Where was I? Right, checking into the Vancouver Delta Suites. Niiiiiice place. We checked in with the assistance of the extremely enthusiastic Alison. Along with our keys, we received... a cookie. A pleasantly warm chocolate chip cookie. Each. Lynn and I looked at each other with looks that probably said, "Holy cow! They gave a cookie! A pleasantly warm chocolate chip cookie! Each!" Needless to say, this instantly become our favourite hotel ever.

Our suite turned out to be a corner suite, which meant big windows giving us a view of the city pretty much any direction we chose to face. (I'm not good with heights, yet this didn't bother me. Well, unless I did something really stupid, like press my face right up against the window. Which is something I tried to avoid doing. Duh.)

After getting settled in, we headed out for dinner at Shabusen on Burrard, where much sushi and Korean BBQ was consumed. Yum!

We took a few shots of some gargoyles and other architectural bits on the way there:




And the Vancouver Olympic countdown clock:



Yep, that's a clock all right. ... Okay.

On the way back it poured. We did have an umbrella but we were still pretty wet by the time we made it back to the hotel. Some passing employee spotted us approaching and leapt to help us through the door. Once back in our room, we discovered there was only one robe in the room. Calling down to the front desk produced an extra robe at our door after about, oh, a little more than a minute.

The rest of the evening was spent lounging on the comfy, king-size bed, in our robes watching a little TV. Oh, yeah, we were roughin' it. Late in the evening, we were feeling a wee bit peckish. "Oh, look, 24-hour room service. May we have a fruit and cheese platter, please? Oh, thank you for bringing that to our room. Here's a little something for your trouble. Time to scarf!"



That would be brie event number 1. Eating our lovely fruit and cheese platter in bed.

Tell me why anyone would ever voluntarily go camping for a holiday when this is available?

After a very nice night's sleep, we headed down for breakfast at the hotel's restaurant, Millennium. Brie event #2 happened when I order a large, yummy omelette with ham and cheese.

We checked out a little later (man, we scored on the Easter special - our total bill, with taxes, phone call charges and our room service was less than half the room's normal base rate). A little shopping at Pacific Centre and a little wandering around led us to:



The Vancouver Art Gallery. We decided, sure, what the heck. I rather liked the Acting the Part: Photography as Theatre exhibit and Lynn enjoyed the collection of Vancouver photographs by Fred Herzog. We were both left underwhelmed by the Huang Yong Ping retrospective, though. It was that weird, kind of pretentious art that everybody likes to pretend they understand but don't really. You know you're in trouble when the exhibits materials, instead of reading "watercolour on canvas" or "silver nitrate photograph", contain... "lion feces". Um, yeah.

We headed back to the SkyTrain station, stopping for a bite to eat in a handy food fair. We picked a Café Suprême (which we'd never heard of before) and... brie event #3 happened when I chose a ham and brie pannini. A ham and brie pannini... in a mall food court. Go fig.

We were right on time for the bus back to the ferry, then into town.

Despite working three evening shifts this week, I've felt fairly relaxed this week. I'm putting it down to all the brie.