Hurray for the long weekend!
If everything had gone according to plan, I would be in Whistler this morning, not at home on the computer typing this post. However, the plan to head up to Whistler was derailed (along with the actual railroad) by a massive rock slide on the Sea-to-Sky highway. If you've ever been to Vancouver and made the trip to Whistler, you'd know that there's one highway connecting the two and that highway is built along a rocky cliff. The rock slide happened on Tuesday night and probably won't be cleared until Monday. The alternative is a seven hour car drive (going to Whistler normally takes 90 minutes), to which we obviously said "no". So I'm staying in Vancouver instead.
There's been a lot of speculation and fear mongering about the slide. What if this was to happen during the Olympics? Could it have been triggered by the construction being done in the area (to expand the highway to two lanes each way)? Could the fact that 40,000 people (in addition to a whole lot of heavy equipment) made the trip to and from last weekend for the Pemberton music festival? Who knows. But hopefully the chance of this repeating itself is slim. When boulders the size of small houses come crashing down, the damage is immense.
Last night, I went out for dinner with Sarah. We headed out to Denman street at Café de Paris, a little French restaurant neither of us had tried. It was a delicious meal, we had terrine de lapin as a starter, then I had osso bucco and Sarah ordered the duck. Yum. After dinner, we took a cab to Granville, as the evening was still young and it wasn't cold or raining outside. We ended up at Republic. Fortunately, we arrived early enough to avoid the lineups and cover charge, and we were allowed to keep our jackets ('cause paying $5 each for coat check seems silly). We sat upstairs and ordered a couple of drinks: one martini and one gin&tonic... $17! Wow. Really expensive, it's not as if we were ordering premium brands. The music in the early part of the evening was good, mainly house. We stepped out around 10:30 to get some fresh air before going back in to dance. Unfortunately, by the time we made it to the dance floor, there was a new DJ spinning and both his choice of music and mixing abilities were terrible. There was no dancing to this crap, most people seemed pretty happy just to bob along ('cause I can't call what they were doing "dancing"), but c'mon. Give me something to work with. We gave the new DJ a chance to improve and headed to the bar for a couple of shots of vodka and RedBull. $20! What?? This wasn't Grey Goose and nectar of some exotic fruit, it was cheap vodka and a sugar/caffeine drink. The music never improved, so we left.
Bar in Vancouver are a hit and miss. I don't go out often, so I guess it's hard for me to know where's the good place to go on a Friday evening. Republic is clearly NOT the place. At least, if the music was awesome, I would have forgiven them for the price of drinks. I'll head back to Ginger 62 before going to Republic again. At Ginger, I remember getting a gin&tonic for $5.50, maybe $6. And the music is typically decent enough for dancing.
There's been a lot of speculation and fear mongering about the slide. What if this was to happen during the Olympics? Could it have been triggered by the construction being done in the area (to expand the highway to two lanes each way)? Could the fact that 40,000 people (in addition to a whole lot of heavy equipment) made the trip to and from last weekend for the Pemberton music festival? Who knows. But hopefully the chance of this repeating itself is slim. When boulders the size of small houses come crashing down, the damage is immense.
Last night, I went out for dinner with Sarah. We headed out to Denman street at Café de Paris, a little French restaurant neither of us had tried. It was a delicious meal, we had terrine de lapin as a starter, then I had osso bucco and Sarah ordered the duck. Yum. After dinner, we took a cab to Granville, as the evening was still young and it wasn't cold or raining outside. We ended up at Republic. Fortunately, we arrived early enough to avoid the lineups and cover charge, and we were allowed to keep our jackets ('cause paying $5 each for coat check seems silly). We sat upstairs and ordered a couple of drinks: one martini and one gin&tonic... $17! Wow. Really expensive, it's not as if we were ordering premium brands. The music in the early part of the evening was good, mainly house. We stepped out around 10:30 to get some fresh air before going back in to dance. Unfortunately, by the time we made it to the dance floor, there was a new DJ spinning and both his choice of music and mixing abilities were terrible. There was no dancing to this crap, most people seemed pretty happy just to bob along ('cause I can't call what they were doing "dancing"), but c'mon. Give me something to work with. We gave the new DJ a chance to improve and headed to the bar for a couple of shots of vodka and RedBull. $20! What?? This wasn't Grey Goose and nectar of some exotic fruit, it was cheap vodka and a sugar/caffeine drink. The music never improved, so we left.
Bar in Vancouver are a hit and miss. I don't go out often, so I guess it's hard for me to know where's the good place to go on a Friday evening. Republic is clearly NOT the place. At least, if the music was awesome, I would have forgiven them for the price of drinks. I'll head back to Ginger 62 before going to Republic again. At Ginger, I remember getting a gin&tonic for $5.50, maybe $6. And the music is typically decent enough for dancing.
Labels: going out, long weekend, Whistler
