blame canada

[rone]

Vancouver's traffic lights tend to blink green a lot. I don't see the point. Many also seem to exist only along the main street, and the cross street only gets stop signs. The lights turn red so pedestrians may cross safely. It seems like a half-assed way to save on traffic lights.

Vancouver is very similar to San Francisco in many ways: surrounded by water, a bustling Chinatown, a large park in the northwest, a suspension bridge that leads out of the northern part of the city, large clusters of homeless people. Commercial Drive is a collection of New Age-y shops and vegan/vegetarian restaurants that reminded me a bit of Berkeley.

The ferry ride to Victoria is beautiful. So is Victoria. Here we found the same painted orca statues we found in Vancouver, a series similar to the cow statues in Kansas City. We took a walk to the end of the Ogden Point seawall and back, and saw a bunch of starfish (including a fuzzy purple variety), lots of two kinds of jellyfish (one about cantaloupe-sized and dark reddish, the other basketball-sized and eggyolk yellow), as well as one lazy seal who cruised by for a couple of minutes before returning to deeper waters.

We saw the first episode of "Medical Investigation", and the characters can be summarized as the hardass, the tightass, the badass, the dumbass, and the piece of ass. We also caught Napoleon Dynamite, which was weird, often surprising, goofy, funny, and cute. Not great, but good.

On the ferry out of Tsawwassen to Victoria, there were prominent signs that forbade further transportation of BEES.

We're leaving Victoria now, heading back to Seattle.