Day 30

Today (Friday the 18th) after a nice breakfast prepared by Brian, we left Seattle en route to University of British Columbia (UBC). The campus was gorgeous, with amazing architecture. Here are just a few of the many photos Corey took.

We then were able to meet up with the School of Architecture (we made it just in time before they closed up for the weekend). Seems like a great program! Hmmmm, living in Vancouver… we will see!

After seeing the school, we went over to downtown Vancouver in the specific area of Gastown (which we had heard was a cool area, it is the oldest portion of Vancouver). We stayed at a hostel there, (that was very fitting for the word “hostile”). Slightly scared for our lives, and car that was parked on that street, we stuck it out. The man working the reception was constantly talking about conspiracies and warning us to gut out our car before leaving it ANYWHERE in Vancouver. Just looking online I found this quote about the streets we ended up in: "it’s one of the poorest and dirtiest areas in North America and is full of homeless people, drug addicts, prostitutes, and diseases." Little did we know that we were walking in the center of that! Yikes! Fortunately God protected us from harm. Below is a picture of the streets that we walked down... below that is a picture of our hostel, we were on the 3rd floor of that old beat-down building!

We went to the night Chinatown market, which we heard was fun. It is NOTHING compared to our awesome SLO Farmer’s Market. But nevertheless it was quite an experience. Getting there we had to wade through the most eclectic group of homeless, downtown characters. (It reminded us of SF, but in this specific area, x20!) Chinatown had more "interesting items" for sale. Here are just a few: picture frame illuminated from behind of Jesus, Mary, and deer heads (imagine that! deer heads up there with Jesus and Mary!), bras, small stuffed animals where you could see their battery-operated breathing, large fake flowers, and key chains of cookies!

Going back to our scary hostel, in our private room, we had 5 twin beds in a very dirty atmosphere. Fitting to the room, there was a weird poem/motto/warning that spoke about convincing someone to go by the window, once they did, they were pushed out and flew… Weird! Sleep was a bit difficult with all of the street noises. Donna was awakened in the night to the sound of breaking glass right outside the window (she just pulled the blankets around her tightly and thought of better places). Waking up in the morning we saw that it was a large window that had been broken just across the street. We couldn’t get out of the fast enough! (thankfully we only had one night there!)

Tomorrow we will be in a DIFFERENT location!