E Hastings

Yay! I've been in Canada!
Vancouver was not at all what I expected, things didn't go quite as planned...

Our bus left at 8am saturday morning and at about 11.30am we arrived in Vancouver. We were dropped off at a touristy area where you could get lots of food - but nothing else but food - and were told to stay there for 2 and a half hours. After about 10 minutes of walking around we realized this was not going to very interesting, got lose from the group of German girls that only spoke German, and settled for hot chocolate at a regular coffee place cause they didn't have Starbucks. It was really cold outside, much colder than I've experienced in Seattle so far, and it was just not nice being stuck there for such a long time, while we were feeling that we could spend our time in Vancouver much better. The real disapointment came when we finally DID get into the main shopping street of Vancouver and we figured out that everything was much more expensive there. The US and Canadian dollar currency is almost equal at this time so there really were no good deals. Even at H&M none of us could find something worth buying..

We decided to head over to a part of Vancouver called Gastown, because we heared there were some nice stores there. But once we arrived most of the stores had already closed. We agreed to try and find a restaurant and head over to Chinatown, which seemed only a few blocks away from Gastown. On our way there we started to graduatly notice a change in athmosphere and people. Here and there we noticed a few homeless people, but we didn't really worry about it too much, cause you have lots of homeless people in Seattle too. As we walked a little bit further we suddenly noticed small groups of homeless, or almost homeless, people standing in groups talking to each other. People with shoppingcarts to carry their stuff in, people standing in porches and doorways, a woman with about 7 or 8 umbrella's surrounding her, as if to protect her stuff. We just realised that this was not a quite right place to be in when a weird looking man leaned towards us and started saying something that I could not even understand. And just as it accured to me that we should get away from this place, we got to a crossing. I looked to the left and saw an amazing sight of dozens and dozens of homeless people. The whole street seemed to be crowded with them. It was already dark and, wow, this was just an amazing sight. And very scary. I'm not scared that easily and I was surprised by how suddenly everything clicked from being fine and okay, to being in a scary situation. The thing that made it worse was that I suddenly saw the street sign saying "E Hastings". East Hastings.. I have been talking to a guy from Canada and a few days before I left I asked him about some tips for places to visit while I was in Vancouver. He named a few things, but after that he had specificly told me (about 20 times) NOT to go to East Hastings. He kept repeating to really not go there. He told me about the people that hang out there being homeless, or drug addicts, and that it was really not a place I wanted to go. Even though I was a little bit curious I had intended to really stay out of there, because the stories he told me sounded awfull. Even though I had remembered what he said, it just never accured to me to look up on the map where the street was so that I could avoid it, but as we were now figuring out East Hastings was the street that connected Gastown to Chinatown. Anyway, we were standing there at the crossing, 3 young girls, looking like tourists, and I realised that if ANYONE of those dozens of homeless and drugsaddict people had bad intentions we were the easiest target. And that there were no sane people around to help us if something crazy did happen. So we crossed quickly. I had no idea where exactly we were, but I didn't dare to get my map out because that made us look even more vulnerable. Soo.. We did what seemed most logical at that time; we started running. One block further luckily we found ourselves in Chinatown and the sevilized world again. I was in complete after shock for about an hour after that, saying things like "wow", "oh my god" and "that was really scary" about every 30 seconds. We were all laughing though. This was the most scary thing that happened in my whole time in America so far, but it was funny and exciting in retrospect. We were in a much better mood after that.

We were in a hurry to get back to the mainstreet. By this time we were really hungry, so we tried to find a restaurant. This turned out to be quite a challenge, with every restaurant looking empty or dirty and every other place being fastfood. We finally (and I mean really finally after about an hour of walking and searching) agreed on a Chinese restaurant, which turned out to be a whole new adventure by itself. We were apart from one other woman there eating alone the only ones in the restaurant. The waiter was really nice and made us some suggestions. "Are you sure you want to order that? I wouldn't order that. I'm sure you won't like it." And we were served three main dishes which we got to share with the three of us. All the food was really good up untill desert, which we got for free, that was really nice. I forgot the name, but this stuff was a sort of slimy liquid with little round balls in it. If you put it in your mouth you felt the balls rolling around over your tongue, and seriously.. I could not eat it. The structure was just to weird. And it smelled like Brinta! The other the girls were better guests then I was and they finished theirs cause they didn't want to be rude and return a free desert.

When we got back to the hotel around 8.30pm we were all three exhausted, but ofcourse we had another mission. The legal age for drinking in Canada is 19, so we had to go out! Outside every club had a huge line and we had no idea which one to pick. The club with the biggest line looked ofcourse the most interesting, so I decided to talk to the two guys at the back of the line and ask them what kind of club this was and if there were maybe other clubs that were good too. It's really amazing how I'm sometimes really shy and other times I just go and talk to complete strangers like it's nothing. The guys we met were named Eric and Lief. Daniela and I still have no idea how to pronounce Lief's name.. They actually had never been to this club before, but were just going cause some friends of them were inside. They were planning to leave at 12am though, to meet up with other people (and smoke weed). Seriously, for some reason every guy I've talked to more then 5 minutes so far has told me they smoke weed. It's America!/Canada! I guess in Canada it's kind of legal or tolerated too, so it isn't that weird, but still.. You think you're getting away from the country where everyone smokes pot... Anyway, little fun fact; we were in line for the club at 10:20pm and entered at 12:50am. That's right, we waited 2 and half hours!! Ofcourse after being in line for about 20 minutes we already felt like we were definatly not leaving now because we already waited this long. Luckily we had Eric and Lief to talk to the whole time, and after 12am they decided to even cancel on their other friends and just hang out with us. We started at the line with me, Daniela and Lena. The whole group of German Au Pair girls suddenly sneaked in line with us, cutting infront of a lot of people, but luckily left again. Those girls are so rude sometimes. They know my German isn't good enough to know what they are talking about when they're talking really fast, and they don't even make an effort to speak English. Unfortunatly Lena decided to go back to the hotel with them because she was getting very cold, so it was just me and Dani. After 2 and a half hours of waiting and one minute inside the club we figured it had been totally worth the wait. The club had live music and it just had a really great athmosphere. The guys were really nice and kept asking if we were having a good time and insuring us that they would be right back whenever they went away to get beer or anything. Yeah, Eric and Lief were great. In line they convinced us that they didn't think all the girls with their ultra short skirts and high heels were sexy at all, so as Daniela and I were not dressed like that at all they made us feel really good about ourselves. The only downside to actually being inside the club was that beer there costs 6 dollar per bottle! This turned out to be both negative but also positive, as it made me realise that I was having lots of fun even without spending my money on lots of beer. At 2.00am the guys had to leave to catch a ride home and by 2.30am we were in our beds at the hotel again.

Haha, and that was only the discription of one day! Day 2, sunday:
Sunday we had to leave at 10am again. Daniela and I went out to eat breakfast. I love going out to a diner for breakfast! It's one of my new favourite things to do. With our group we visited Stanley Park. It was rainy and cold, so we didn't really enjoyed ourselves there, but we still had to hang out there for an hour. After Stanley Park we had to cross the Lions Gate bridge, where we got stuck in traffic for I don't know how long, but it must have been at least an hour. There was an accident, and the bus wasn't able to turn around on the bridge. We saw the two cars as the way finally cleared. One of the cars fronts was totally smashed together and the other car had part of it's front just compleetly fallen of. Like if you would divide the front of the car with a diagonal line, and one of the pieces was just... missing.. It must have been a really bad crash by the looks of it. After the wait we went to the Capilano Suspension Bridge, which was really fun. I think it's the world largest suspension bridge and it was really cool to walk over it. With it wobbling and all. Unfortunaly, when we were finally at a place where we would have liked to stay longer, we had to be back at the bus pretty soon and make our way back to Seattle. Home, sweet home. :)

So our final opinion about Vancouver is that the city is over-rated. We didn't think it was pretty at all and it was definatly no fun shopping there. However we still had a great time and made it out alive, so that was pretty good. ;) Today I looked up some more stuff about East Hastings, cause it had made quite an impression. Most sites said things about East Hastings being controlled by the homeless and drug addict people that hang out there, that people openly do and sell drugs and that it's not unusual to see people die on the sidewalk as you walk through. Most people descriped it as a place they felt very uncomfortable in and wouldn't recommend people to go. However one person on a forum said that even though all that, East Hastings isn't known for random acts of violence or muggings, and that you are just as likely to get hurt there as in any other part of the world. I'm still putting my recommendation up there with all the others though, don't go there if you can avoid it.

It's time for me to get to bed and I'm sorry for taking half an hour out of your life to read about my weekend. Maybe I'll edit this later and make it a tiny bit shorter, haha. Or maybe not.

Good night!