Vancouver Trip (Day 5)

I'm a little behind now, but today is going to be a fairly chill day reserved for a little time out in nature, a nice dinner, and no late-night drinking (in preparation for the early flight tomorrow), so I should be able to catch up.

Day 5, the second full day in Vancouver, actually turned out to be my favorite day of the trip thus far. It started out slowly, with Marina and I going to get some lunch at this little man-made island under a bridge called Granville Island, which is home to a lot of cutesy (but meaningless to me as a male tourist) shops, but the pace picked up later on when we headed out for the Vancouver Art Gallery (or the VAG, as Marina likes to call it), which was perhaps the best modern art museum I've seen in a long time (and perhaps on this continent?).

Afterwards we did a little shopping at H&M, stopped briefly in the food court at the underground mall there, and then split up for the first half of the evening to do our separate things: Marina went to visit a girl for her birthday, and I made plans to meet up with my buddies from the plane, Jeff and Miranda, for some Indian food. So, they picked me up from Marina's place and drove me to a really neat buffet they like that overlooks the city, and then they took me into town to see if we could get scalped tickets for the sold out Ting Tings show, but no luck. Instead, we ended up having a couple pitchers at a frat-tastic place called the Steamworks before meeting up with Marina and her friends for a "hipster dance party" (as Marina likes to call it) at a venue called the Biltmore.

It was here that I met the majority of Marina's friends I've met thus far, and as per the rest of the trip, all of them have been SUPER nice and cool. Perhaps the one I gravitated to most is this guy named Sean who totally coincidently is a musician, my age, speaks Dutch (being half Dutch!), and even spent some time growing up in the suburb of Atlanta just around the corner from where I grew up! Small world! We got along really well (as you might expect)...his friends Robbie and Martin were also really cool.

Anyway, all around, this day was pretty awesome and was most-definitely needed, as that morning (which was roughly the half-way point of the trip) I was starting to get really fatigued with traveling and needed a boost.