Ok so welcome to Andy and Maika's Canada/USA blog!

We are currently writing from the International Youth Hostel in Victoria. As i sit here I can hear water planes flying about 40ft over my head and the occasional horn of a departing ferry. As you may have guessed, we are right on the waterfront.

We left Penny and Shani's this morning and arrived in Victoria at around 9am. A short bus ride later and we had discovered downtown, a pretty little street with a mixture of various different types of architecture. As we had our bags with us we decided to head to the hostel first of all to drop them off before heading out again to walk toward the harbour. This walk took us past the british Columbia Museum and with a few hours ahead of us we decided to be cultural and took a 3 hour visit, delving deep into the depths of the ocean and coming face to face with nomadic man himself! Alriiite. A few cheesy nachos later and we found ourselves wandering back along the waterfront, noticing the growing crowds of tourists around us. As we could now check into the hostel we collected our bags and picked up the keys to our 6 bed, high ceilinged, relatively comfortable dorm room (currently empty apart from us!) A quick touch base and we were heading back out along the main street towards the main square infront of the huuuge and extremely posh looking Empress Hotel. The harbour itself is bustling with boats, planes and ferries including an underwater garden that was just that bit too pricey to be worth a look. A floating seal gave us all the free entertainment we needed! (Maika would like to add that said seal was still alive, just being lazy) As we wandered around we saw a street performer from Belfast limbering up for his act which turned out to be very amusing although not as action packed as he made it sound. In hindsight all he really did was juggle a bit of fire and rode a 10ft high unicycle. It was still worth the rather pitiful $3 tip we gave.

After this hit our first 7-11 of the trip (wont be the last!) and stood amazed at the 1.8L cups of 'pop' you can buy! By this time our stomachs were duly rumbling and with a cheeky mcdonalds that i forgot to mention earlier sitting quite heavily on our stomachs (never again!) we headed to get food at a nice pub/restaurant set up with kinda cheap cocktails :) And this is where you find us now, back at the hostel ready for bed in anticipation of a very very early start tomorrow (ferry at 6:10am!!!) Tomorrow we head for Seattle which we are both looking forward to so for now, peace out! AC and MS xxx