Grandma's Beef Shack

So last Thursday around 5:30pm I got a call from my friend Holly's Mom down in Oregon asking if I would like to come down for the weekend. Being as I am unemployed with relatively little obligations at home. I thought about it for about 5 minutes before I decided to say fuck it and just drive down. After about 15 minutes of packing, I was on my way to North Bend to stay the night before I would leave for Hillsboro, having to be there by 11am if wanted to catch my ride down. At around 8:00pm I got home, said hi to my family, and proceeded to go to bed.

At around 6:30am the next morning I got up to leave. It was a pretty quiet ride down, as I was able to get down to Hillsboro in around 3hrs and 15min. After arriving at my destination, I threw my stuff in my rides van, and proceeded to head 6hrs down to Ashland, Oregon. For those that don't know about this particular place, it is a small town about 10 miles from the California border. For those that haven't passed through, the most similar town I could think of would be Fairhaven if it were bigger. Anyways, the drive across Oregon reminded me of why I like the state so much. While most towns in Washington usually ellicit the response of "huh, thats nice I guess", Oregon doesn't deal in shades of grey. For me, most towns are either very nice places in which one wouldn't at all mind moving to, or complete trash holes that bring about both fear and curiosity. You want to get away as soon as possible, but at the same time you know you want to visit that dilapitated amusement park that is rusting on the side of the highway. Maybe i'm just weird, but I love the fact that from the freeway I could see methlabs in the hills. Well, maybe they aren't meth labs, just people's compounds.

After about 6 hours, I finally arrived and suprised my friend Holly with my visit. She showed me her apartment and we exchanged what we had been doing with our lives. After that, I headed down with her mom, stepdad, brother, and friend to watch her wind orchestra recital. For those that don't know what that is, it basically is using trumpets, saxs, and trombones as replacements for things like string instruments. I'd look it up on youtube as its kinda hard to explain without hearing it for yourself. After the concert, we all got pizza and went back to Holly's apartment to watch old home movies and play Wii.

Next time I will explain what happened the next day. Also, explain what they title of this entry means.

The other night.

Thursday night was probably the best night ever. Why? Well for once I wasn't completly grossed out by a dish that involved fake melted cheese. Usually I despise any sort of fake cheese. Even when I was a kid I hated it. For instance, someone would ask if I wanted a ham and cheese sandwich. Liking both of those things, I would of course say yes. However, this was an instinct I soon learned to ignore, as often times these sandwiches would be filled with disgusting American Cheese. It's not real cheese people. It tastes like plastic, which is what it is made out of. This goes for its close relative "fake" melted cheese. This may actually be classified as food, but it is still disgusting. I bring this up because this type of melted cheese was one of the ingrediants of the HUGE plate of nachos that I got at Casa Que Pasa. For those that don't know, Casa is a mexican restaurant in downtown Bellingham. The plate cost about 9 dollers and included chips buried under a huge mound of beans and salsa, topped wit guacamole and sour cream. When I say buried, I mean that it was hard to get to the chips and you needed some sort of utensil to eat the thing. So why did I not mind the cheese this time. Probably because I it was kinda mixed in with everything, so I didn't really notice it. For my drink, I had a Dos Equis. Purely because I had just seen the commercial. After the meal, My group then drove over to the Bowling Alley. The Bowling Alley that was across the street and would have been a shorter trip to just walk over. However, I wasn't doing the driving so I enjoyed the adventure and figured that it would make a good story. The bowling game did not go so well. Let's just say that it was "down there". Hopefully that gives you a good idea of what I was dealing with.

Canada Part 2

So now on to part 2. In this episode find out if Canada has more asian restaurants the Bellingham. Hint, the answer is yes. And asian restaurants they do have... in spades. Seriously, you could eat a one a day for a year and never eat at the same one twice. Hell you could probably do it for two years and never eat at the same one twice. Granted the first place we ate this day was an indian restaurant, a type of restaurant many wouldn't consider an asian restaurant. But you know what? It's doesn't fit to any landmass but Asia so you can shove it. For our Indian "Sunch" Steve, who happens to be vegan, ordered a whole mess of food that included Crepes, Bananas, various kinds of sauces, and other munchies that escape my mind right now. Danny, my other travel companion, ate essentially the same thing. I on the other hand had a delicious mix of Lamb Curry, Coleslaw, Rice, and a type of fruit sauce. All dishes were amazing and a far cry from the deli food that you find at other indian restaurants.

For the sake of continuing on the food topic. I will skip to what we had for dinner, that being mongolian bbq. For those that have never been to a place like this before, think of a buffet where you load a bunch of meat, vegetables, and sauce into a bowl, then giving it to a cook who proceeds to cook it for you and deliver it to your table. Maybe its because I essentially eat this type of food everynight, but for me at least it seemed like the least exciting meal on the trip. However, this is mainly because I like ordering meals that I never eat when I go to restaurants. Hence my love of PHO, because for being such a simple dish I know I would just fuck it up if I ever tried to make it myself.

Interesting food is one reason why I loved going to Chinatown, home of fish drying out in the sun and the worlds thinnist building. Need medicine? Well hope into the nearest pharmacy and order some hairy deer antlers. Hungry? Pick up a lizard on a stick. This was probably my one regret of the trip. While it would have been a crazy story to say that I roasted a lizard I got at a food stand, I was a little fearful of customs stealing it on my trip across the border. Still, if you are a seafood fan and want some fresh catch, come to Chinatown. Chances are the fish will probably still be flopping around in the tray.

After Chinatown, we took a bus/skytrain down to the beach. That's right, they actually have beaches and warm weather in the land of ice and snow. A nice one at that. One which people actually want to go to. It was here where you could see just about any type of person you wish. Including one old woman who we met. I honestly have no clue how it happened, but one minute we were walking along, the next being engaged in conversation by this woman. After chatting her up a bit we took a picture of her and she went on her way. After this, we proceded to walk along the beach, through Stanley Park, back into downtown, finally going back down to the beach area. It was here where I had a bit of an inspiration of why Vancouver is sometimes thought of as being a bit more "renowned" then a city like Seattle. It is because Vancouver to me seems to not only have more meeting places, but ways of actually getting to these places. It also seems to be a much more diverse town as well, though I will let wikipedia prove those facts. All in all, we probably walked around 8 miles that day, being as we walked to Stanley Park and back, taking the bus a minimal number of times. I have a number of pictures that I took that day that I have posted to Facebook if anyone would like to look at them.

Oh, before I forget. That night I probably had my most canadian experience of the trip. After we had got back, Steve invited us to watch the hockey game downstairs at his friends apartment. What did this experience consist of? Why watching hockey and drinking beer of course. The only thing that would have added to it was if they were all eating donuts, but I guess you can't be picky.

W00t

I applied to work at Blizzard Entertainment today. It is by a beach. I hope I get the job and never have to see Washington again. Want to see me, you will have to come visit.

Canada > My current whereabouts.

So this past weekend began with a simple enough mission. Go up to Vancouver BC and see the latest Star Trek movie. I will give my review of that later, because it is not the main focus of the story today. Instead, this will mostly be a review of the city I experienced over the past 2.5 days.

The first main experience of the trip was simply crossing into the country of Canada. Maybe the woman at the crossing was new that day, but I feel we were put through the ringer. "What is your purpose of coming into the country?" , we were asked. Thinking that simply saying tourism wouldn't have been a valid enough answer, we replied that we were going to see Star Trek with our friend Steve. "Why are you going all the way up here to see the movie?" asked the guard. Now while it may seem a little pointless to go 40 miles to see a movie when it is playing 5 minutes from your house, what business of it is hers? Maybe someone wants to see it on a bigger screen.

After I passed through the border, it was a pretty smooth trip until we got to a split in the freeway. While this wouldn't have been a big deal if my GPS hadn't been stolen last week, we instead had to deal with directions from Google Maps. While we did eventually get ourselves to where we needed to go, we instead were sent through the city of West Minster and its accompanying forest, instead of through Richmond, which was the city we wanted to go to. After finally getting to our friend Steve's apartment, we were on our way to experience the city. For dinner, I had a platter of sushi and sashimi. It was your standard raw tuna and salmon fare, though it did come with the biggest pieces of BBQ Eel I have ever had. After a filling meal of sushi, the three of us drove up to North Vancouver to see the suspension bridge, the name of which escapes me at the moment. It was at this point where all three of us were spotted by a film crew and will be staring in a movie that is soon to come out. Well, that didn't really happen, but it did look like there was some sort of filming going on.

After the short walk on the bridge, we drove to 30 screen theater in Langly to see Star Trek. Two hours later, I enjoyed the movie. However, my viewing companions weren't so happy. After that, we drove back into Vancouver, got some ice cream, and took a tour around the city.

That is all for now. In part 2, find out why I spent 8 hours wandering around a city.