February 11, 2011- City Life...

     Today was a free day, free to do whatever we wanted as we had no specific plans. So, what did we do? We lived the life of big city dwellers, cruising through the city at a fast clip, we stopped first at a local pizza place which touted itself as "the best pizza in town." We ordered and stood by the one open stool and shared a slice of mushroom and pepperoni pizza to curb our appetites as we had slept in late and missed our hot hotel breakfast.  It was the first rainy day we've had here, but we seemed to be able to miss anything but the slightest showers between our indoor stops. Next, we moved on to a famous local Sushi place called ZeroOneSushi for an 11 piece California combination with one of my favorite, tamago, which is rice and egg sushi (the egg is scrambled with sugar and pressed into a rectangular patty, and place on top of the rice with a strip of seaweed tying it all together), along with 6 traditional California rolls, and 4 pieces of sashimi type sushi, one made with snapper, one with shrimp, one with tuna, and one with salmon.  It was delicious.  Both of these places were closely related to street vendors as they were small stop in and go restaurants not meant to sit, relax, and be served in.  We had wanted to have just a street vendor food sampling day, but this will probably have to do as our time is running short now.
     As the weather was still quite cold and the showers were hitting us on and off, we decided it was a good mall walking day, so we headed back to the Pacific Centre we had visited the first day in Vancouver when we were shopping for warmer clothes.  We marveled at all the various kitchen and cookware there in the Hudson's Bay company, bought some extra large chocolate bars for the boys for Valentine's and one for ourselves to enjoy later with the bottle of Canadian wine we discovered at the little wine cellar within the store.  We thought about catching a movie in a real theater as this is a missed cultural experience for us on the island, but in the end, we decided to head back to the room to watch a movie from the hotel's choices. It was cheaper that way anyway.  Before making it there though, we stopped for an early dinner at The Shore Club. We were a little under dressed for this fine dining experience, but the exuberant host clearly wanted out business and happily seated us in the more comfortable and less formal lounge area, which is more our style anyway. :)  We enjoyed a scrumptious lobster bisque soup and a plate of salt and vinegar french fries for starters, then went on to main dishes of Macadamia encrusted halibut and maple glazed salmon, which was more than enough for us.  Then, it was home to relax in the warm, dry atmosphere of our home for the last week, which just happened to be right around the corner from our last stop.  Oh, I think I could get used to the city life, if only I could afford it for more than a week!