A mindbending work of uncertain intelligence

Attention everybody!
Jeff just stubbed his toe!
*sadness*

I’ll just take the time now to update everyone on Vancouver, Saturday to Thursday. I’ll try to keep up with the blog in the future so I don’t have to keep making these massive back-posts and so y’all can have more updated information on my trip.

When I got here, it was already snowing. There wasn’t much buildup, though. I called the hostel and the lady at the front desk attempted to give me directions. Her strong Canadian accent made it a little hard to understand her at first. I figured out that exiting the station led to a park, of all things. Yeah, there’s a city park right in front of the main transit center in Downtown Vancouver. I thought it was weird too. There’s a fountain there, but it was filled completely with snow. It looked like a dish with shaved ice in it. I finally understood her directions. I crossed the park, crossed main street, and then walked past the Ivanhoe hotel, and there it was, C&N Backpacker’s Hostel! Or so proclaimed the sign out front. I went in and asked about a reservation. Turns out C&N owns two hostels, a block from each other. I was scheduled to stay in the other one. So outside I went again, and walked a block. Finally made it to the hostel!

The rooms are pretty spacious, especially since there are only 2 people in my room (counting myself.) I set up a charging station to replenish my electronic devices after the bus ride, where they’d all died.

The outlets are really loose here. The springy metal piece that normally grips the prongs is absent in these, so I had to improvise a solution.

A quick tour of the room…
The entrance on the left. In the center is the “closet” that they built, covering a door, for some reason. I suspect the door leads to the next-door, but it’s got a closet in front of it, in addition to being nailed shut, so I’m not certain.

Next to the door is the sink, and next to that is a bunk.

We have the best sink in the place:

The “plumbing problem” is that they took off the U trap under the sink and didn’t replace it with anything. It’s not really a plumbing problem so much as a water disposal problem. If we put a bucket under the sink, we could use the sink

Across from the sink is my bunk (I’m the bottom one), the charging station, an uncomfortable chair, and the radiator.

Radiators seem to be really inefficient technologically. It gets extremely hot right next to it, and the rest of the room gets really cold.

Here’s a better picture of my bunk (the bottom one.)

My biggest complaint with these bunks is that you can’t sit up when you’re sitting on the bed. If they were really low, it’d be fine, for space saving reasons. But it’s literally about 3 inches too short. Couldn’t they find the extra metal to make it 3 inches higher and infinitely more comfortable and convenient? Apparently not.
You can see the set of lockers behind the bunk. I can’t imagine who would use them. I put stuff in them, but in order to “lock” stuff in them, you have to pay something absurd like $10 a day or something, and if you leave your stuff in there for more than a day it’ll lock and you can’t get your stuff back. Oh, and if you open them you have to pay again.

Here are a couple views outside my window

And that’s the end of the pictures I have.
I was in the park on Tuesday, and I flopped down into the snow to make a snow angel. It kinda hurt, and my coat was open, so it messed up the pattern and filled itself with snow. It just ended up being a bunch of messed up snow rather than a snow angel. I took a picture of it. I put my camera in my pocket and walked about 2 blocks. I saw this funny hole in a chain link fence, and went to get my camera out. It wasn’t there. I went back and forth in that same area and couldn’t find it. I guess I just dropped it and someone picked it up and took off. There was this big drunk guy who I suspected of having it, so I went up to him, looked him square in the eye (this guy was maybe 6′4″ and probably 260 lbs) and I said “hey, have you seen my camera around here? I just dropped it about 3 minutes ago.” He said “no, I haven’t seen your camera.” I, having no proof, and not really wanting to start something with a huge drunk guy, said “okay” and then walked on down the street. I turned around, and I saw the guy walk to the edge of the curb, turn around facing his buddy, and step back slightly. His foot slipped, and he, quite comically, pinwheeled for a good 5 seconds, before turning around and plowing headfirst into a snowdrift on the side of the road. It took him a good 20 seconds to stand back up.
So anyway, I have no camera and thus no more pictures from here on out. I may try to pick one up in Seattle at Walmart, but the one here is way far away.

Sunday after I got here, I met this girl from Australia. She tricked me into eating like 5 pancakes (she kept puttin’ them in front of me and somehow convincing me that it was paramount that I eat them). I didn’t have any Canadian money, so she bought me a bus ticket and we headed to Robson district (that’s the upscale shopping strip mall in Vancouver.) She had to check into a hostel up there, because she was on a plane at 5:30 AM and didn’t want to have to walk to the airport from C&N (the buses don’t run that early.) We did a whole lot of stuff, a lot more than I feel like writing (it’s really late), but some of the highlights: We took the Sky Train to the bus depot and took a bus to the Ferry and took the Ferry to another bus station and took a bus to Walmart.
On the weekends, all of Vancouver is considered one zone, so you pay $2.50 and you can travel anywhere within the zone for an hour and a half. The ferry was huge, and moved really quickly. It’s definitely made for public transportation, not sightseeing. The cabin where all the people were was completely enclosed.

She was surprised to see a McDonald’s in a Walmart. When I told her that nearly all Walmarts in Texas have McDonalds in them, she thought it was really funny. Other than Walmart, we also went to the Future Shop. I’ll talk more about that later. We went to a music store that was really classy, found some $20,000 pianos, and played duets. They were Yamahas, and didn’t sound very great. They were in tune with themselves, but not with each other. Who would own a music store and not tune all their instruments to concert pitch? Makes no sense. It was a lot of fun either way. She played the Viola but couldn’t remember very many songs other than the Suzuki Method beginner songs.

That’s mostly what I did Sunday. After that I pretty much just went to bed.

Monday, I got Mom to send some money via Western Union, and picked it up at the bus station. I ate breakfast at the Ivanhoe Hotel. I had a hamburger, and it was amazing. I walked a couple blocks up Main Street to Chinatown and walked around there. I bought a bunch of fruits and snacks. Man, the stores there were really cool. There was one that literally had hundreds of huge jars (2 gallons?) lining all the walls, and they were all completely unmarked. You just had to know what you were getting, I guess. A lot of them were filled with various beans and other plants, but equally as many were filled with random parts of animals. The store next to that had a lot of live animals, fish, lobsters, crabs, etc. They had mollusks that were really long. Like 8 times the length of their own shells. I’m not sure if they stretched them or what. Then of course they had whole fish, frozen. Big ones, too. Maybe 2 feet long. Eyeballs starin’ up at you.
The store after that had all sorts of weird animal pieces outside. I can’t even remember what most of it was. It was interesting to see, though. The store after that was just a supermarket, so I bought some Asian candies and puddings and such. One cool thing I noticed is that their jello-type substances are made using seaweed instead of gelatin, and it’s definitely a different consistency, but I like it. It’s pleasing to eat. It’s very firm, even if it’s not cold.

Tuesday, I lost my camera. Before that, though, the day was pretty much dedicated to making Laurel jealous.
I rode into town on the Sky Train. Oh, let me take a minute to talk about how much I like the Sky Train.
It’s this transportation system that travels above the roads, so it doesn’t have to stop for traffic like the buses. It’s like a subway, except without the expense of building underground tunnels. My favorite parts about it are the efficiency and the autonomy. It’s driven completely by computer. Yes, that’s right, there is NO driver on board in case of an emergency. Whenever they break down, they have to send out repair crews to fix it, and a driver to bring it back, if necessary. It’s pretty weird, but it makes a lot of sense. That way, the precise amount of acceleration and braking can be applied to make it the most timely and energy-efficient possible. A human driver can intuit a lot, but I’m doubtful they could run the trains more efficiently than the computer. My favorite part is that, when approaching your stop, the generic PA woman voice will tell you the name of the station, and then you have about 5 seconds until the train stops. The doors open, and you have 2 or 3 seconds to get off, and the other people have 5 seconds to get on. Then the doors close and it gets going again. It’s really efficient, and because they stop at each station for only a short period of time, they have more trains running, and I’ve always been able to catch another one not more than 5 minutes away from another.

So after I got off the sky train, I got lost. Really lost. I had to look at my map 4 or 5 times before I understood where I was. I ended up walking past this street vendor making hot dogs. I got a Jalapeno+Beef sausage on a bun, with grilled onions, cheese, and all sorts of sauces. It was really delicious. Cost about $6.00 because the cheese was extra. I went to the Vancouver Public Library. It’s so huge, they have a mini shopping mall just for the library. They have pizza places, and stationery shops, souvenir shops and coffee places. The whole bottom floor is the children’s section. One thing I’ve noticed about Vancouver is that they love escalators. I don’t know that I’ve been in any multi-story building that didn’t have escalators in addition to elevators. The library had a set of escalators for all of the floors. It was really nice, clean, well-organized and well-decorated. I don’t know that I’ve been to the Austin public library, but it blows San Marcos and Texas State’s libraries way out of the water. Then, as I was walking back to Robson district to have some dinner I saw the Vancouver Art Gallery, and decided to go in. It was pretty expensive, even as a student. $17 for adults, $12 for students. I paid anyway, and went in. Laurel’s probably jealous already. Wait’ll I tell her that the whole bottom two floors were based on the Feminist Revolution, and they were all female artists. She’ll flip. Check it: Vancouver Art Gallery: Wack! .
I really liked the 3rd floor the most.

Here we go again… discussion time!
See, I find faults with a lot of the art in that gallery. Specifically with the first, second, and fourth floors.

Art is, to me, a way of telling a story, whether it’s just to preserve a piece of history, make people feel a certain way, or to make a specific point. But the key here is that Art should be these things. Not little placards next to it.

One of the pieces was a set of plastic cylinders with no tops. Like really wide and short straws. They were clear except for a swirling pattern on them. They looked like lamp shades. The placard said they were some statement about the futility of homemaking or something along those lines.
Now please don’t misunderstand me. I think that’s a fine message, and even if I didn’t agree with it, I’d still support it. But the art itself really had no correlation as far as I could tell.

There’s a difference between clever abstraction and abstraction for abstraction’s sake.

I can’t enjoy postmodern art. “I’m so postmodern that I cut off all my hair, and knitted it into a beanie, and threw it off a bridge.”
There’s no correlation there.

That was really my biggest qualm. I generally don’t like art films either. They rarely pull them off with enough elegance that they don’t just come off as extremely pretentious.
A woman wanted to comment on the fact that society sets standards for women. I think she could’ve approached it differently. Instead she made an hour-long movie (52 minute runtime) with a set of scientists measuring a woman. Literally. Just measuring her with tapes and such. For 52 minutes. The drawings they did on the paper were reminiscent of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, and I said “Ah Ha I see the symbology there” (yes I’m being ironic), but let’s take a practical stance here for a minute. Seriously. Who is going to watch a 52 minute movie about a woman being measured? I’ll tell you who: people already allied to her cause. No bigot is going to say “hey Pa let’s sit down and watch these scientists measure a woman for 52 minutes! I think the sheer agony of sitting through this will reform us of our wicked ways and allow us to see the argument in a more objective light!” So I really don’t see what purpose her art serves in that regard. It’s social commentary, but to an already-converted audience. I don’t write 1,200 page books about how awesome computer programming is and then hand them out to CS majors. I would make 2-page colorful pamphlets that make my point clearly and succinctly, and hand them to all non-CS majors.

Oh, my favorite one was the video of the woman brushing her hair. It lasted 55 minutes. No, I did not time it. That’s what the placard said. Apparently it was challenging our idea of beauty. She was repeating “beauty is pain” or some such phrase, in italian I believe.

I think the problem is that, while I appreciate women’s rights, I won’t pretend to appreciate feminist art just because I’m afraid of what people will think. I dislike it because I don’t think it’s good art, not because it’s done by a woman.

Anyway, the 3rd floor made the $12 worthwhile. Very amazing photographs, and they were in lightboxes that made them look absolutely stunning.

After the art gallery, I ate at two different pizza places. Pizza’s actually reasonably priced here in Vancouver. You can get 2 slices of pizza and a soda for $4, and these are huge slices. I could’ve stopped at two, but I wanted to sample the different restaurants. In case you’re ever in Vancouver, don’t eat at Numero Uno Pizza. Eat at Romano’s. That was really great pizza, and very liberal with the toppings too (I had Hawaiian - Canadian bacon and pineapple.)
One thing they do up here is put hot sauce and ranch on the pizza. It’s all custom made hot sauce by each store. Romano’s was much better. It’s actually incredibly tasty. I’ll definitely try eating it that way when I get home.

Wednesday, it snowed really heavily all morning, then rained all afternoon, then snowed again at night, so there was this horrible slushy stuff all over. It’s really nasty. It’s dark brown from all the mud and oil and stuff from the cars, so you have to slog through maybe 8 feet of it (4 inches deep) to cross a road. It’s still slushy ice though, not liquid, so if you follow in the footsteps of someone else it’s not too bad. I don’t have any waterproof shoes, though, so my socks are always wet. I slogged through the slush to Subway (needed a taste of home) and then came back to the hostel. Watched some movies and went to bed.

Today (or tomorrow by now) I stayed inside all day. It’s Christmas! Pretty much everywhere I want to go is closed today. There’s a really nice thai place right across from the Skytrain station. Tomorrow I plan on going there, eating, and coming back, on one ticket. I might change my mind and hang out downtown, depending on the weather. I want to see Science World (it’s only a couple blocks away - I can walk there) and I want to see the monk’s garden, assuming that it’s not covered in snow. I can’t remember the exact name of the garden right now.

I called all my family members around 3 PM. It was nice to hear everyone, and I’m glad they all made it together for Christmas dinner.
Around 5 PM, I started to snoop around the kitchen. I volunteered to help, and ended up making the stuffing, mashing the potatoes, and helping with cleaning a bit. I refilled the cranberry sauce too. It was a lot of fun. We ended up with plenty of food. It was pretty funny though, the group I was sitting with all talked about how Texans overeat (they didn’t know I was from Texas) while all eating a huge amount of starchy food. Yay. I chuckled under my breath a bit.
I’m glad I got to help out the cooking, and it was really delicious. Sad that I missed the festivities back home, though.

Speaking of the holidays, does anyone else remember that ridiculously huge tsunami that happened on 12/26 a couple years back?
I don’t necessarily want to start politicking on this blog, since it’s intended as more of an account of day-to-day life, but I think there’s room for a few remarks.
I find it really strange that we, as a nation, have such a skewed idea of tragedies. We practically make Sept. 11th into a holiday. Do you know how many people died in those attacks? I do. 2,974. Do you know how many people died in the tsunami?
I don’t. No one does. There’s not a precise count because it was so devastating. At minimum, 225,000 people died. Contrast those figures.
Consider that the U.S. has 300,000,000 people. 3,000 people is a tenth of one percent of one percent of the population of this country, and most of those were adults working in a high-rise office building.
But when a tenth of a percent of a percent of our population gets killed, we start a protracted war, tighten security and our borders, and all such things? Bush had the highest approval rating of any president in the history of the U.S. during that time (92%, according to an NBC poll).

I guess I don’t really have a point here. I just feel like, sometimes, the interests of the state (approval ratings, etc.) lead them to overemphasize the “tragicness” of events for their own benefit, and it’s important for citizens to realize the true impact that events have worldwide. an estimated 500,000 people were displaced by the tsumami in Indonesia alone. The population of that country is less than ours. Is Sept. 11th such a bad tragedy just because it was caused by men, and not nature? I still feel much worse for the loss of life in the catastrophic Category 9 earthquake than I do for the people in those office buildings.

Did you know, before a tsunami hits, the tide will recede? Guess who goes running after the receding water and plays with the stranded fish? Food for thought.

The quake got a bit of coverage on the news, but not nearly as much as some other things I can think of that “may affect us.” Guess how many cases of Bird Flu there have been reported in America. Give up? 0. Not deaths, cases.
Perhaps that’s why the media has stopped talking about it, and is probably looking for the next “pandemic” to scare us with. But they didn’t stop talking about it because the threat is over. 20 to 100 million people died from the Spanish Flu worldwide between 1918 and 1920. That flu has adaptations both to humans and birds. It’s possible the current Bird Flu (H5N1) could adapt to humans. I, for one, would like to have updates on the progress to prevent this from becoming a pandemic. I don’t want to wait until millions of people have died before I hear mention of it again. That’s all I’m saying.

Kimya Dawson said “We’d have 12/26 tattooed across our foreheads if something this atrocious happened on our shores instead.” I’m still trying to decide if she’s right.

Anyway, on a lighter note, I’m up to 3700 words (dang I ramble a lot) and I think I’ve caught y’all up on current events. I’ll try to update every night, so I don’t have to type so much, and I’ll see you soon! Oh, by the way, I’m planning on staying until the 5th. So if anyone’s back by then, let me know and we’ll do something.

Laurel/Teri/Jeff/Megan/Briane, sorry we didn’t get to talk on the phone, and merry christmas you guys!

Here’s that post I’ve been promising.

So, where did we leave off?
…
Let’s start off with a bit of this…

Oh, and of course we wouldn’t have a big update post without…

Cyborg Beaver!

Okay, so.

I arrived in Seattle on Thursday. My flight was delayed because it snowed all over the runway. It doesn’t typically snow up here (Seattle, Surrey, Vancouver, Portland, etc.) so everyone’s confused about what to do. They finally cleared off one of the runways, and my plane left, 4 hours late.

My mom’s friends picked me up from the airport. It was kinda confusing because I’d never met them, so we were both just going off pictures of each other. I found them finally, and after waiting 25 minutes or so, my bag finally got loaded off the plane. I’m not going to complain about that too much, though. I only had one extra change of clothes in my carry-on luggage (in case they lost my bag!) so I’m glad it got here safely.

Their house was really nice and homey, and they had a cute Chow:

Her name was Jenny. Jenny seemed to like me for the most part, but one morning became alarmed at my presence and started barking. Maybe I smelled different or something.
So they fed me and gave me a place to stay Thursday night, and took me shopping Friday morning. I got a pretty awesome coat that I was going to post a comprehensive review of, but I’m unable to do that for a reason that’ll become apparent shortly. I also got some long johns to wear under my pants to keep my legs warm.

I frolicked in the snow my first night there, and made this wonderful snow man:

Okay, maybe not a snowman. A snow-log-man. A slogman. A stumpman. A stumman. Something like that.

They had an adorable little swingset that I didn’t partake in, for obvious reasons (protip: it’s covered in snow):

but it looked so cute I had to snap a pic of it.

One thing I noticed is that Seattle uses different encoding schemes for their emergency services. Apparently, a red stripe still denotes a fire zone, but I believe they said that blue is either handicapped or police, and then they have these funky fire hydrants:

They’re yellow instead of red! What’s going on with that! I DO NOT KNOW! I WISH I COULD ANSWER THAT FOR YOU!

They have white picket fences here!

How much whiter could that be, Jeff?

Seattle basically looked like this everywhere:

Very snowy and such.

On the way to get my coat, we saw this funny car, a yellow Scion XB (from the infamous Youtube video)

You can’t really tell because the window wasn’t down and there’s a lot of internal reflection, but the license plate says SCIONXB.

Seattle has a lot of really tall trees.

One cool thing I found out was that Seattle has some computer-enforced stop lights. If the cameras catch you running the light, they’ll take a picture of your license plate and automatically ticket you. I got a picture of the sign as we drove past (when the light was green of course.)

Up north (Seattle and Vancouver both) there’s this chain of stores called Safeway. It’s essentially the same in spirit as Randall’s. They have lots of sales, but you have to be a Safeway member to get the discounts.

I bought some stuff and didn’t realize they did that member crap until I was already in line to check out. I was in a different line from the people I was staying with, so I couldn’t use their checkout card. They got through their line a little before me, though, and came over with their card. Much confusion ensued, and the woman at the register said that we could come back with my receipt the next time we visited the store and get the discount on our next purchase. I asked how that made sense and why she didn’t just give us the cash back. I wasn’t trying to be difficult or inconvenience her, I was genuinely confused. She got all haughty, though, and made the person in line wait while she entered in the discounted items. She said “it was $1.38 right” after having said it was $1.28 a few minutes ago. I replied “No, it’s $1.28″ and she said “oh” and nodded. Then she handed me $1.50 in change. I didn’t want to inconvenience the people in line any more, and I figured that if she seriously got $1.38 and $1.50 confused, I wasn’t going to correct her there. She’d have more serious problems soon. I took my $1.50 and triumphantly left. The moral of the story is that the system of member-based rebating is inherently flawed. Having to swipe your membership card is an unnecessary extra step for the heavy users of the store, and for the casual users (I.E. people from out of town, like me) it’s a way to nickle-and-dime us out of a bit more cash. Even if the average price is marginally higher, I’d prefer to shop at a location that didn’t have this unnecessary step and classification of its consumers. So what if I want to shop at Safeway only occasionally? I shouldn’t be forced to get a membership. That’ll just convince me to make my visits go from an “occasional” to “nonexistent.” If there were a Randalls in San Marcos, I purposefully wouldn’t shop there just for this reason. And I can sense some people in the audience rolling their eyes at that. It’s the same thing as people who won’t go into Walmart. It’s a matter of principle. And I won’t buy anything from Best Buy either. I won’t attempt to justify that one because it quickly devolves into a convoluted mess whenever I try.

So after Safeway (I was there for snacks to eat on the train) and the coat, I went to bed. The next morning, they dropped me off at the train station at 9:30 to begin my journey to Vancouver, BC.

I was supposed to hop the 194 bus at 9:57. It was very cold out, but in my new coat and long johns, I didn’t feel any of it. Except for my face. My face was cold. Around 9:45, the 187 bus showed up. I casually sidled nearby to ask about the whereabouts of the 194, and realized that it wasn’t running down to Federal Way because of the ice! (Federal Way is the suburb of Seattle that I was in at the time.) I hopped on the 187 and rode it into town. It took until 12:00 to arrive at the King Street station. I committed a huge faux-pas on accident and sat in the Handicapped and Elderly section of the bus for about an hour. I eventually moved back, but I had so much luggage (since I was taking all my luggage up to Vancouver) that I ended up blocking the aisle and probably inconveniencing everyone more than if I’d stayed. But I felt better having moved.

So, at the station, I was still an hour ahead of schedule. The bus to Vancouver wasn’t scheduled to leave until 1:15 PM.

I’d read online, trying to find good food, because the King Street Station is right next to the International District. I found a place called Saigon Deli (not New Saigon Deli - that’s owned by a different company.)

It was 12 blocks away. That doesn’t seem too hard, but consider that everyone had been walking on the snow for days ( and Seattle’s a busy city - international district especially), so it had melted and repacked into very slick ice. On top of that, I was wearing shoes with no tread, and carrying 90 lbs of luggage. To make matters worse, the walk to the deli was entirely uphill, and the sidewalk bordered a major street.
I took some pictures on the way back, to truly capture the icy hilliness of the trek.

It was like that the whole way.

Anyway, so it took me 30 minutes to get to the deli. I perused their menu for all of 30 seconds. I already knew what I wanted. “Give me a #1, a #3 and a #4″ I said, cheerily, to the Vietnamese man behind the counter. He repeated, replete with hand gestures, to confirm. Now it’s not necessary to order 3 of these. One would pass as a lunch. These are by no means small sandwiches - they’re about 7-8 inches long. But I wanted to try a lot of different flavors, and for a median price of $2.25 per sandwich, I felt like I was getting a great deal.
I put them in my pack and hurried back to the station, worried I’d miss my train.

I made it back with about 20 minutes to spare, so I cracked open the sandwiches and started digging in. If you’ve never had one of these sandwiches, you are missing out. Ask me or Travis to take you to have some in Austin sometime. They’re extremely delicious and badass.
Up first was the Barbecue Pork.

I’m sure you can tell just by looking at it how delicious that would be. And let me tell you, I was not disappointed. It was a little on the non-spicy side (but I normally line these things with pepper sauce to make them hot enough for me, and they had some at the restaurant, I’d just forgotten to get any.) But man, that bread was so fresh and crisp! and everything else about the sandwich, the veggies and the meat, were delicious as well.

I complemented that with some vietnamese Soy milk that I picked up at an asian grocery store on the way back. Man, I swear, if you want good asian supermarkets, Seattle and Vancouver are a good place to be.

The reason the focus isn’t pristine is because passersby were teasing me about taking pictures of my food.

After I finished the sandwich, I noticed that I only had about 3 minutes until 1:15, the scheduled departure time. I still had 2/3 of my soy milk left (ostensibly to eat with the other two sandwiches) but I didn’t have time to eat them, so I chugged the soy milk and chucked it in the recycling bin. Please be advised - never chug soy milk. It’s a bad idea.

So it turned out that the train was actually delayed for a couple of hours (until 3:45 - it took them 4 hours to get through
US customs) I went on to finish the other two sandwiches.
One was chicken,

and was equally as good, but a little spicier, which I approved of. I had to buy a

for like $2.25 so my mouth would stop burning a bit. Funny story - northerners are not as crazy about water fountains as we are. There was 1 water fountain in the entire transit center, and it was out of order.

Finally I moved on to the “3 kinds of ham + bbq ham” which sounds more like 4 kinds of ham to me, but whatever.

Here’s a size comparison if you want to imagine how big the sandwich was. I didn’t think to do this until I started eating the sandwich, so I ate very close to a half of it before taking this picture.

It had some really funky meats in it. I’m pretty sure they weren’t ham.

It had 2 of those in it. For the most part it was ham, though.

If you know what that mystery meat is, please don’t tell me. Unless it’s turkey or tofu or something. Otherwise I’m happy not knowing. It was delicious either way.

By the time I was halfway through that, I’d exhausted my Dr. Pepper supply, and my mouth was pretty much an inferno. So I went to the Baggage Check lady and whined a bit about how they should have public water fountains like Texas does. She felt sympathetic for some reason, and went in the back room. She came back with this:

Conductor’s water! Special magical water reserved only for train conductors. I felt honored for about 15 seconds, and then remembered why I needed it and drank it quickly.
Here’s a picture of their planned restoration of the station.

That’s what that scaffolding in the previous picture of the station was.

The bus that would take me to Vancouver was very valiant and … vital and vivacious!

The bus ride was pretty boring. I played DS games and listened to music. It was interesting watching outside the window. There were beautiful trees towering along each side of the interstate, snow on all the branches. It was really beautiful, but I couldn’t get any pictures to come out. It was pretty dark by that time - it gets dark early. Oh, funny story - because of the snow, a lot of the streets had been closed. People would try to drive up the hills, lose traction, and slide all the way down and hit other cars. So the bus driver’s regular route was closed off. He got on the intercom and asked if anyone was familiar with downtown Seattle streets. A woman near the front crouched next to the driver and guided him to the interstate. It was a pretty funny sight.

Right before we got to customs / border patrol territory, we stopped in at the Duty Free shop.

Duty Ree, perhaps.
It’s pretty funny. You can bring 24 cans of beer, 100 cigarettes, 50 cigars, and 2 pounds of chewing tobacco across the border if you want. Why you’d want to is still a mystery to me.

I got stopped at customs and redirected into a secondary interrogation room. Their computer had crashed, so I had to wait for it to reboot. They then asked me the same questions as before - where are you staying, do you have reservations, do you know anyone, are you traveling alone, etc. The guy next to me was a more interesting story. As he answered the questions, I grew more and more intrigued. He was from Corpus Christi, but originally from New Mexico. He had cowboy boots, blue jeans, a bif belt buckle and a white 10-gallon hat atop his head. He drawled like a true southerner. He was on his way to Canada to meet his internet girlfriend - right across the border in Surrey. He owns a company repairing parking lots. Apparently he failed to answer some of the questions correctly, because they detained him for a good 10 minutes. I was already back on the bus at this point, and we all just sat waiting. Eventually he cleared customs, and we dropped him off in Surrey on the way to Vancouver. Good luck, Tex.

As we travelled through downtown Vancouver, I saw a lot of things that I wanted to post comments about. One thing that startled me was the increase in the speed limit from 60 to 100 as we crossed the border, until I remembered that was in kilometers per hour. Since I don’t keep a notebook with me, I have to come up with mnemonics to remember things that I’m going to write about. It’s enjoyable and helps exercise my brain a bit. My mnemonic for this trip was

green chinese hands play table tennis with balls at home depot and the gas station.

Green relates to the traffic lights. They actually have a different status of traffic light here that we don’t have in America. It’s flashing-green. Basically what flashing green means, from what I’ve gathered watching the traffic, is that you have right of way, but be careful. In america, we just wouldn’t have traffic lights there at all. But in this case they’re warning you: hey, there’s an intersection here. Someone might be dumb and pull out. But they have no signal lights on the intersecting road, just stop signs, so they have to wait, indefinitely if necessary, until it’s safe to go.

There are so many Chinese people here that many of the signs are in English and Chinese, rather than English and French as typical for Canada.

The hands thing I found interesting, but maybe no one else does. In the US, our traffic hands and people are filled in. In Canada, they’re outlines. Here’s a US one.

I didn’t get a picture of a Canadian one. If you think about it, though, the outline is just as clear, if not clearer, than the filled-in version, and uses a lot fewer lights, conserving electricity and reducing the overall cost.

The International Canadian Society of Table Tennis is located in central Vancouver.

Balls I’m not sure about.

I noticed that in Canada they call the store The Home Depot and we tend to call it just Home Depot.

I was going to remark on the insane cheapness of gas here in Canada (78 cents!) but realized that price is per liter, not per gallon. It actually works out to be about $2.45 a gallon, so it’s a bit more expensive than the US is.

Well, I’m nearing on the 3000 word mark, and I’ve already spent the greater part of 3 hours writing this post, and it’s nearly 4 AM, so I’m going to head to bed. Tomorrow night I’ll write about Vancouver so far. At least I’m done with Seattle and the trip up to BC. Laurel, you’ll have to wait ’til tomorrow to be jealous.

I was going to complain about something, but I figure it’s just as productive to do this:
WAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH
WAHHHHHHHHHHH
WAAAAAAAAAAH.

How much blacker could this be?

See if image shows up.

I’ve been trying to make a big updated post on the current happenings, but I want to include pictures and I can’t figure out how to upload them to WordPress. It gets dark here at like 5 pm so I’ll figure it out then.

So I was checkin’ out the craigslist Vancouver, and I came across this post:

Quick Question!

Okay, so if there was a zombie take over, where would you go, who would you bring and why?

I’m not talking about the Dawn of the Dead zombies that do that awkward straight-leg walk and have lost most basic motor skills save for groaning and chewing. We’re talking batshit crazy, flesh hungry, Rage virus zombies (think 28 Days Later).

If it makes any difference to you, I’m 5′7″, white, long auburn hair, blue eyes and slim. I just finished up my third semester at post-secondary and I am also employed. I’m polite, witty and relatively mischevious.

Now tell me your zombie escape plan!

And I, being the hapless hero and all (or whatever) replied.
Firstly, I linked to this comic:

And secondly, writing the following reply:

Presupposing the former argument’s invalidity, it would depend how far the zombie outbreak had progressed when I became aware of it.
I mean, best case, you’d have something like I am Legend, and have a few days to prepare before the outbreak became widespread. In that case, I’d probably stockpile some weaponry, and then find a really small town (we’re talkin’ 100 people or so) that had already been infested, and bring a couple of friends. Then we’d drive up to the most secure-looking building (probably the city hall - those tend to be stone and multi-level) with a van full of food, weapons, generators, fuel and such, and a truck with a deer guard. We’d smash all the zombies in the way, then enter the building (guns drawn of course) and clear out the lower levels. (and remember to secure the entryway - people always seem to forget that during zombie outbreaks, don’t they?) Then we’d head up to the roof. We’d throw some fresh meat or a cat or something off the roof and hide. When all the zombies came, we’d clear them out with our rifles.

The reason this is my preferred strategy is that
1) we’re in a secure location with not very many buildings around us.
2) zombies don’t like people food, so it’s better to kill them all first and then fetch the food out of the van later. as long as they don’t go batshit crazy on the van and start destroying it, we’re fine. In fact, that may be better, because that means they’re mostly stationary and can be eliminated more easily.
3) the town has already been converted, so it’s now deserted, and we can assume that the zombies are migrating _away_ from our town. If you think about it, depending on how the zombies became so, there’s likely a point of origin somewhere in the country. So as more are infected, the radius of infection spreads from this point of origin. As the zombieism spreads from the POO (point of origin), the density (that is, the ratio zombie:nonzombie) increases at the origin and all radii less than or equal to the current maximum infection distance. Therefore, in order for the zombies to continue to be zombies, and to spread the infection (since apparently that’s their main motivation - that and brains and flesh), they must continually move further from the POO. So once the initial wave of zombies pass from the POO through our town, there probably won’t be any more back. I’m making the assumption here (which I believe to be reasonable) that zombies don’t have some sort of wireless communications network, and they obviously are too effed up to properly communicate in person, so if any of the zombies do come by, they can be disposed of, and we won’t have an “oh no, how did THEY ALL FIND OUT WHERE WE ARE OH NO THERE ARE 40,000 ZOMBIES WHAT DO WE DO” type situation.
4) clearing out the lower levels and getting to the roof pretty much guarantees that your building is zombie-free for that instant. Then, as long as it’s watched on all sides for new zombies, there’s really no reason to suspect there are zombies on the premises. This relaxes the group and leads to better shooting and increased zombie-killing productivity, and boosts morale.
5) small towns are generally less-frequently-supplied by supply lines, so they tend to carry more food per citizen in their grocery stores than cities do (because of the high turnover, they carry less of each thing so they can have a bigger variety.) And we don’t want to be fighting over food with some crazy city folk who are going to be greedy and not ration. Since the group are all friends and they’re smart, they’ll realize that it’s an anarcho-syndicalist commune, and that the greater good must be upheld for the sub-society to be successful. So they’ll share food and stuff.

In the other case, where the way I discover there’s an outbreak is by answering the door and nearly getting eaten, I don’t think there’s much way to plan that. It’s mostly 1) get weapons, 2) get food, 3) find safe place to stay, 4) have some dumb guy compromise safety of facility, 5) repeat steps 2 through 5.

I don’t know that I’d actually do any of this this in a real life zombie situation (who really knows how they’ll react?), but I didn’t have a zombie escape plan, so I made one up on the spot and attempted to justify it. Whether or not I was successful in that endeavor I’ll leave to you to judge.

We’ll see what she says.

Finished the resizing code. Looks like this:

import os, Image
target_image_type = ["jpg", "jpeg"]
maxside = 1024
image_exts = ["jpg", "png", "jpeg", "gif", "bmp"]
restricted_dirs = ['resized']
resize_filter = Image.ANTIALIAS
#there's a more efficient way to do this but I don't think the speedup would be worth the trouble.
if not os.path.exists("resized"):
    os.mkdir("resized")

def resize_current_dir(directory):
    if not os.path.exists(os.path.join("resized", directory[2:])):
        os.mkdir(os.path.join("resized", directory[2:]))
    #resizes all items in current directory.
    #restricted_dirs only applies to the root dir.
    if directory == ".":
        all_items = [item for item in os.listdir(".") if item not in restricted_dirs]
    else:
        all_items = os.listdir(directory)
    dirs = [item for item in all_items if os.path.isdir(item)]
    images = [item for item in all_items if not os.path.isdir(item) and os.path.splitext(item)[-1][1:].lower() in image_exts]

    for image in images:
        #resize images in the current dir, copy over.
        print image
        im = Image.open(os.path.join(directory, image))
        width, height = im.size
        if height > width:
            width = (float(maxside) / height) * width
            height = maxside
        else:
            height = (float(maxside) / width) * height
            width = maxside

        if not os.path.exists(os.path.join("resized", directory[2:], image)):
            im = im.resize((width, height), resize_filter)
            name, ext = os.path.splitext(image)
            if ext[1:].lower() not in target_image_type: # convert.
                #assume the first item gets preference.
                #we need to remove the base directory off the path.
                #let's do it the cheap way and if they want to support more advanced crap later
                #they can.
                #this may break on images in the root dir, who knows.

                #not sure if this actually works with the current FORMAT items.  maybe it doesn't.
                im.save(os.path.join("resized", directory[2:], image), target_image_type[0])
            else:
                im.save(os.path.join("resized", directory[2:], image))

    """
    print "root:", directory
    print "dirs:", dirs
    print "images:", images
    print "all items:", all_items
    """
    #call the func on all dirs.
    #terminating condition of recursion is a directory with no subdirectories.
    for subdir in dirs:
        resize_current_dir(os.path.join(directory, subdir))

resize_current_dir(".")
#traverse subfolders and resize images.

Works fine for me.
Look for pictures in the latest post.

Ah ha ha, I just remembered that I’m a programmer. I can write an image resize script in about 5 minutes. I’ll just do that and then post the resized images. No pictures yet though - I don’t want to hang out at the computer too much while I’m visiting with people. I’ll do it when I get to vancouver and it’s cold and I’m inside.