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Vancouver, Canada

I’ve spent the last couple of days doing a fair bit of bugger all so I’m going to go ahead and roll two days into one entry.

Yesterday, I picked up my self guided downtown tour where I left off on the day of the Canucks game. I caught the Skytrain to Waterfront to again admire the view of the North Shore mountains and then up to Robson Street – Vancouver’s most renowned shopping street, with absolutely no intention of shopping.

It’s an odd thing to feel compelled to visit shopping hubs when I have so little interest in actually buying anything – this trip is not about gain and accumulation, it’s about loss and relinquishment. Even if I was inclined to consume, I’m in such an in between place in almost every respect that I wouldn’t even know what to buy because I no longer have a concept of what I have or what I want. I don’t even know what size I am or will be. And yet, I still go to the shops!

I continued down to the West End down to and along Denman Street passed more familiar places – our favourite sushi place, Denman repertory cinema, the West End Community Centre – without stopping for any great length of time. I kept on to the seawall to reunite with another old friend – the Inukshuk.

The Inukshuk is a large Inuit stone statue built as a symbol of welcome to the city (though there other theories, this is the one I chose to believe). You may recognise it as the emblem of the 2010 Winter Olympics. Perched on the waters edge overlooking English Bay, s/he had quite a view so I sat down beside her/him to gaze out in the same direction for a while before following the seawall back home (with a ferry short cut across to Granville Island).

Today I did even less – a designated admin day and my first visit to the gym that I vowed to use daily. I took my hoop with me to give it a whirl in the yoga room. I managed to get my heart rate and temperature up, not to mention a couple of good bruises so next headed to the pool to cool down… and then in the spa to warm up again.

Suffering no guilt or delusions about doing anything more ambitious today, I sat down to a sumptuous feast of eggs on bagels and caught up on a few favourite TV shows on my laptop before officially calling it a necessary but not very exciting day.

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