Trip to Vancouver & Seattle - Day 5

Since it was our last full day in Vancouver we thought we'd go back to our favorite place, Stanley Park. We headed into Vancouver, did a little shopping and had lunch on the way. We ate at a korean restaurant, and we thought it was interesting that even in a Korean restaurant, some of the dishes were flavored with maple. Before heading to Stanley Park, we went to the Vancouver Art Museum. The building is beautiful, although they seemed to have a balloon shaped like a fetus adorning the front of the building for some reason. The exhibit was cartoon and anime. I don't claim to be an art buff by any stretch of the imagination, but it's really hard to get my mind around cartoons and anime as art! So I was pretty disappointed in the exhibits. However, they also had a part of the exhibit on computer games, apparently they're art too. The good part about that is that they had an old Pac Man machine, which Aisling and I played on for quite a while and also a Super Mario game that Aisling played. PacMan as art, that I can see!

They also had a couple of other exhibits, equally disappointing. A Chinese artist who expresses himself by dressing in a suit made of raw meat and then hanging out near ground zero in New York. I'm not sure what that's about. Also a local artist whose exhibit included a four-poster bed on a turkish rug. It was very nice, but more in a furniture and furnishings sort of way than in a art way. Finally some female Canadian artists whose work looked a little more traditional. Sometimes I don't get art. Especially when there's raw meat involved.

After the museum we headed back up to third beach in Stanley Park. I'm not sure why the highways have names and the beaches have numbers, but I guess it works. It was just as beautiful as the previous day and we spent hours there playing in the water. It is so much warmer than northern California beaches, I cannot figure out why, perhaps it's to do with currents or something. We stayed until about 7 and then headed home. However, on the way home we passed another beach called English Bay beach, bigger and way more crowded than third beach and with the added attraction of a platform with a slide out about thirty feet from the shore. Aisling was still in her swimsuit and begged us to stop. Miraculously, I found a parking spot, and off she went to play in the water for another thirty minutes or so. The beach is in a lovely area, the west end of Vancouver. There are lots of the high-rise condos that seem to be common here, including one with a rather large tree growing on the roof. What a great place to live! After Aisling finally got her fill of the sea, we headed back to New Westminster and ate at the Keg, which seems to be a Canadian chain, but was very nice.

Photos are on flick.