). We went to Downtown Vancouver to see the Olympic torch as well as Queen Elizabeth Park to see the view.

Unfortunately for us the sun only shone for about 2 hours of our 10 day trip and most pictures that I've taken to suggest otherwise were likely digitally enhanced. We used to visit the city in the summer and spend more time outdoors and doing things but this is quite a challenge in the winter because it might be cloudy, raining, or snowing. So a lot of the time we stayed indoors. I started to chip away at reading Game of Thrones and played computer games to amuse myself since I lacked internet connection.

It occurred to me that the city feels differently to me now than it did when I was 4 or 5 years old. It's busier, more pressured, and dare I say more inhibited. That's not to say that one is superior to the other because I think I can appreciate being there much more today than I could before(especially now that I've consented to eating raw things). But it is also a reminder that nothing ever stays completely the same, a feeling I'm sure affected my parents who had lived there in the 1970s much more acutely than it did me. A bittersweet revelation. But as long as the dim sum continues to be good, I don't think we have much to complain about.