We Left the Country

That's right!...and we're back! Yesterday, Craig had the day off, the weather was nice, we had no other plans, so we went to Canada for the day. Canada is only about two hours north of us, so we thought it would be fun to cross the border. I've been to Canada a couple of times, but Craig has never been ...so we set out. We ended up going to Vancouver which was very interesting to say the least. Once we could see all the skyscrapers we were both taken back quite a bit. Craig described it as looking like it had been "blown up", I described it as looking like it had "been abandoned." It was the weirdest looking city we had ever seen. All the buildings looked about the same...tall and completely rectangular, no neat architecture to speak of. The color of all the buildings were the same too.. gray and washed out. The only difference between all the buildings was the height. Some were taller, some were shorter. The weirdest part of all was the windows though. You may not even realize it, but in most downtowns, all the skyscrapers have tinted windows, but in Vancouver, not one skyscraper had a tinted window which made it look really weird...kind of dumpy for a lack of a better term. In addition, the skyscrapers seemed to stretch on for miles. It was really weird. Once amongst all the big buildings however, it appeared to look like any other downtown. People everywhere, shops, restaurants, no where to park, one way streets, etc. A couple of other things we noticed in Canada that were different from the U.S.

- Their traffic lanes are really really skinny. I could seriously reach out and shake the driver's hand next to me we were so close. This was scary, especially when you were alongside a bus.
- They don't use medians, even on highways. The oncoming traffic was waaay too close...only one little yellow line between us and the 100 kph oncoming traffic
- Not all, but some of their green traffic lights blinked. I tried looking up what they meant, but google supplied me with too many answers.
- People's houses are right on the highway...as in their front doors are literally no more than 4 or 5 feet from the street. I hope they don't have kids in these houses!

After exploring Vancouver we decided to head out of Canada but on the way a HUGE casino caught our eyes. We decided to go in to check it out. It was pretty neat. We had some dinner, walked around and then left. It was a nice little pit stop.

Overall, our trip to Vancouver was fun, and quite interesting. I'm not sure if we'll have a huge desire to go back to Vancouver but I hope we do make it back to Canada to ski at Whistler (location of the 2010 Olympics!!). We'll have to return to explore more of British Columbia as well. It is always fun seeing new things!