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Day 197-8: Cycling to Sushi
On our second day in Vancouver the weather wasn’t great. It was a little overcast and rainy but we had decided to go for a cycle ride around Stanley Park. Stanley Park is Vancouver’s version of Hyde Park or Central Park but it differs in that it has the sea coastline around one side of its perimeter which makes the ride pretty interesting – you can view the city skyline including huge yellow piles of sulpher in factories, shipping yards as well as boats hopping back and fourth along the coast.
Steph, Alli and I walked down to the bicycle rental shop where much to Alli’s joy they had a range of funky cruiser bikes with floral patterns adorning them. The girls tried to persuade me to get a similar model but an experienced cyclist such as myself required something a bit more suitable for the terrain and the lengths I would be pushing it to. I got a basic hybrid.
We set off on our little cycle jaunt and I took great amusement at Alli’s state of ecstasy as she remarked repeatedly while cycling “Its ah-maze-ing. Ah-maze-ing!”. “I love it!”. It took us just over an hour to get round the whole park but our ride was cut a bit short by an outburst of rain.
That evening we met up with a few Whistler seasonnaires for a couple of drinks on Granville Street. Huy, a ridiculously, cheery Aussie reminded us about the ‘all-you-can-eat sushi’ we had agreed to go to with him on the following day. We all couldn’t wait. I couldn’t think of any better words to precede the word Sushi apart from ‘free’ maybe. Huy explained that it was only $13 for the Sushi and that you could order as much as you liked. Oh, the joy. However, we would discover, there was a catch.
The next day we woke up with one thing on our minds, shamefully. Sushi. We all chose to have modest breakfasts in the HI Downtown hostel we were staying in to avoid ruining our appetites in any way. One thing you may not know about Vancouver that is worth mentioning is that it has a very large Asian community. A local observer recently said to me that the ratio of the Asian community and White community may be close to 50:50. Many of the Asian population I have been told hail from Hong Kong that left the country after it went back into the hands of Chinese rule but there are also many Japanese, Koreans and Chinese.
The significance of all this? There is a lot of Sushi restaurants. And it’s blooming cheap. On many of my frequent visits to Vancouver over the season I’d been gorging myself on $5 boxes of Californian rolls, Gyoza and Nigiri.
We arrived at the restaurant and met Neil, an Irish Whistler seasonnaire who had worked with Huy all season. Sarah, who had lived with Steph all season in Banff and who had recently moved to Vancouver also joined us. As did Michelle a New Zealander who had started the season with us and had then relocated to Vancouver.
Huy took control as he understood how it all worked. We were about to find out the catch. Huy explained that he had little pieces of paper with all the available Sushi printed on it and we simply indicated how many of each dish we wanted. Simple enough.
We then found out that if we didn’t finish any of our dishes we would get charged full price for it. And we had 1 hour and half to complete everything we ordered. Not so simple. I was up for the time trial Sushi challenge.
We ordered over 80 Sushi dishes. Tempura, Gyoza, Nigiri, Tuna, Salmon, Teriyaki chicken and beef, Shrimp, the list was endless. There were even little barbeques for us to cook our own beef and chicken from raw. It was in the words of Alli. ‘Ah-maze-ing’.
See: http://www.statravelblogs.com/smarsha78/albums/vancouver-with-the-girls/5720530
Well the first two orders were. Just under an hour and a half later we were left with a few plates of raw tuna and salmon which now had gone from inducing a mouth watering reaction to a stomach churning one. I was left with six gyoza, pork dumplings, my favourite Sushi dish normally but now I was rendered almost incapable of consuming one more having eaten about six already.
Pleasure had turned to pain. Joy to despair.
We all forced our way through the remaining Sushi. The girls, Steph and Alli, actually had to resort to stuffing some Sushi into some of our shopping bags. Huy thought it was all hilarious as he was well practiced in this ritual.
We managed to finish it all and all vowed not to eat Sushi again for a while. I personally haven’t been able to look at a Californian roll for days. We headed over to Granville market to look around and then ended up having a snooze in the hostel exhausted.
The next day we were checking out and heading to Victoria on Vancouver Island. Lauded for being beautiful, we were all looking forward to visiting the island.
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