I just went there

This city has decided to flick it’s fun switch. Like the rest of Canada, Vancouver is a completely different place when the weather gets nice. Another cool thing is, well, the wicked nature, which I’m admittedly a bit of a dork about.

With all that being said people here can still be a bit weird. I think I’ve revealed enough on here about how great the place is to gripe a bit now. For one, no matter what people say about the west coast this city is not full of relaxed, happy-go-lucky people. Far from it. Because everyone here is so athletic and beautiful they take themselves a little too seriously. There’s a reason you never see handsome comedians. If only they spent half as much time working on their fart jokes as they do on their beach bodies. I get it dude, you got a sweet six pack, but could you please stop recycling jokes from “How I met your mother”?

As an extension of that a lot of dudes here take the city too seriously. Say anything bad about Vancouver and it’s like you just took a dump on their first born.

This city is like one giant teenager, and in a way the metaphor makes sense:

1. Until recently it wasn’t really a big city. It’s almost like it’s going through it’s puberty from town to big city.
2. It takes itself too seriously, which is exactly like every teenager.
3. It really cares about being seen as cool, not as much about actually being cool. Which is basically what high school was all about. Seriously you see 40 year olds here dressed like teenage skaters, but at the same time it’s really hard to find a bar open late with cheap pints and a decent jukebox. Priorities people, priorities.

Hopefully this cities awkward, self-conscious phase ends soon and we can move on to the party animal university phase, the indy hipster phase and eventually the quarter life crisis phase.

Okay, now back to the fun, photo stuff.

Recently I’ve been trying to get out, hang out, do outdoors stuff like most of the world except for maybe Goths. Been a few places lately, thought I’d show off and include some photos and quick descriptions.

The Capilano river is right on the North Shore of Vancouver. It’s a super rugged river but super close to the city, what makes it so wicked is that since it’s still a super mountainy, cliffy river it can feel quite remote despite just being 10 minutes from down town. Lately I’ve been up there quite a bit scaling down the cliffs to the river to find nice quiet fishing spots. Was up there on Friday where me and my buddy Joel found a spot with smaller minnow sized salmon jumping all over the place, we had a feeling there were bigger ones forcing them to try and get away. Despite having fish following our spoon all the way to the surface, staring back at us, we couldn’t convince any of them to bite. Next time we’re bringing worms.

Recently went to Whistler with Christy and my buddy John. The funny thing about Whistler is how fake of a town it is. It gives Disneyland a run for it’s money. The whole place is so polished it feels like your visiting a theme park called “extreme town” or something. I guess the super rich chubby kids need to have a place to call there own where they can get decked out in mountain biking gear without being beat up by the kids who actually do mountain bike.

One other weird thing we saw was a mountain unicycler. In hindsight I can't believe i didn't take a picture but seriously the kid was like 16, old enough to know better. Seriously if my son came home one day and was like "Dad I think I'm a transexual martian" I'd be like, cool, we'll figure it out. but if my son came home with a unicycle I don't think I could ever forgive him.

We grabbed a few beers and nachos on a patio right near the base of one of the mountains. What was cool was that there were tons of people mountain biking down the mountain. They’d take the ski lifts up and bike down. We sat beside a couple of trophy wives doing a good job of neglecting their fighting kids while drinking wine and talking about plastic surgery. I wish I was making that last sentence up. Welcome to Whistler I guess.

After Whistler we headed up to near Pemberton to the Green River and a cool waterfall. Once you drive past Whistler the drive has a real intimidating feel to it, in kind of a cool exciting way. It’s like the Mordor of BC. The mountains start to look more intimidating, the road starts to snake more and it just generally looks a lot more untouched. You also see the odd orc or dragon too. The river had a pretty rad camping spot attached and was generally just a cool place to hang out and check out nature.

Me and Christy also did a day trip up to Squamish and a few surrounding waterfalls and lakes. Once again cool stuff to check out. I forgot to bring my rod this time but I went one spot where people were catching Rainbow trout. Blah blah blah nature nature nature.

So there we go. Blog entry done. One less thing to feel anxious about all week. Hope everyone isn’t still coping with the fear from drinking too much this weekend. Peace out.