Traffic and tiffin

So, yesterday Otis and I decided to get out of town, just for a change of scenery. For no particular reason, we thought we would head up to Vancouver for a bit of Canadian fun. No plan, really - just a day trip oat and back, eh?

It was a beautiful drive up and there wasn't too long a delay at the border (where Otis got to officially announce herself as a "massage therapist" for the first time). As we headed up into Vancouver proper, Otis said she'd fancy Asian food, so we headed off to 99A in order to hit Chinatown.

Traffic got a little messy as we made out way in (Chinatown is in northeast Vancouver), but after circling a few times we found a parking space (we carried no Canadian specie, so we couldn't use metered spaces). We walked around a bit and discovered that (a) there was little in the way of vegetarian food on offer and (b) Chinatown was a pretty sketchy neighborhood to walk around in. So, we got back in the car and headed west a bit, into a sort of Italo-Japanese neighborhood. Less sketchy (reminded me of Brooklyn, actually) but still no place that seemed worth eating at after a two-and-a-half hour trip. We decided to try Gastown (the Vancouver equivalent of Pioneer Square) and made it near that area, but by then we were jammed in traffic and never really found a way out. We next aimed at Robsonstrasse, the kind of upscaley downtown, figuring we would just find a parkade, but never quite made it there because we missed a turn and got lost. Traffic was really getting bad so we angled off toward Stanley Park, getting more hungry and more frustrated. I knew there some nice restaurants in the Beaches area adjacent to Stanley, but when we got there we found that the entire neighborhood seemed to have been converted to permit parking and couldn't find a spot within ten blocks. Ack! This trip was starting to look like a Very Bad Idea, as we got hungrier and crankier.

Suddenly, I was inspired. With renewed vigor, I jumped across the bridge to south Vancouver and headed straight into Granville Island (sort of like the Pike Place Market, only bigger) and paid to park. This is what we should have done in the first place! Lots of arts, crafts, farmers' markets - and food!

Our reward was finding an Indian place in the food pavilion that sold tiffin! This is apparently a word and a practice stemming from the colonial period in India. It was a totally cool way to have lunch: You get a little kit with two little metal containers; each one gets a different dish in it; you pack it up and carry it off. You bring your kit back the next time and just have it refilled. We met some women who had older kits, which had three small containers that got filled with curry, curry, and rice; ours only had two larger containers, so the curry and rice were mixed. I got mango potatoes and lentils; Otis got lentils and mixed vegetables. It was yummy good! Here's what the tiffin boxes look like:

and here's what Otis looks like eating her tiffin:

After this delightful interlude, our mood brightened considerably. We hung around the island for a while, watched the boats on False Creek, and listened to some street music; it was pretty cool.

We didn't stay long; not wanting to push our luck, we headed back south pretty quick after lunch. We had to fight out way through vancouver traffic again as well as a longish line at the border, but we made it through to Bellingham in time to do some sightseeing and bookstore browsing and such. (Although it doesn't seem to be in the cards right now, I wouldn't rule Bellingham out as possible place to live in the future; it seems like a thriving little city, with lots of culture.)

We made it home just as it was getting dark, to find Otis's license certificate and news business cards in the mailbox. A happy end to a long day.