My travel guide told me, that Gastown is a hip area and right next to Chinatown. Getting served coffee by coffee nerds with moustaches, just what I had planned for the day. I had breakfast at home and then started my walk to the Patagonia store to finally buy a new rain jacket. I donated my old rain jacket, to be recycled and become a new jacket one day… the beautiful circle of Goretex life. I needed to put it over my down jacket right away, because guess what… it drizzled. Now I was ready to walk to Granville Island for lunch. There I bought a sandwich and some sweet potato salad and ate it while watching the ferries passing by. After lunch I took the ferry bus to the Plaza of Nations, which took a little longer than my usual ride to the other side. I was the only one on the boat. There were some amazing houses right by the water and I instantly felt like I want to live in one of those. Everywhere I go and I like to be, I start looking at rental prices on the web, but I could not find any information about those houses.
Gastown is pretty, but all about fancy shopping and I was neither in the mood nor did I have the money for those kind of shops. The red brick buildings are very pretty and it feels like a village within the city. As it started to rain heavily, I had a coffee and read for about an hour and then walked around Chinatown a little bit.
I had enrolled for the Vancouver bike share program „mobi“. They have bikes all around the city, usually near the streets that are marked as bike streets or have bike lanes. Like all bike share, those bikes are rather heavy, and driving up the hills let me break out in sweat. I was concerned, that the helmets that come with the bikes will be too big for my tiny head, but as I needed to wear my beanie anyway, it was fine. I took one of those bikes to get back home fast. I had a ticket to the Shamir concert at the Biltmore Cabaret for the night.
I ate some bread and yoghurt and then walked to the venue, that was only 400 meters from my apartment. I was totally on time, but there was no queue in front of club. When I opened the door I ran directly into Shamir. There were only ten people inside the club, five at the merch table and five behind the bar. I bought the first beer since twenty days and waited for something to happen. People arrived quickly, but the venue never got packed. The opening act was „Michete“. She was great, funny and got people to dance immediately. After her came another act whose name I forgot. I felt like I travelled back in time and space, to the early nineties in Seattle. After a short break it was Shamir’s turn. I danced for the next one and a half hours and then walked back home.
