Vancouver, Day One

Life is good.  Particularly in the Pacific Northwest.  My initial reactions to Vancouver are:

• It's very quiet.  Despite what I would consider to be a pretty late night, we hit the Sky Train to go into the City by 9:00 AM.  Public transportation is very quiet, there weren't many people around for the first 2-3 hours, and even in the busiest parts of the day, just very peaceful seeming.  Maybe it was the parts of the City we were in, but lots more walking and biking going on than driving.  The only notable exception was that when we were in the Chinese Garden, there was an elementary level soccer tournament going on across the street, and there was a very enthusiastic announcer.  Troy kept telling me that it was the Women's World Cup.  It wasn't.
• Vancouver is a pretty clean city (but we also encountered a lot of homeless people).  Also, SUPER easy to navigate using public transportation.  We had considered doing a hop on/off thing, to get a sense of the City, and it ended up being both more direct and wildly cheaper to just use public transportation to get where we were going.
• I'm loving the backdrop of the mountains, plus all the water.  Very picturesque.  Coupled with the quiet and the clean, I feel like Vancouver feels smaller than maybe it is (pop. 603,500).
• Have I mentioned the climate?  The temperature maxed out in the low 70s, low humidity, and minimal clouds for the whole day.
• I'm still pretty on board with our hotel decision.  Here's the view from the room.

Anyway, those are my initial thoughts. 

Today we went to the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden.  This was the first "scholars" garden created outside of China (using 100% authentic materials imported from China), and it's designed to mirror what gardens would have looked like in the Ming Dynasty.  52 Chinese Master craftsmen completed the garden in less than a year, using highly precise joinery, and no nails, screws, or glue.  Our tour guide was very engaging, and we both enjoyed both the history of how the garden would have been used and the circumstances under which it would have been created, as well as the description of the Yin and Yang elements found within the garden.

After finishing our tour, we walked a few blocks to Gas Town, where we had lunch at the Old Spaghetti Factory.  It's pretty clear to me that the diet for this trip will be ...What diet?  Lunch was good (I think Troy and I would both give it a B+), and afterwards we walked to see the Steam Clock.  We didn't really know anything about it, except that it showed up on several tourist maps.  A steam clock is a clock that runs fully or partially by steam engine.  Apparently they're pretty rare - so says Wikipedia.  The mechanism did seem cool, but maybe a bit underwhelming.  We took a picture anyway.

Last on our list today was to check out Olympic Village.  Everything we did was walkable, and it was very pleasant to hang out by the water.  Troy hung out with a giant sparrow.

And now we're watching Game 5 of the Stanley Cup.  This vacation is really working for me. Tomorrow we connect with the cruise ship, and make our way to Alaska :)  

GO HAWKS!