Day 11
It's Always Something
In case there was any doubt from what I had to say about the previous day, I'll start out by confirming the obvious by stating that on this day, we ate dinner at the same place we'd eaten the day before. But, I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.
It's funny, because at the end of the ninth day, I was seriously bummed at the prospect of having to get off the train on the tenth day and spend a week in Vancouver. Mind you, it wasn't because I had anything against Vancouver, because I didn't. It's just that I'd grown so fond of train travel that I just didn't want to quit a good thing so soon.
Having said that, I'll have to go on and admit that for all my sorrow at leaving the train, I was sure having a lot of fun in Vancouver.
But, my eleventh day didn't start so great. It would seem that I was to spend my entire vacation swinging wildly between overdoing everything, and suffering for it. This day started on the suffering end of the scale. Sure, the hole in my cheek had healed to the point of not needing constant application of that mouth deadener I'd bought in Jasper. Just leaving it at that would have left me feeling too good, I suppose, so I awoke from a very fitful night's sleep with a distinct feeling of unease.
Since Robert had been doing such a nice job of finding things to do all along, by now, I'd just left the whole thing up to Robert. I just retained irrational veto power over anything he decided. Maybe the real reason for letting Robert decide was that it usually took him a while to come up with an idea, and that gave me time to get more sleep.
He decided to start the day with a cable car ride up the side of Grouse Mountain (3700 feet -- sound metric yet?). In retrospect, this sounds really stupid. I mean, a scant ten days ago, I'd just learned how to be afraid of heights, and here I was, all ready to hang out in a box suspended a couple thousand feet off the ground on a day when my thoughts were already focused on Technicolor yawns.
So, Robert drove me in a semi-conscious state to the cable car station, and bought us tickets to the top of the mountain. We figured it'd be a good chance to get some really swell pictures of Vancouver from real high up, and it even looked promising when we got the tickets. It's just that sometime between the time we got the tickets and the time that we got into the lift a big cloud rolled in and covered the peak of the mountain.
Well, the trip up was nice, except that we couldn't see anything, and by the time we got to the top, all that swinging around on the wire had added further definition to my no longer vague feeling of unease. Now, I could put my finger on it: I felt downright lousy.
We walked around up there on top of the mountain a little bit, but there wasn't much to see except for a cloud, and a ski resort with too much grass on it to be immediately useful. Well, we didn't walk that much, because I didn't feel that ambulatory.
We decided it might be a good time to feed me something, hoping that my problem was hunger based, so we stopped at the overpriced lounge in one of the buildings and got me a bowl of generally ok, but not great seafood chowder. That helped a bit.
Back on foot, we explored a bit more. Turns out that during the winter, the place is also a ski resort, or maybe just a major ski area, or at least as major as you can get at 3800 feet. Even though we were near the end of May, there was still quite a bit of snow up there, which was fun to look at even if I did feel like I was about to decorate a snow bank.
But after a while, the food finally cut in. Of course, by the time this happened, Robert had returned me to the hotel room. Still, I was feeling human again, and was also promising myself to quit staying up all hours of the night reading Len Deighton novels (which is what I'd spent the last few evenings doing). I figured this would be an easy promise to keep, since I'd just about finished the second of the two I bought in Edmonton.
While I had a little lay down, Robert went out and bought some more travelers checks, and got some more cash from a nearby ATM. When he returned, he declared that we were going to the Aquarium to see the killer whales and white whales. Fine with me.
Riding out to the Aquarium, I formalized a few opinions of the Vancouver car buying habits that I'd been nursing to life since we'd arrived. The first was that the Vancouver Mazda dealers must have hijacked the first couple dozen boatloads of Miatas, because they were there in numbers all out of proportion to the number of those cars Mazda was planning to import to the whole continent.
As a matter of fact, I'd decided that owning a Mazda Miata, or at least some other less socially acceptable convertible, was just as essential to any good Vancouver household as, say, a refrigerator. I still couldn't understand why a convertible would be so important to your average Vancouver resident until Robert came to the rescue and speculated that the real reason was that they could hear the rain so much better when it was beating against a canvas top.
Before we hit the Aquarium, we drove around Stanley Park, which is a big green spot on the map, close to the middle of town, where they keep all the local bugs in their natural state. Still, this gave me an opportunity to get some nice pictures (ok, nice picture... again), and to use up that pack of film we'd bought that had an expiration date two months in the past. The pictures weren't too good, though, as most of the town was still fogged in from the morning, which seems to be what the town spends most of its time doing.
After a couple of circumnavigations of Stanley Park (one round intentionally, two more being lost), which were officially us seeing the sights, but were really us repeatedly missing the turn for the Zoo and Aquarium, we finally arrived at our appointed tourist destination.
It was a nice park. Critters all over the place, and mostly of the variety that you could see without magnification. There were pigeons and crows all over the place, and squirrels and ducks as well. As soon as these animals had established that we were from out of state, and therefore considered them to be cute attractions, which in turn meant that we were not of potential harm to them, they'd walk right up to us and say "Hey, man, can you spare a piece of bread? Some peanuts?? Popcorn???". When we didn't give them anything, they pecked at our feet, and faint right in front of us, trying to make us feel all guilty for starving them to death.
I don't know. Maybe I sound too cynical. I really did like the critters. Especially the black squirrels. I hadn't seem them in black before, and I must say, they looked quite sharp in the getup.
We walked through the zoo park, and looked at all the terminally cute little animals, all with their little critter tin cups out, squawking "feed me" at us. I especially liked the Aviary. People think that I'm a bird lover or something. This really isn't true. I just like standing there, wondering to myself what they'd taste like.
Maybe it was all that drooling and lip smacking that got me thrown out of there. I don't know. Maybe it was me whipping out the Acme catalog...
This brought us to the Aquarium and the expenditure of another outrageous admission fee.
Anyway, we got there just in time to see the killer whale show. These are pretty neat animals -- a lot like dolphins, only a whole lot bigger (and they take a whole lot more fish to operate). It turned out that they also had a dolphin in the tank. It wasn't a bottlenose dolphin, but it did look a lot like a miniature killer whale (most of us thought it was one of the whale's kids at first, even if it was 27 years old). It wasn't supposed to do the tricks, but it'd still try to follow the big guys around and mimic their action, sort of like the little dog following the big dog "Spike" around in all those Warner cartoons. It also happened to be around when the fish were being handed out, which might have been its real motivation. It must have learned early on that if it was cute enough, all the spectators would boo the "trainers" out of existence if they didn't give some fish to the little guy, too.
By far, though, the best part of the Aquarium for me was to see the seals and otters. These are both truly wonderful creatures, even if most fishermen would disagree. They came off sorta like aquatic puppies, only a whole lot more devious.
Well, ok, I don't describe it well, but this ain't eating, driving cars, or having a lousy time, and those are the only things I know how to sound really inspired over. I might as well get on with the good stuff, then. Excuse me while I spend a couple of pages eating.
We took the car back to the motel, and walked up the street to the Beijing again. I really liked this place a lot, but you probably didn't notice that. This time, we decided to be a little more experimental with what we ordered. That meant lobster and octopus. The experiment worked. 'nuff said.
On the way back to the motel, Robert and I tossed around the idea of going back there on the next day and trying the Peking Duck. Hmmm... We'd have to think about that one...
So much for another wonderful day in Vancouver. Riding the train may have been pretty wonderful, but that Chinese place is a pretty good way to pass the time, too.
On to Day 12: Life Without Peking Duck
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