RYAN IN OSAKA

I'm in Osaka. But before I get to that I had better finish off the exciting cliffhanger I left you with on the last post. I ended up going to neither Chinatown nor Granville Island. Instead, I rented a bike for the afternoon and rode around Stanley Park. I also filmed a movie about me cycling in Stanley Park using my digital camera, I'll upload it here if I ever figure out how.

I returned the bike before 5pm and made my way to Starbucks for some cafe latte. The yuppies of Vancouver are obsessed with Starbucks and in some areas there is a Starbucks at every intersection. In fact, on Robson Street there are certain intersections which have rival Starbuckses across the street from each other and they're still both always packed with people.

After dropping off a grammatically incorrect postcard to my family, I returned to my hostel room. Australian Dave was getting ready to go meet three girls he had met in the park earlier who were impressed by his accent and invited him out to dinner. I had planned to go to that evening's city hostel pub crawl at 8:30pm and met a Japanese guy named Sushi in the hostel lobby who was also going, so we agreed to meet at 8pm to walk over.

At around 7pm I went to get some take-away from a local sushi joint and picked up some chicken sushi to bring back to the hostel's TV room. After turning on the TV I was joined by a woman of about 60 who asked what I was going to watch. I said I didn't know and just passed her the remote as I was flipping through. By chance it was left PBS which was playing something like "Arthur" and I think she must have thought that that's what I wanted to watch because she just left it on that for a good 15 minutes before I told her that I wasn't watching it and she quickly changed the channel.

I've never really understood why old people stay in hostels and have always thought it must feel demeaning to them to be the only old person surrounded by dirty youngsters. It seemed that Vancouver's hostels had an unusually large number of old people, but it just be that this is a time of year when fewer young people travel. I've always assumed it was for financial reasons that they were there, but this woman led me to think otherwise. We got to talking and it somehow came up that she had spent her career working on Wall Street and graduated from Columbia. We watched the World Business Report and discussed the stock market and she seemed to know what she was talking about. I asked her what she was doing in Vancouver a couple of times but she avoided the question by awkwardly saying she was "visiting". So what's an Ivey league Wall Street bigwhig doing staying in a hostel? Running from the law, I presume.

Before leaving for the pub crawl, I went back to my room to see that the empty bed had been filled by a delightful Irishman named Brian. Brian had just finished a 5-week bartending stint in Churchill, Manitoba, where he had gone to watch the migration of the polar bears. He told me about how great of a place his hometown of Cork is and it was clear that he was in that phase of "culture shock" where you idealize the simplicities of your hometown. I wonder how long it will be before I'm telling Japanese people about the glories of Halifax...

So at 8pm I met up with Sushi in front of the hostel and we walked towards HI Vancouver Central on Granville Street where the pub crawl was meeting. (continued in next post)