Bus to Vancouver

This is going to be a short one today!

First thing this morning we bid adieu to a cloudy Seattle to embark on our last leg of this trip, Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada. There are no shortage of ways to go from one city to another, as they are so close to each other: locals simply drive their cars, there are of course also flights, and trains, and buses. For tourists without a car the most convenient option would be the train, except as of writing there are only two trains a day, one too early in the morning and one too late in the evening. Those might work fine for you! We just don’t like getting up before 8 or arriving at a new place after 10PM!

So that leaves us with the bus, operated by Flixbus, which I have learned is the same company as Greyhound. Amtrak also runs their own bus service to replace those trains they aren’t running; I forget why I picked one over the other. Most depart from the train station, but since we were staying in Eastlake we chose the University of Washington stop instead. It’s just a spot on the street, but we made our own waiting room out of a cafe/supermarket across the street where we also bought lunch for the trip.

The journey was pretty uneventful and didn’t feel very long for a three-and-a-half-hour ride. The landscape was all very green, sometimes with typically PNW forests, sometimes with green hills that could easily pass for the Basque countryside. The only issue with the bus ride is that, while trains go all the way to Vancouver and then passengers go through border control at the destination, the bus has to stop at the border, everyone needs to get off, we go through customs at a sparse processing room, and then we only depart when everyone is done.

We finally made it to Vancouver’s train station with only a slight delay over our scheduled arrival time. Our apartment is in Chinatown, itself right by the station, so this time around we were able to walk over to our AirBnB and unpack.

After figuring out the keys and locks and stuff, our next mission was to buy groceries for breakfast and dinner. Being in Chinatown, the closest thing to a supermarket was an Asian grocery store that made me feel like a kid on Christmas morning, gawking at all the different Chinese, Korean and Japanese products that are either expensive or difficult to find in Europe. The equal and opposite reaction, of course, was that finding cheese and yogurt here was a challenge as they only had one or two varieties!

We made it safely back through the lively Chinatown. Here, too, the inequality is on stark display, as there are homeless people lying on the ground in a square with middle-class people walking about and even fancy fusion restaurant terraces within view. It’s shocking how much the atmosphere can change from one street to the next.

To celebrate our arrival in Vancouver, we went out to dinner (thankfully Vancouver buses accept regular credit cards!) to Blue Water Cafe, a seafood restaurant that had been recommended to me. It’s fairly expensive, but for a reason, and after a few disappointing meals we were really looking forward to some high quality fish. I had toro sushi as an appetizer, soft as butter, and for our main course we split a sea bass that would be a common lunch in the Basque Country, but which here, now, felt like a delicacy. And I guess it is!

This was just our first foray into Vancouver! Tomorrow we will go into the city proper, see it in the daylight, and start getting ourselves acquainted with the sights.