Vancouver day 3

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Plans today are to try and visit most of Chinatown and Gastown during the morning as this afternoon moving to Burnaby (30 minutes by train from Downtown) where my Airbnb is.

I start to go direction Chinatown (always with my map now). I will get to see the house where Jimmy Hendrix used to visit his grandmother, go into interesting shops, such as a very nice tea shop and also a kind of market where you find all kind of Chinese strange things like insects and all the medicinal plants you can imagine (not for me !!).

After I discover Gastown that is the old part of Vancouver, very nice. Loads of pubs, restaurants, nice little shops. Small houses and calm streets. Just look at the pictures and you’ll see the charm of it.

As I still have a little bit of time I then go the Public Library, which is supposed to be one of the spots to visit. Quite impressing, just went in the outside hall, where they have café’s and souvenir shops.

Now way back to youth hostel, get my bag, take the train direction Burnaby. I arrive there, it’s raining cold, I’m already tired of having my bag on the back. Can’t get to know what way I’m supposed to go out of the station, has the airbnb host hadn’t given me any indication whatsoever. Stop a kind young woman who helps me with her i-phone so I finally get on the right way. And surprise when I arrive, nobody to meet me, don’t know what to do. Meet another girl who knows the guy supposed to meet me, she phones him, he was gone out and had left the key under the mat.

Well if I had known I wouldn’t even had left my youth hostel if I knew what I was going to discover in that flat. Awful, the bedroom was just a mattress on the floor with no sheets of covers, it was cold. And when I saw the kitchen, I nearly felt sick, never saw anything like that before or maybe just on TV on that show where two women come to clean your flats. The fact is that this guy had this flat with 3 bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom and just rented these bedrooms for people needing a place to stay. I could not even think of spending one night in that place, get on internet, find a cheap hotel and get back on the train direction downtown.

How good to have a clean room, comfortable bed, private bathroom, it was heaven ! Decide to stay there for 4 nights before I go to Victoria on the Vancouver Island (little earlier than planned).



So this was an exhausting day, just hope I won’t have any bad surprises like that on the rest of my journey.

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