vancouver

the weekend is finally here and we are back in the pacific northwest for a long weekend with family and a little run. 

because i had to work late on thursday, we had to catch the latest flight out of nyc which was the 9:00pm jetblue flight arriving into seatac around 12:30am. it was one of THE MOST MISERABLE FLIGHTS of our lives i think. seated a couple rows in front of a set of babies and a quite indifferent mother who clearly had already lost her mind and hearing, we were an audience for the two wailing babies for almost the entire six hours of the flight. not a great start to the trip at this point.

thankfully it was a quick 20 min drive to the in-law's place and we were in bed around 1am pacific time (or 4am ny time). honestly, i think we were both starting to feel like it was time to get up on the east coast. in the morning, we woke up and surprised liam, who had just celebrated his fourth birthday earlier in the week, with his massive museum break-in lego set and spy gear walkie-talkies!

by the time everyone was up and we loaded up the van (five adults + 1 child), it was about 10-11am, and we were off! the drive up from bellevue to canada was quite nice! jen drove the entire way, making just a couple stops for coffee and breaks, and it took us 15-20 minutes to get through the US border. 

liam was in high spirits as he was learning how to use his walk-talkies with uncle kevin. there was a whole lot of "10-4", "over", and "roger that". and an exponential amount of  "uncle kevin uncle kevin uncle kevin" - we all had a lot of good laughs.

for lunch, we had a really delicious dimsum meal at hereon chinese restaurant in surrey with kevin's auntie, where we had the MOST DELICIOUS & FRESH 流沙包 (liu sha bao), which directly translates to "quick sand buns". it's actually a bun filled with a molten hot custard and it's a bit sweet and savory - i'm not sure if i want to learn to make this because i would like to continue eating it :)

after lunch, kevin and i took the bus to the rapid transit rail finally to arrive at our hotel in vancouver. the transit time from white rock was about 65 minutes total, not bad, and way quicker than driving through the friday summer traffic. and we were upgraded to a deluxe executive suite - woohoo! we bundled up, as it was quite cool that day, and went to the convention center to check out the lululemon seawheeze events and pick up our race numbers. 

there was all sorts of goodness going on at the convention center, including lululemon tattoo-ing, haircuts and a nail salon, a juice bar, a giant orange rubber duckie, and more! i oggled at all the discounted lululemon clothing, further discounted by the strong usd, but held back from making any impromptu purchases. that would come later.

for dinner, we walked along the shops on robson street and feasted on ramen at kintaro ramen. my friend, christine, had been raving about their cheese ramen, which is apparently "loved by the ladies" haha. there was a slab of butter on it which you can no longer see in the photo below because i pushed it into the broth, and there is a pile of shredded cheese on top. LOL. it was quite tasty! i wasn't able to eat very much of it though since we had lunch just 3 hours earlier.