West Coast Vacation - Vancouver Day 4

This was our last full day and only rainy day in Vancouver.  It wasn't pouring, but it was a steady rain for the better part of the day.  We decided it might be a good day to check out a museum.  I had heard about the Anthropology Museum and the Biodiversity Museum at UBC in my reseach for activities to do in the city.  They were places that we probably would not have sought out, had it not been raining, but my cousin Rebekah did suggest the Anthropology Museum to us as a neat place to look around if we needed an idea.

We had decided that the Biodiversity Museum would better suit our interests so we put the address into the GPS (I think the GPS should have it's own blog post....haha) and made our way to the UBC campus.  There was some construction going on, and the GPS kept telling us to turn down roads that we were unable to use.  And when we would drive past the roads, it would tell us to turn around and go back, instead of giving us a new route.  We got frustrated, and I had seen that we had driven past the Anthropology Museum, so we just figured we would check it out instead.

(We had to take a picture of these teensy little baskets.  I am not sure what they used such a tiny basket for, but it was maybe the size of the tip of my little finger.)

I wasn't entirely sure what to expect from the museum.  When we first got in, paid admission and started heading toward the main gallery, I felt quite discouraged as there was a huge, steep ramp from the front entry down to where they had displays of very tall totem poles.  With my help, Jay managed to get down the ramp.  The totem poles were neat to see.  We found a gallery of ceramics/pottery.  It was a lot of pottery....but some of it did date back to the 1500s, which is kind of neat.  Then we wandered our way over to their feature display gallery.  I assume the displays in this gallery change on a semi-regular basis.  The one they had on display was a bunch of art by Middle Eastern artists.  I am not usually much of an art person....but it was very interesting/thought provoking stuff.  And some was just shiny/sparkly/bright.  This was definitely the highlight of the museum for me.  After this we found this HUGE room full of displays of different cultural clothing/weapons/masks/etc from all over the world.  I would say we made it through about half of this room before our two hours of parking expired and we figured we better start making our way back to the van.

We had a few different types of restaurants/food that we wanted to try on our trip, they included some fish/seafood, sushi, indian food, and any other ethnic type food.  Since this was our last day in Vancouver, I did some research on Urbanspoon and I found us a sushi restaurant for lunch and an Indian restaurant for supper.  I found a little sushi place in the Kitsilano neighbourhood (since it was near UBC) for lunch.  We had to drive around the block a couple of times because it was a tiny little place with a tiny little sign.  But we found it, and it was accessible and more spacious than I thought it would be from the outside.  We both chose a lunch sushi combo and shared some gyoza.  It was really good!  It was so fresh and had better flavor than any sushi I have ever had here.  We thoroughly enjoyed it.

After lunch we had decided to head over to a mall in Burnaby called Metropolis at Metrotown.  It is the biggest mall in BC.  We wandered around for a while.  It was okay, just another big mall.  We decided to try some bubble tea and a cream puff from Beard Papa.  We had seen the cream puff place at the Aberdeen Mall, but were too full of chinese food to even think about.  I was impressed.  Such a tasty little treat!

The traffic to get back to North Vancouver was a little crazy with the construction, so by the time we were done at the mall and got to North Vancouver it was pretty close to supper time.  I had found another highly rated restaurant on Urbanspoon for Indian food called Indian Fusion.  It was a nice little place that was fairly quiet when we got there, but filled up as we sat and ate.  We had an appetizer of vegetable pakoras, and they were so good.  Much better than the ones we have had at Mogul Divaan.  And such a generous portion.  If we had known how much they would give we probably would have ordered less supper.  Then for supper we had butter chicken, aloo gobi and some naan bread.  It was all delicious and we left there feeling very satisfied.

After supper we headed back to the hotel to start packing up our stuff to get on the road early the next day to head for Seattle.