Vancouver

So I been on vacation about a week and its been nice, refreshing, fun and interesting...at times. I can't say its been my best trip, but lack of preparation and planning is the only thing at fault.

I decided I wanted to go to Vancouver because
A) I love the pacific northwest: culture, climate, food; I've had great experiences in North California and Portland
B) My aunt lives in Seattle and my cousin goes to school in Bellingham, a beautiful area btwn there and Vancouver so it seemed like a good way to see em all
B) I imagined it's a damn cool Canadian city and a good counterpart to NYC w/urban arts culture, modernity and surrounding nature

This is also a major Couchsurfing trip, and CS culture is a very particular type of travel culture. Those of you who don't know, this is a GIANT community of travelers worldwide. They can typically be a little scatterbrained and certainly travel on the type of shoestring budget that I find can be very restricting and uncomfortable, but they are awesomely adventurous, friendly and extroverted people. My hosts, for example, are two fabulous gay guys who have hosted 80 people over the course of 8 weeks and are fun, kind, wacky guys who are soooo happy to be surrounded by travelers every day of the week.

One Australian guy, David, that I met was a great travel partner for a day or two. We hiked Lynn Peak, a 9 km hike of 1000m elevation. On a beautiful day (when I thought I was gonna get rain all week), it was EXACTLY what I wanted to do. And it was easy, cause he had a car. The next day we spent wandering around, drinkin beers, not exactly finding what we were looking for (generally having a cool time while doing it), but when we were at a serious loss for the next step, our interests began to divert.

I saw a really cool tour go by that my family has connections with, but he didn't wanna do it, so I gave the guide my card to hook up with him later and we went to an art gallery. Now David is a very outdoorsy sort of person and I knew he would not be into art, but I really wanted to go and there was practically nothing else in the area so we went. The stuff wasn't very good, but he goes off into a diatribe of how disgusting it was and it really just pumped negativity into the already uncomfortable situation and unfortunately, that was how we said goodbye. I sat around for a bit, waiting for the tour guide to call me and later found out that he got caught up grabbing beers with his tourists (some of whom were damn cute). I kicked myself for missing out on that and fighting with David instead, and stood on line for rush tix at a film festival for 20 minutes before realizing I couldn't get in.

So this was just one shitty thing that came about. I'm hookin up with the guide later today but otherwise Im really not sure what I'm doing here. I've wanted to bike around but I keep passing that up for other opportunities. My cousin is coming up this weekend to hang out with me/see his girlfriend and he's a fun, cool, outdoorsy guy so I really gotta make some plans with him (esp cause he's got a car) but it's gonna rain most of the weekend. I may end up spending a lot more time at the film festival (I saw one pretty intrstiing bawdy sex comedy from China about nonagenarians at a northern farming village), so that'll be cool but I'm lacking a travel partner and I knew that would get me down.

How come no one stopped and said "Hey Jonah, Canada can be pretty boring"? Again, I'm probably not looking in the right places, hooking up with the right people and making the right plans, but I guess I got a coupla more days to get that right.

On the upside, I had a blast biking around Seattle, hanging with my Aunt and I got a couple more days of that before I go home, so I'm looking forward to wrapping up the trip with positivity.