Got back last night from a most excellent 12-day vacation in Canada with Andrew. It was one of those amazing trips where most everything just works out exactly like it should - charmed luck with reservations, timing, weather, people, the works. The one-line summary is as follows:

British Columbia is awesome and beautiful, and I want more already.


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To market, to market! No fat pigs were harmed in the making of this adventure, but we did take a very pleasant ferry ride over to Granville Island and spend a delightful morning at the market there. After having feasted our eyes on every delicacy you could name, and our mouths on a very large plate of potato-cheddar perogies, we headed out to West ( Read more... )

The day started off with a steaming stack of pancakes - what could be better? Shelly, Andrew, and I then went and visited Andrew's paternal grandmother, which made for some very interesting Chinese practice for me. (By this, I mean I listened intently and tried to pick out personal pronouns, a few country names (zhongguo, bingdao) and numbers ( Read more... )

 We had to book a SuperShuttle to the airport, and for some unknown evil reason we were scheduled for 4:10 am for a domestic flight at 7:00. As a consequence, the alarm was set for the charming hour of 3:30, and a shower, sort-of-breakfast, and making of beds were crammed into thirty minutes before the shuttle arrived. Of course we got to the ( Read more... )