January 6, 2004: Whistler Day 4

We took a break from riding today, expecting this to be the last clear day before the snow blew in. The estimate was wrong, and upon waking at 10:00 we found that it was already snowing, but we decided to head to Vancouver anyways. Relgar and Marilyn had anniversary plans for today, so the other six of us made plans for cheap dim sum and cheap sushi.

The word plans should be used with grain of salt, since it amounted to cheap dim sum and cheap sushi. It took us almost two hours to make it to Richmond, where we suspected we could find dim sum, along the way we started out with a game of 20 questions, which soon lead to another game, and yet another.

We ended up driving up and down No. 3 Rd. until we saw Kingford Seafood Restaurant, which looked like it had potential for dim sum. We ended up having good dim sum, although we missed out on the cheap. It was one of those fancy restaurants with good chinese food, where you check off your dim sum choices instead of carting food around. Although there wasn't too much in terms of selection, everything we ordered was very well done. Averal picked up the tab to a very satisfying lunch, although I was on the edge of narcolepsy while driving around aimlessly afterwards.

Since it was around 15:30 at the end of lunch, and the Vancouver Aquarium closed at 17:30, we decided against it (at $16, it wasn't quite worth it for the two hours). Instead we went to the local Buddhist temple that was featured as a tourist attraction (with free admission too!). After wandering around for a while we went to look for bubble tea for Sinyee. We went to the Yaohan Centre a bit further north on No. 3 Rd. We wandered around there for a while too, picking up bubble tea and some snacks from the japanese supermarket.

Arislan, a karoake junkie in disguise, proposed that we go find some chinese karaoke place. Not knowing where to go, we agreed to give him a shot if he found a place. He asked the bubble tea store server. She gave us enough information to find Karaoke Box, where we went and got kicked out since it was closing for a staff party at 18:00 (we got there about 20 minutes before that).

We found another karaoke place nearby, where certain events happened that cannot be discussed here. Videos do exist however.

After a karaoke session that was quite painful yet somehow fun without the aid of any alcohol, we moved on back to No. 3 Rd. (it seems like we spent the whole day in that one segment of Richmond) to Daimaru Japanese Restaurant. They had a $16 all you can eat sushi thing after 21:00. We were in somewhat of a "rush", since the snow had been coming down all day, and we wanted to leave for Whistler at a reasonable hour, fearing that perhaps if we left too late, the road might close.

We ended up with 6 sushi boat dinners and way too much food at quite a good price. After being completely stuffed, and having reasonably accomplished our original mission, we headed back up to Whistler. The two hour drive was filled with additional 20 questions. In the end we had things like Mickey Mouse, speech, a pomegranate, sunglasses, windshield wipers, Norwalk virus, and much more. We ended up at home just before 01:00, and crashed pretty soon after, looking forward to the full day of fresh snow on Blackcomb on Wednesday.

I'm about a day behind with this log stuff. Hopefully next day I'll have some pictures to upload too.