Tag: Travel

Short Getaway: Victoria for Victoria Day! Pt. 1

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Hey all,

For Victoria Day, the boyfriend and I decided we’d take a short getaway to Victoria— the island. You know what? I didn’t realize that Victoria Day was to celebrate Queen Victoria until probably two years ago. I always thought it was a random day to celebrate the island where our Parliament resided.

Anyway, get ready for picture dump.

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We took the coach to Victoria. It was my first time coaching since my family had always driven onto the ferry, but I can say that it was a great experience and I’d be alright with doing it again. The bus drivers are super friendly, and not having to deal with lining up to board the ferry on foot was great. You also get first dibs to lining up for food in the ferry, and those lines can basically take the entire ferry trip.

We got to our hotel at around 11AM, having taken the 7:30AM coach and luckily enough, they had a room ready for us! We dropped off our stuff and walked downtown. Our hotel was not super close to downtown, but we decided to walk it to see how far it was. We stopped along the way to visit Chinatown. We had expected it to be super boring, but the two blocks or so we visited were pleasantly interesting!

We checked out Fan Tan alley, which is rumored to be haunted. We didn’t find ghosts, but we did find very interesting shops that sold trinkets and toys we remembered from our childhood (chinese finger traps anyone? whoopee cushions?). But we couldn’t stop long since we had planned to eat at Fisherman’s Wharf. So we left Chinatown and headed straight there. With a few detours to do touristy stuff like take pictures in front of the Parliament and look at the Empress Hotel:

By the time we finally got there, we were starving. Which was good because it made the food that much more delicious! We shared fish and chips, an oyster sandwich, and a three-salmon chowder. It’s was so good and definitely worth it. As we ate, we watched kids feed the seal, though a random sea otter kept vying for the food.

After our nice meal, we rounded it off with ice cream! Sea salt caramel with caramel cups that were soft on its inside! How do they do that? Nobody knows!

Taking our ice cream, we walked to Beacon Hill Park. My bf said there was a petting zoo there, and I wasn’t super excited. Mostly because I was exhausted from walking all day, and plus, what would be there? A lamb or two? I was wrong. It was a pretty amazing petting zoo. The entrance fee was by donation, but it was well worth it.

They had:

These aren’t all the animals. There were pigs, rabbits, birds, guinea pigs, and lots of other small animals. The lambs and goats were really the only animals you could “pet”, but kids sure did try to run at random chicken who had escaped their enclosure or grab at squawking peacocks. The alpacas were the cutest things there! They were so derp. I’m glad we visited the petting zoo. Not only had I not been to one for years, but I don’t recall them being this good.

We ended the night with going to Sushi Matsuri. We had a list of restaurants we wanted to visit during our trip and this was one of them. Walking in, we knew we made the right choice. They were playing our favorite documentary there: Jiro Dreams of Sushi. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend you do. The food there was really fresh!

After returning to the hotel, it mainly consisted of us pigging out on popcorn, marathoning Storage Wars since it was on TV, and then passing out because we were so physically tired. Not bad for a first day! It also felt very long, which felt very satisfying.

For days 2 and 3, I’ll put up a separate post. This one is getting a tad long!

– Karen

Beautiful British Columbia: Our BC Backyard

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Hey all,

That’s a lot of “b”s in my title I now realize.

I recently took up hiking again, since Summer’s just around the corner! I was itching to go explore nature again, and luckily, my boyfriend was super on board! Since we don’t have a car, the bothersome thing about hiking is the commute. Getting away from civilization takes at least an hour or two. Then getting back sucks because you’re tired, but you’re not home for another two hours.

I think spring is the best time to go hiking. The air isn’t muggy, but crisp and fresh. Mosquitos aren’t roaming for human flesh. And students are still mostly in school, so there’s slightly less people hiking the trails.

There are times when I cannot believe that we have views like this right in our backyard:

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Pack a sandwich, grab a fruit, fill your water bottle. It’s nice to escape away from the city. Something about knowing that the snapping of twigs you just heard was made by nature, and not by something man-made. If you live in Vancouver, go out there and seize what you’ve got! (Believe me, having lived in asian countries where they’ve ran out of natural land to develop and had to turn to land reclamation, having natural trails within arm’s reach is a blessing.) I’d recommend using Vancouver Trails to figure out which trails to go to!

– Karen

LA for Christmas! Pt. 2

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Hello y’all,

So finally posting part 2 of my LA trip. And it’s actually not that overdue if you look at some of my other posts.

After Anaheim, we went back to the city of Los Angeles. We were exhaused on the first day and decided to skip some of the stuff we had planned so we can go straight to Little Tokyo. Some things I learned about LA:

1. Little Tokyo is the best place ever

We ended up skipping another few things on our list just to re-visit Little Tokyo on the third day. They have a million ramen places to choose from and we ended up going to Orochon Ramen and Hakata Ramen. We had to wait at both of them but Hakata’s wait was almost 2 hours! They both served great ramen, but the bf and I both agree that Orochon’s soup was better. We like spicy and Orochon gave you the option to make it super spicy.

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Another thing Little Tokyo was amazing at was mochi. I think the mochi lato at Mikawaya Mochi has forever changed me. No mochi will ever taste as good 😦 They had regular mochi too, but the lato ones were creamier and the skin wasn’t as hard. It was so perfect!

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2. K-town isn’t trashy

From what I’ve seen of the webseries K-town, I had expected Koreatown in LA to be trashier and greasier. It really wasn’t. Instead we found super cheap restaurants! They were quite famous for their Korean BBQ all-you-can-eats and we ended up settling for one that was $11.99 at Sanya Korean BBQ Buffet. So much meat. So worth it.

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Tell me this isn’t cheap. The $11.99 menu was more than enough for dinner.

We had lots of beef brisket, thinly sliced. We let it grill just a little longer than necessary, giving the outside a slightly crispier exterior. It was amazing. We also had some pork belly and there were a lot of other things on the menu. But we were quite full from the side dishes they provide you as well.

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Koreatown also had lots of shops that sold Korean products. I hopped into one or two cosmetic shops just to see what they have and their collections are quite complete. If you’re looking for asian snacks, this also was a good place to go!

3. The Getty is far

I was annoyed by LA’s transit system to begin with, but getting to the Getty really was something. We had to take two busses, and the schedules were horrible. It took forever to get to the Getty via transit (about an hour and 20 minutes?), whereas driving would’ve taken 19 minutes.

$100 million. Right there.

$100 million. Right there.

One thing I did enjoy was seeing the paintings. I’m no art expert, but at the Getty I got to admire the works of some big artists. It was the first time I had seen a Van Gogh, Monet, and a Picasso in real life. Or any famous paintings in real life I guess. Irises by Van Gogh was the featured exhibit for the period that we were there. A hundred million dollar painting. I didn’t even want to breathe near it.

4. Hollywood is only glam for about 4 blocks

Exiting the metro station for Hollywood, I took a few seconds just to marvel at how alive and amazing Hollywood looked. Bright lights, crowds of people, music everywhere. We hit up a few souvenir shops, went to Madame Tussauds and at night, spent new year’s eve at Hardrock Cafe counting down with other patrons in the restaurant.

Madame Tussauds shenanigans. They had a Marvel exhibit!

Madame Tussauds shenanigans. They had a Marvel exhibit!

But then we went to explore and walked down Hollywood only to realized that the glam only lasted a few blocks. Beyond the main strip of Hollywood that we always see on TV, the street was lined with mediocre restaurants or shabby looking pubs. The Walk of Fame also deteriorates drastically, the names of actors/actresses being none that we recognize. But I guess to be a tourist attraction, you don’t need to show everyone the full picture before their arrival.

5. The TCL Theatre is beautiful

My boyfriend and I saved The Hobbit: The Battle of The Five Armies for the TCL Theatre! We saw that they were showing it and decided we’d hold off until we got to Hollywood. Plus, we’d get to check out the TCL Theatre!

I could not believe how nice the theatre was and that it is accessible to the public. I’m so used to seeing award shows and events happening there on TV I never thought it would be open for regular movies. They also played movies in IMAX and the quality was so good it was almost disorienting at first watching the characters so clearly.

I thought the price was amazing. It was $19 a ticket for IMAX in a gorgeous theatre. In Vancouver, we pay $15 for a shabby theatre seat for IMAX. It was so worth it watching a movie there. If you do go, visit the washrooms. It’s ridiculously big.

So that’s it for my LA trip! I’m proud of myself for having written pt 2 so quickly 🙂

– Karen

LA for Christmas! Pt. 1

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Hello all,

I do realize it has been a while since my last post, but Christmas came along and I realized I was not at all prepared this season. It was a mad scramble to get passable gifts for my loved ones, and then I also went on a spontaneous trip with the boyfriend to Los Angeles!

We left on boxing day, really early in the morning since we got our tickets for cheap off Expedia. The trip to LA should take about 2.5 hours if we took a direct flight, but instead it took more towards 8 hours since we had layovers and such. We went to Phoenix first, then down to LA. Weird flight route, I know.

The first day was all travelling, so it passed by in a blur of naps in weird locations, and switching between modes of transport. Once we got to LA, we got on a shuttle to take us to Anaheim. We were visiting Disneyland for Christmas!

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We spent one day at California Adventures, and one day at Disneyland. It was really busy in both parks due to schools being let out and everyone wanting to see Disneyland in its Christmas form. But seriously, Sleeping Beauty’s castle was amazing with the Christmas lights.

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It’s funny how we all pay hundreds of dollars to line up for hours on end at Disneyland, yet still leave feeling like we experienced magic. Disneyland was definitely a LOT more busy than California Adventures. At least at Cali Adventures, I felt like I could walk around without constantly bumping into a wall of people!

One thing that I loved most this visit was Cars Land. I had forgotten they had added a new section to Cali Adventures, and when I walked by the road that lead down Radiator Springs I actually cried. I wish I was kidding. It looked so much like the movie that it really was magical. We ended up eating dinner at Flo’s and it was the most satisfying meal of the day!

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Another thing that stood out to me was Dole whip. Here’s the thing: I’ve never heard of a Dole whip. I saw it on instagram, then realized that there were a million pictures of the little mountain of pineapple flavoured soft-serve ice cream. What the heck was this and why is it so popular? I was very hesitant to get it, mostly because it was cold at Disneyland and there was a lineup. There was a lineup for soft serve. I had enough of lineups. But nonetheless, we waited about 30 minutes in line and got our Dole Whipe Float. It tastes much like pineapple flavoured soft serve, except there are little chunks of pineapple. It tasted tart, which I quite liked. It was a very good soft-serve, but I still didn’t get all the hype that surrounded it.

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By the end of the Disneyland visit, we had spent a small fortune on foods at the park, and also severely lacked sleep as we would always leave at the last possible moment, then arrive as early as possible. So worth it!

Next post to be on Los Angeles itself 🙂 (Hopefully, it won’t take 2 months for me to post)

– Karen

San Fran Fam Jam!

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Hello all,

This is definitely a late post, but three weeks ago I went to San Francisco with my family! Although San Fran is quite close to Vancouver (well. comparatively.), it was my first time there.

The sun was out during our whole trip, which was nice when we got to San Fran, but not so nice as we road tripped by California. I had forgotten how hot it can get out there.

We did a bunch of touristy things such as visit Fisherman’s Wharf, including having a bread bowl of chowder. Apparently it’s considered a tourist trap, but I still went for it and it was good. The seagulls there must be pretty happy with all the people who throw unwanted pieces of bread to them after they’re down with their chowder!

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I had wanted to go to Alcatraz too, but the tour was all sold out for the weekend that we were going. Instead we decided it was only right if we visited a museum or something to properly play the part of a tourist so we went to Ripley’s! Ripley’s Believe it or Not books were such a big part of my childhood it was cool to see their displays in person.

I must say that one of my favourite parts of San Fan was Chinatown. We came back three times over the course of three days for food. Something I found special was their dim sum. They sold them in stores and unlike everywhere else I’ve been in most parts of the world, you didn’t sit down in a restaurant to enjoy them. They’re packed up in a takeaway box and you eat it wherever you please. The dim sum places didn’t even have tables or chairs for you to sit, so that option was non existent.

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Chinatown was so authentic in San Francisco. If I don’t think about it too hard, it almost made me feel like I was back in Hong Kong. The mannerisms of people there, the language, the things they sold. Of course, there’s a lot of western influence intertwined but it didn’t make it any less authentic.

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My sister got me really hyped up for Ghirardelli’s factory, but when we ordered an ice-cream sundae there, it tasted like poop. Well, that’s a little harsh, but it definitely wasn’t worth the $11. I’ve had better chocolate (literally anywhere else).

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Our trip to Union Square was not eventful. It looked like a typical downtown region of any city, but the weather was really nice while we were there.

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ALSO, I never knew Japan towns existed. Chinatowns? Sure, everywhere. But San Francisco’s Japan Town was quite cool. They had so many geek wares there that I was trying not to freak out.

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10613079_10152440934504748_5513272189264340628_nWe lived a little ways outside of San Francisco, since we wanted a nice hotel that wasn’t overly expensive. I’d highly recommend everyone do the same since all the nice hotels cost a pretty penny inside the city. In the end we chose a hotel in San Mateo, which was close enough. We’d drive for about 20 minutes to get back to the city each morning, but that was no hassle with a car.

I wonder when I’ll have another family trip. This trip reminded so much of what it was like to be on holiday with my family, especially since it was a road trip. The past few family vacations always lacked a member or two — my parents and sister went to Vegas without me; my mom, sister and I went to Hong Kong/Japan sans my dad. You get the story. But family time really is the best 🙂

– Karen