Sixth Week, October 4^th – 10^th, 2010

Sunday evening my former boss from Germany arrived in Vancouver after having attended a conference in Portland. We explored some more great vegetarian restaurants, me trying to get used to the many choices and convincing her that you can actually eat delicious and healthy things in a restaurant on the North American continent. Monday after university we explored downtown which is still very impressive with the huge skyscrapers, the closeness to the water, (I love the waterplanes – nearly as good as helicopters) and the cleanness in the city and around.

On Tuesday the sun was shining, perfect blue sky, the mountains were enticing us. Lynn Valley was once again a great choice for spending the afternoon, diving into the thick forest, listening to the murmuring river and enjoying the peace and quiet out there. 

the seabus heading towards downtown Vancouver... 

However, university was still going on for me and this week was actually a very busy one with two laboratories, two lab reports and upcoming midterms (and an extended weekend coming up…). I took some pictures since the weather was so beautiful: you can see right to the mountains from the university and some snow can already be seen on the higher mountains. 

 

Yesterday I spent a long time searching for a tent, since we want to go camping this weekend. It was not very easy, although some friends had a tent, but they were just too heavy for hiking. Hopefully we will find one today. In the evening we met downtown for a drink and it was an amazing and very thoughtful evening. Being downtown you see all the poor and filled-up-with-drugs people living on the street asking for money, injecting drugs in front of your eyes... It is very sad and makes you think a lot about justice, social systems and what keeps people alive… It is so weird in this city, it offers you so much and you can do so many great things, life quality is enormously high, but then just right next to this perfect world you see all these people having fallen out of the “dream”.