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Published: April 2nd 2009
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GM Place
Home of the Vancouver Canucks As someone who works @ the Travel Channel, you might that I'd be whisking away to some exotic place every now and again for work. You'd actually be very wrong. I barely travel for work, and the surprising thing is, a lot of my co-workers don't do it that often either. I had a vision to create a culture change @ our organization, and thus created a program with a co-worker of mine that essentially allows Travel Channel employees to actually get out there and travel. To make a long story short, employees go out to a destination to create video and blog content for web and mobile platforms, and Travel Channel picks up the tab in return. As one of the co-founders of this program, I got to go on a pilot trip to work out the kinks in Vancouver, British Columbia in preperation for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. While my other co-worker was going to Hawaii, I was actually excited about going to Vancouver, as it is somewhere that I've always wanted to visit. I wasn't going to be getting tan anytime soon though...
Before I had left to Vancouver, a co-worker of mine put me in
contact with a friend who works for Canadian Tourism, who then put me in touch with some great people from Tourism Vancouver. When I went down to the front desk the next morning, there was a package waiting for me from Tourism Vancouver filled with helpful information, maps, and best of all, a guest attractions pass which gave me free admission to several of Vancouver’s top attractions. I could see our finance team smiling from 3,000 miles away. After grabbing some coffee, I started out on my walking tour of the downtown Olympic trail. Stops included the Countdown Clock @ the Vancouver Art Gallery, the BC Place Stadium, Canada Hockey Palace, and Hudson’s Bay Company, where you can purchase your official Olympic maple syrup. While at BC Place, I visited the BC Sports Hall of Fame. I’m going to sum it up in one brief description. If you’re not into the Vancouver Canucks, the BC Lions (Canadian Football League), Terry Fox, or the province of British Columbia, you probably won’t have that much interest in the museum. However, it was very cool to see the passion that Canadians have for their national athletes and the pride they have for there
teams. Trevor Linden is to them what Jordan is to us. Really something else…
Since I was so close, I then headed past Canada Hockey Place and headed along into Chinatown. Believe it or not, Vancouver has the 3rd largest Chinatown in North America behind San Francisco and New York City. As I walked through the main arch, one thing was evident, this place smelled awesome. It was around 11am and all the restaurants were cooking up great stuff for lunch. As I made my way down the main drag, I ended up stopping in this one Chinese market that would have made Andrew Zimmern s**t his pants. I mean, the amount of spices, herbs, and other random looking things that were in this market left me boggled but fascinated. And to really make it an authentic experience, 98% of the signs and items were in Chinese. Using my careful translation skills, I noticed some “ginger tea” and decided to get that. I also picked up a bunch of little candies/dried fruits which again I had no idea what they were. Since I was really hungry and only had a coffee that morning, what better way than to start
your day with bbq duck over noodles and hot tea? This is exactly what I had when I popped into a Chinese bbq restaurant right near the market. I think it was the dead ducks in the window that really drew me in.
After lunch, I headed to the Chinese Cultural Centre and the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden. Fighting through the groups of school children, I was able to walk around this peaceful garden and got some beautiful photos. The architecture was simply stunning, and the waterfalls were so relaxing. I took a tour with a local guide who explained the balance in Chinese culture, and how everything in the garden balanced like ying and yang. He pointed out everything from the design in the stones to the trees next to rocks. “Everything in balance. Ying and Yang”. I must have heard this phrase at least 50 times during the tour. Afterwards, I had a little sip of green tea, picked up some jade earrings for my mom, and headed back to the SkyTrain towards the Olympic Village.
One thing that’s very evident in Vancouver at this time is that a lot of the city is
under construction and still very much preparing for the Olympics. This is certainly the case at the Olympic Village, which right now is nothing more than cranes and building frames. Very riveting I know. However, there was this great little park that’s adjacent to the village where I got some cool shots of the venues and the mountains surrounding Vancouver. Armed with me free attractions pass, I went into Telus World of Science since it was so close and just looked neat from the outside. Walking into this giant silver dome, I knew this would be very cool. One thing that I immediately noticed was that EVERYTHING was interactive. The whole bottom floor has a number of puzzles and games you could put together, as well as cool hands-on experiments. Of course, this place was mobbed with young children, but I didn’t care. I was having a blast! Upstairs had more great exhibits, including Lego sculptures, music machines, a giant hamburger with a film playing inside about organic food parodying Star Wars, and the ball waterfall. Now I have to tell you, this thing was awesome. Basically, there were two cannons on the end that fired off plastic balls up
onto this towering waterfall, where you could watch the balls come down a maze. Kids loved this, and spent a long time just firing off the cannons. Needless to say, a really fun afternoon.
I headed back to the hotel and caught up on emails and rested for a bit before I decided to hit up the town for the evening. One of the places was recommended I check out was the up and coming Gastown neighborhood on the north side of downtown near the waterfront. In particular, she mentioned this pub called The Irish Heather which apparently had great food and beer. I was sold. I took the Skytrain to the end of line, and had a short walk to the pub. Looking at the menu, I noticed they had fresh mussels which were prepared daily in a different style. When the bartender said today’s mussel special was a green Thai curry sauce, I just had to try them. Served hot, these mussels were out of this world. It really shows the Asian fusion into everything in Vancouver, as curry sauce would be the last thing I would expect to have with fresh Pacific mussels. There’s wasn’t enough
Chinese Garden
I love the contrast in this photo. fry bread to sop up all the sauce, but I used some of the shells to get the good stuff at the bottom. After dinner, I ended up chatting with a couple of guys that were in town for an interactive design conference and shared a few pints of Strongbow with them. Tying a couple too many on, I headed back to my hotel and crashed for a very eventful first day.
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