Vancouver

So on our way to Vancouver Brian got his first full body scan in the naked scanners.  He went back through security to grab money out of the ATM as we had loads of time.  So the guy got suspicious the second time around.  Getting from Vancouver airport to the hotel was pretty easy.  We were staying in a hotel cause the hostels in Vancouver are so very very expensive.  It was a choice between a hotel outside of downtown right beside the subway/tram or a hostel for the same price in a very bad part of town which was'nt very clean.  On the plane we were told by the friendly guy next to us that it never ever snows in Vancouver just in the surrounding area.  We took the Skytrain from the airport to our hotel and as soon as we got off it we were covered in snow.  It was a downright blizzard.  In the end only about an inch stuck but the receptionist in the hotel also told us it never snowed and we must have brought the weather with us (not sure where from...).  The hotel was really and for some reason had two double beds like a lot of hotel rooms we have stayed in which we booked just as doubles. 

The next day we went shopping in Wallmart as we had a fridge and food was expensive. That was the first day I tried to fix my laptop. I had downloaded a program to create a bootable linux formated usb and the new netook OS. We asked a guy in a laptop repair shop to use the programs to create the disk (my laptop at this point could do nothing and it's really hard to repair a laptop without a pc of some kind. In internet cafes you don't get admin access to pc's so you can't install programs or format us sticks. Anyway the guy actually seemed to know what he was doing and created the bootable usb. I spent a lot of the day working on it and still have a few things which I gave up on in the end. While I was doing all this Brian skyped his family to say hello and because he had sent a parcel that had just arrived with them. A few other bits and pieces happened but mostly the next day a we went to do the touristy thing and look around Vancouver. It's a massive city but it's very functional. People kept saying there was loads to do without being specific. They are definitely some of the nicest people in the world though. Whenever we opened a map for longer than a minute someone would ask if we were ok. While waiting in line at Tim Hortons for donuts, we were giving out that we couldn't find a book shop and a fire fighter behind us gave us directions to one and asked us how we were getting on. Tim Horton's donuts are really nice in Canada, I don't really like the ones in Spar back home. They don't seem to travel well or they don't take being left out. The shops are really busy over there and very similar to Starbucks in style. We went up the Skytower in downtown. It was 15 dollars and tax and so boring. That left us a little down heartened about tourism in Canada. We spent the day wandering the city but it was freezing so in the afternoon we decided to buy some beers and head home. It turns out 12 bottles of Miller is 28 dollars and then tax. (This seems to be getting a bit down We did have a great time here and once the skiing and stuff gets going it really picks up). Next day we headed to the traditional Chinese garden in Vancouver's Chinatown. It was about 10 dollars in but we got a tour of the place which a history of the founder and information about what makes it a Chinese garden and some traditional tea. Turns out they have to import the rock in the garden from a specific place in China in order for it to be a traditional Chinese garden. It looked really beautiful but the weather was pretty cold and crisp. A lot of effort seems to go into the fine detail and getting a ying and yang element throughout the garden. After we went inside for our tea which was great to warm us up. While we were there we got to try out Chinese calligraphy on these really cool things called budda boards. They almost feel like slate on one side and soft on the other. They have a paper like appearance on the soft side and when you paint on with water to the paper like side, it appears like black ink. They seem to be set up to have a lot of groups of school kids in there so I think they were aimed at teaching them calligraphy without making as mess cause the most they could do was spill water. We had fun messing about with them.

Eventually we organised an over night bus to Penticton which was the nearest town to Apex Mountain where we were skiing. We arrived at 6 in the morning but we hadn't counted on the hotel (it was more of a motel but it called itself a hotel) not having a 24 hour reception. We got a taxi down from the bus station as we didn't have a map and saw the sign saying the hotel wasn't open til 10. We didn't really have an idea what to do as it was absolutely freezing at that point. The taxi driver stopped when she say us standing outside the door and we told her that they weren't open so she phoned her head office and found out where the nearest 24 Denny's was. So we took her advice and headed over there. We got a really big breakfast with tonnes of food. It was really nice but seriously heavy. That took up about an hour but we had three more to burn. Brian was talking to the waitress and she was fine to let us sit there until out hotel opened except to offer refils on our coffee. The hotel was quite nice in the end. It was on a beach at the edge of a lake and was really orientated towards a summer resort. We thought that was a little unusual considering it was right next to a ski resort. We had heard there were shuttle buses up to the mountain so we asked where to get them at reception. Turns out they only run on the weekends. No one goes to Apex during the week which is why we paid 69 dollars for out accommodation and got free 60 dollar a day ski passes from Monday to Thursday. We had no idea how to get up there as the only options were to rent a shuttle bus which cost 150 dollars or get a taxi at about 75 dollars. In the end the receptionist phoned us and said that the husband of one of the other receptionists had offered to drop us up the mountain after he got off work as a baker for the price of petrol. We assumed when we first heard that he was going up anyway but it turns out he was just doing it because we didn't have another option to get up the mountain.