Lynn Canyon Park

Yesterday we went off to North Vancouver to spend the afternoon at Lynn Canyon Park.

We had been there once during the fall two years ago and it was very pretty, but Vancouver during summer is a whole different thing and we were curious to see the Lynn Creek in a sunny day.

We reserved a Car2go and it was parked in front of a Peruvian Cafe, so we decided to try some Inca Cola. With our tutti-frutti chewing gum flavoured soda in hands, we drove off to North Van.

We got in to the park at the wrong entrance (2011 was a long time ago!) but had a pleasant surprise! We didn't get to see the Indiana Jones kind of suspension bridge they have at the other park entrance, but we didn't had to share "our" area of the park with any other tourists either.

We walked down some narrower trails following the sound of water until we arrived at this crazy beautiful shallow and wide portion of the creek between a short waterfall and a small rapid.

The water was extremely cold and we couldn't have our feet underwater for more than a minute.

Unfortunately it was late in the afternoon and we wanted to go through the trails back while it was still light out, but we are definitively going back someday this summer early in the morning to perhaps risk a freezing swim.

Eating in Vancouver Vol.1: The Naam

The Naam is a pretty easy choice for us. It's vegetarian, on our street (the busses go from door to door), it's good and it is 24 hours. The Naam and the japanese restaurant close by are our to go restaurants for when we don't feel very creative to try someplace new. We even went there on new years eve, after getting bored at a house party!

I guess it's the oldest vegetarian restaurant in Vancouver, located in a very hippie house, with aweful live music sometimes in the evening. The menu is huge and pretty eclectic, which makes it even easier to just go there and decide what kind of food you want to eat later. They have burritos, burgers, pizza, pasta, asian noodles, vegetable bowls, nachos, hot dogs... most of it with a hippie twist (the pizza is in a pitta bread, the hot dogs are wrapped in chapati...) but really really tasty.

They also substitute the real cheese for vegan Daiya on any item. Even though I'm not vegan, the dragon bowl with vegan cheese is one of my favourites, and their miso gravy is crazy good!

This is just the dinner/lunch menu. For breakfast they have a special menu that includes one of the best vegan sausages I've ever had, made in house!

We went there yesterday and we had a Milano quesadilla platter and an Asian noodle bowl to share. Servings are huge!

I though we had more pictures from other meals we had there, but it turns out that if we had any, they were in Pau's stolen computer, so here are some shots from Geoff Peters from Dine out here Vancouver:

The Naam is on 2724 West 4th avenue and it's well worth the ride.

Corintia

We always have our daily dosis of streaming tv here at our house, but for the last few months we had been struggling to find something that could hook us for real.

After a long period of searching, we downloaded the first 3 seasons of Boardwalk Empire and have watched the first two in about a week or so, but as always, good things come in three (or four) and now we have a ton of shows to watch and almost not enough time.

Apart from the 3rd season of Boardwalk Empire, the new season of Wilfred just premiered this week, two episodes in a row, but that is not the greatest. The greatest is Un Principe Para Corina!

Oh my! oh my! It has been a while without watching thrash tv and I guess there's nothing like a good manipulated Spanish reality show to get brainwashed late at night. 24 weirdos competing for a bland blonde's love, in the best Bachelorette style possible, as funny as it can be. There's a vampire, a nerd rapper, a christian body builder, a guy with thousands of plastic surgeries, a porn lover chinese-basque guy, a dog loving cop... We are hooked! Hooked! It's all in Spanish, but you can watch it here.

Italian Day

Yesterday it was Italian Day at Commercial Drive in Vancouver. It was sure better than the time we went to Greek Day in Kitsilano, but it wasn't exactly the "OMG it's so authentic" that we overheard people saying on the streets.

We started off with a 2PM breakfast of Fanta Banana Slurpee for Pau and some Tonic Water for me to get us going.

As expected, there were several non-sense vendors that just enjoy the opportunity to sell a bit more, like promotional stands from bands, radio stations and Car2go. The restaurants of the street also set up an outside stand with foods that are no so very Italian, like butter chicken and sushi.

Out of all the activities expected for the day, like eating contests and Italian fashion shows, we only saw the very end of a cooking demonstration with "The Singing Chef". We got there at the right time!

Singing was actually the only thing we saw. A trio with dark tans and bright teeth at first, then the singing chef, then a very self confident guy in a pink silk shirt and a smaller karaoke style area.

After some good laughs, we started getting cranky from hunger and decided it was past time to have our first meal of the day. But everything was so full! The lines for the street vendors were huge and the prices weren't really that attractive and all the restaurants of the Drive were packed with long waiting times.

By 4PM we gave up on the theatrical Italian Day and went on to get great pizza on Gastown, at Nicli Antica, far from it all. It was really really good as always, but we were way to hungry to take pictures.
From there we walked back home, stopping for a Clover coffee on the way, Pau's new coffee preference that deserves a whole post about it.

Drawing

Since we were going to meet friends from Barcelona in Montreal last month, Pau made a small package with gifts for his parents and brother, so Albert took it back to Barcelona to them as early birthday gifts with free shipping.

To Jordi, Pau's dad, we got this very fun book, with 642 things to draw. It just says a word (in english, so he can also practice vocabulary) and a small blank space to illustrate each word.

Last week Jordi sent Pau some pictures of what he had been drawing:

All these fun drawings made us want to try too, and I enjoyed a great sale on chapters to get the 642 things to draw for Pau and the second book, 712 more things to draw for Jordi in advance for christmas or something.

I know I didn't get me one and it sure wouldn't hurt to have a reason to draw more (or to draw all together, because I definitively don't draw anymore at all.), but I can always just copy the words from Pau and draw in another notebook, right?

Fostering

Being international students forces us to live in a semi-temporary arrangement. We refrain ourselves from getting anything too permanent, since we don't know how long we'll live here. That includes nice expensive furniture, records, books and pets.

I miss having cats around. A lot. I like their company, playing with them and having something to take care of, but cats do live a long time and we're not one of those people (and there are many!) that move out and leave their pets behind.

Last weekend we finally decided to contact VOKRA to become volunteers. The Vancouver Orphan Kitten Rescue Association is a non-profit association that rescues cats in the Lower Mainland and does not have a central shelter. They rely on volunteer foster homes (like ours!) that help on keeping the cats safe, tame and socialized, making it a lot easier for them to be adopted later on. It is the perfect solution for us! It allows us to have a cat, help out and hopefully keep the mice away!

After filling an application and a few phone calls, our first foster cat arrived 3 days ago! They brought her together with canned and dry food, a litter box and wood pellets to use as litter.

Her name is Katrina and she's 14 months old and a real sweetie! She has spent the first day behind the bathtub (that's why she's so dusty) and so far has chosen the bathroom as her HQ. She's a talker and meows a lot every time we stand up because she wants us to keep her company by the toilet, where she feels safe.

But little by little she'll get used to the rest of the house and today she even played a bit with a string in the living room.

When we feel like she's ready, calmer and socialized, we'll right a short bio about her, take pretty pictures and try to get her adopted through Vokra. We get to choose who adopts her, since we will be the ones who know her better. I'll sure cry a lot and then get another foster cat to start it all over again.

Whiteboard

So, I got back to university for graduate school. And it's cool how everything feels totally different from the boring bachelor's degree. After discussing lots of physics with colleagues and my supervisor, I realized that whiteboards are exactly where the magic happens. That's why I got obsessed with getting a nice whiteboard for home.

I looked at many options, I was about to spend $60 in whiteboard from Staples, but since we were in front of IKEA, we got in there to see what do we find. They sell an actual whiteboard which looks nice (even though I would need like 2 of those to fit in some formulas).

However, we bumped into a 70 x 100 cm aluminium picture frame for $15 that is just perfect. You simply draw on the glass, and, even after many days, it's extremely easy to erase.

I use it a lot, and I actually own a bunch of different markers for the sake of good science!

Grillin'

We're on patio madness mode around here. It's definitely not summer yet, but it feels nice to be able to sit outside just because.
And then I saw this post on Buzzfeed (talk about procrastination!) about vegetarian grilling recipes... Combined with a portable barbecue sale on Canadian Tire and our new balcony, I guess I figured out what could be the next home upgrade. Pau is not THAT on board with my idea, but I would love to grill pizzas and sandwiches and vegetables and try to have an actual barbecue at least once with all the fake meat we can find here in Vancouver.
Off course the 10 dollar grill from Canadian Tire is not nearly as pretty as this Cast Iron Grill

Or as portable as this flat fold grill (I can only find the uglier black version for sale)

But I just wanna grill an asparagus and Gardein chicken lunch like this one!

and grill away like Bob Dylan!

Kettle update

We have finally substituted our old kettle that was dripping a lot to this new one about a month ago

A week after we got it, we went for a walk in Chinatown and found these other two kettles that we absolutely love for half the price of ours, but there's nothing we can do about it now... Next time we need any kind of cookware, Chinatown will be our first stop, for sure.

My favourite is the one on the left and Pau's favourite the one on the right. I would be happy with either one of them, but I can't complain, I'm quite happy with ours too.

We didn't buy the kettles, but we did get this enamel mixing/ serving/ peeing bowl and the most amazing papier-mâché head traditionally used during the Chinese new year's celebration that now sits in our bookcase.

I'll try go back there this summer for the new Chinatown night market, to buy our lantern string lights and to take pictures of the pretty pots and pans that we weren't allowed to photograph this time.

Balcony

We have finally fixed our kind-of-a-balcony. Pau says it's a "back porch".
It's a bit of space we have outside of our back door, by the stairs that lead to the back alley. Each of us neighbours have a piece of land like this that sometimes get invaded by people coming up or down and ours has never been anything.
We had a nasty small couch that the previous tenant left behind resting there that got substituted by our own old couch after we got a new one for the living room. After we finally sold the couch we were left with an open storage space. There was my bike, Pau's bike and two abandoned bikes we found on the streets. We sold them one by one and in the end there was only my bike and garbage left over from our kitchen renovation. Once there were also some embarrassing bags filled with kitchen garbage that we forgot to take down and got attacked by racoons (up in the third floor!).

We have been dreaming about this for a while and with summer starting to show its face, we decided it was time to take action. We took the old countertop and other junk to the dump, tied the bike standing up, cleaned the infinite amount of black dust and spider webs that we've been gathering for all these years and off to IKEA.

We managed to fit everything (perhaps illegally) in the smart car from Car2go and drove home through a storm. When we got home the storm had already stopped so we did some easy IKEA carpentry work transforming our nasty old space into a great summer spot! It got so great that we're working from here right now, even if it's still a bit nippy out.

The next step is to get some string lights for the night time. We already bought a huge pack of tea candles on this trip to IKEA, but string lights look so nice and cozy and pretty...

I've been researching on which on to get. I really love the look of the globe lights at night, but Pau has a point, they don't look so good during the day.

We're leaning towards the japanese lanterns made with nylon instead of paper so they can stand the Vancouver drizzle and look good in the day and night time.

But I've seen so many other fun novelty or more expensive string lights online...

I like the mini street lanterns or the "cafe" lights with a metallic dish on top from here. And I like all of the caged string lights a lot as well.

Bamboo lights for a tiki look, or straight tiki lights.

From the fun novelties ones that I'm sure we won't get, there are thousands of great ones (including some penis lights)

But I would have the greatest fun with these grape ones, just to reenact this video over and over: