Thanksgiving Trip Day 3: Vancouver tour

Wah.. I don't know if I should be happy or pissed at myself.I think I spent close to 3 hours just arranging the entry for day2. I'm just not a natural blogger. Some stupid formatting problem can have sturggling for an hour or just uploading photos takes so long. B4 this week, I was cutting and pasting each url for each photo into the post and writing code to resize it. Then I tried using blog through Flock for day 2 which drove me mad, because it uploads every picture twice and does not upload the size I indicate. Then I realise I can just copy and paste directly into the blog itself. Arghhh!! What have I been doing! Why nobody enlighten me till now.. Sighh.. never mind.. Onwards!

beware of onslaught of photos.. ^o^

Exploring Vancouver City

As we piled into the car in search for some interesting Vancouver sights, we caught sight of the mountains on our right once we turned out of the hotel's carpark. It was so dark the night we came that we missed this magnificant sight that was right next to us. The sight of the mountains is just so beautiful and msmerizing, it gets ones spirit up. Such a wonderful feast to the eyes to the unexpecting group made me hopeful of what other lovely sights I'd see for the day.

Some sights in Vancouver city:







We stopped our car by the road near a lake, so that we could get unobstructed view of the mountains.

After taking the photos, we went to the tourist information centre, where we purchased tickets for the Capilano Suspension Bridge and collected some brochures.

Stanley Park

We decided to make our way to Stanley Park, because it was featured in many of the brochures and websites. Think the totem poles are rather iconic of stanley park and seattle. Anyway, I bought 2 magnets of the totem pole from the souveneir shop. I think I'm going to give up on collecting shot classes, lose interest in them already. One's for me and the other is going to be for Kaima!

Totem poles and the Hollow Tree

After the stop at the totem poles, we went to visit the hollow tree. Sounded like a big attraction, but in the end, it was just yeah.. a hollow tree.. But to be fair, the trunk was pretty huge. 4 of us shashayed to the tree and into Mark's photos and unbashfully made Mark take photos for us. Next, we moved on to prospect point which gave us an even better view of the mountains, the city and this bridge. I have no idea what's the name of the bridge although it makes a great photo-taking backdrop.

Vancouver City from Prospect point at Stanley Park

Of all the short stops we made around Stanley Park, prospect point had the best phototaking opportunities and another souvenier shop. We hung out the longest at this stop, and also got ourselves a parking ticket for parking without paying! After Stanley Park, we had to rush to Capilano Suspension Bridge because it was already 3pm. The sun has been setting around 4.30pm the last 2 days in Vancouver and the place closes at 6pm.

Capilano Suspension Bridge

It was already snowing as we got out of the car and was pretty cold. We decked ourselves in additional layers before proceeding to the suspension bridge. In the place, there's a brochure that allows you to go to various points to put a stamp on your brochure and you can go around the area collecting all stamps to show that you made it through the whole place. The girls started out rather enthusiatically, then promptly forgot about it after missing the 4th stamp.

Day shots

When we got there, it was already not too bright, therefore, we couldn't get clear photos on the bridge. Plus the suspension bridge was shaking all the time! Then it got dark pretty soon. Luckily they had lights hung up all around the forest else it would have been quite sad to be walking around in the dark. I think we had a nice walk. It was nice to have light snow falling on your face and hair, and to watch the snow flakes float down as we strolled in the forest.

Capilano at night

These colourful shots of the lights are taken by Mark, and I stole them, cos they are pretty well taken, and I didn'take any night shots anywhere as nice as his.

Grouse Mountain

Throughout the day, we were discussing night skiing on Grouse Mountain, because many of us didn't get enough from the one day of skiing at Whistler and it did seem pretty cool to try night skiing. However, after we drove to the bottom of Grouse Mountain, we all felt pretty tired from the long day and it felt even colder than in the day. Suddenly night skiing didn't seem all that worth braving the freezing cold. It wasn't even that cold at Whistler because of the heat from the sun. We all opted out from skiing, but decided to take some photos first to show that we "had been" to Grouse Mountain!

We proceeded to downtown vancouver where we bought some chocolates at a salmon shop. yah.. chocolates at a salmon shop, (mark/elvin thought it was pretty hilarious). Then we went to whitespot burger, because the friendly canadian guy in the salmon shop said the mayonaise and fries over there was F-ing good. Hmmm.. It was alright la.. COld burger.. Guess the fries were pretty good though. After the meal, we met up with Philip outside Starbucks and we made our drive back to Seattle.