Wow so we've been here almost a week already and we're having a really fantastic time. Vancouver is such a beautiful place & we've only just begun exploring here! Just a quick update - I know it's not too exciting for most of you, but we know our mums will appreciate it xxx

Thursday:
The day after we arrived & the weather was pretty gloomy. We took it easy using jetlag as an excuse, slept in and relaxed around the apartment most of the day. Late afternoon we went exploring our neighbourhood and ended up getting some yummy Chinese takeout for dinner.

Friday:
We woke up to sunshine and clear skies - yay! The weather was still pretty fresh but so lovely for walking around the city. We pretty much walked all day, checking out shops and exploring around Yaletown, Downtown, Gastown & Chinatown - all the towns haha. We checked out Canada Place (cruise ship terminal) and a bit of Costco (because its so massive). Lunch was hotdogs from Japadog - one of the many street vendors located downtown - the food is great & so cheap. We found an Asian supermarket and had to take a look. It was pretty interesting & the basic groceries were a lot cheaper to buy there than at the one closer to home. The seafood section was like an aquarium - choose your live fish/crab/lobster/shrimp etc from the tank and they'll fish it out for you & off you go. They also had turtles in the frozen food section - gross! Bit different to Woolies lol :) We grabbed some steaks for dinner & while cooking them that night worked out that the apartment isn't very well ventilated. Even with the doors & windows open and the rangehood fan on, the smoke alarm still went off about 7 times. I thought the fire brigade was coming for us haha. So while Ben cooked tea I got to stand under the smoke alarm & fan it with a tea towel - as soon as I thought it was right & stopped fanning it would go off again. Ha fun times!

Saturday:
We woke up to another beautiful day - sunny, fresh & clear. We slept in (I think our body clocks were still a bit out of whack) and then headed out again. We spent most of the day shopping for warm jackets & hitting the malls that we missed the day before. We hadn't realised earlier that most downtown shops are either underground or inside buildings that don't really look like malls from the outside, so we'd done a bit of research the night before & found a lot more shops today. Benny got a nice warm jacket but I'm still looking. While shopping we also came across the filming of a TV movie 'Window Wonderland' at Holt Renfrew (fancy department store) downtown. We watched them for a while & while both the male & female lead actors seemed familiar we couldn't put our finger on who they were. The actress turned out to be Chyler Leigh aka Lexie Grey from Grey's Anatomy (with her hair all chopped off she looked so different) & I'm still not sure who the male actor was so please let me know if you recognise him, it's driving me nuts! :)
Link to close up pics here:
http://yvrshoots.com/2013/03/shoot-chyl er-leigh-films-window-wonderland-at-hol t-renfrew-downtown.html

Sunday:
We didn't get up to much today as Ben was starting to come down with a cold. It was pretty rainy, cold & miserable out and he wasn't feeling great so we stayed home most of the day. We ventured out in the afternoon & checked out the casino which was a bit of a letdown. We went off to another mall and had a late lunch, stopped off at the drugstore for Ben & then grabbed a pizza for dinner on the way home.

So today's Monday and its pretty gloomy, grey & cold weather again today. Ben's still feeling pretty ****** so we've spent the day at home again. He's slept most of the day (or been knocked out by cold/flu tablets, not sure) and I've discovered that daytime TV here is worse than at home! Yes I didn't think it was possible either. I also didn't know that there was more than one "jerry springer" type show on air, but there's been about 5 different ones on today ha, I've sure been educated.... On the plus side I've been able to catch up on all of our emails, Facebook and blogging - making the most of our free wifi here!

We haven't got a lot of photos as we haven't been taking the camera out with us a lot but here are a couple....

Have a great day, it's nearly dinner time for us (5.30pm here now).
Love to you all, Loz
xxx