Swimming with the fishies

Mama came to visit over the weekend and in addition to eating.  A lot.  We got to go to the Seattle Aquarium.  Where I got to TOTALLY geek out over the marine life.  And to top it all off there was this magical 'petting zoo' area where we got to touch starfish, sea anemones, sea cucumbers, and weirdo creatures w/o any names that I remember.

Petting zoo!!!

Thingamabobs

Radioactive starfish!

Neato burrito! 

One of the coolest things there was this Jelly-doughnut!  It was a huge ring you could walk through that was filled with jelly fish.  They looked like they were floating through the air.

Aliens!

Space invaders

Then there were the mammals.  My need to own an otter has been reinforced.  The seals were kind of cute too, but my god, they did not even hold a candle to the adorableness that was the otters. 

Fur seal

WANT.

And then there were all of the random awesome fish that I decided were my friends.

Needle nosed dude

O RLY?

ROAR

My new best friend.

So after getting our fill of the fishies, we headed over to Flying Fish for dinner.  We were in the mood for some seafood after all of that.  Annnnd...voila!  Whole fried rockfish!

OMNOMNOM

Canada, eh?

 

So I went up to Vancouver this weekend.  First of all, the drive between Seattle and Vancouver is amazing.  It's so freaking gorgeous and it takes no time at all (as long as traffic is ok).  We headed up on Saturday morning and because the weather was awesome we did the drive with the top down on the convertible.

Roadtrip!

Along the way we stopped at an air/car show where one of L's coworkers was showing his mustang.  There were a lot of pretty cool old mustangs there and some really interesting old planes.

Apparently this one flaps its wings to fly...

Pretty cars

Nazi killer

This one looked like a toy

The weather held out for our entire drive so I was able to get a lot of pics on the road.  Mt Baker is amazing and you can see it for a big portion of the drive.

There were snowcapped mountains visible for almost the entire drive up there

Bad shot of Mt Baker

Farm land and mountains

We finally made it to the border and the wait wasn't bad at all...maybe 15 minutes?  Passports scanned (the bastards don't stamp anymore) and we were on our way!

Approaching the border

Peace arch border station

Vancouver has to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world.  It's so clean and everywhere you look there are mountains and water.  Just amazing.  So we get into the city and decide to do a little shopping before checking into the hotel.  When we walked out of the Zara there was a freaking zombie walk going by.  Seriously, like hundreds of people dressed up as zombies stumbling down the road.  We have no idea why it was happening but it was fun to watch.

Canada, eh?

Heading into downtown.

Mountains, etc...

Run for your lives!!!

The view from our room

Oh, we also discovered that Canadians are really weird about where you can buy your beer.  We wanted some for the room while we were getting ready to go out and found out that you can't buy beer at 7-11s or at grocery stores.  You (at least in this area) have to go to one of the govt liquor stores.  Kind of a pain but whatever.  And Canadians are as friendly as everyone says.  It's kind of crazy.  So we finally got our beer and went to get ready for dinner.  OMG so good.  We went to this place called Vij's that has the best Indian food.  Ever.  http://www.vijs.ca/  Laura's coworker that was showing his car drove up the remaining hour from the show with a friend and met us for dinner.  This place is so great, you sit around for a couple of hours waiting on your table (they don't take reservations) and while you wait you can sip on some drinks and they pass around free Indian snacks.  It's like a wedding but five million times better.  I think I probably ate my weight in naan while we were there.  So, we had for appetizers: pork belly, samosas, and dungeness crab spoons.  For dinner we had (and passed around the table) beef short ribs, lamb pops, curried prawns, and goat.  I think everyone was cross-eyed when we left.  Laura and I had wanted to go dancing after that but we didn't do enough research ahead of time.  And using our cells were out of the question b/c you're charged an obscene amt if you don't have an international plan.  So we asked the waitress where to go and the two of us headed over a place called Diamond http://www.di6mond.com/  It was a really cool bar and my drink was excellent but we were both so tired we just ended up going back to the hotel after that and crashing.  Oh well, next time we'll look things up ahead of time.  

We got up at a decent hour the next morning, grabbed some breakfast at a coffee bar, and hit the road.  Turns out that if there is a hellacious line at the border you can buy some cheap(ish) liquor at Duty Free and skip a lot of the line.  

Back in the US!

At least there's a nice view for when you're stuck in line for an hour

The drive back was pretty uneventful.  We stopped at a couple of outlet malls but they were so freaking crowded I felt like I was in one of the inner circles of hell.  But I did get some Pumas and Joes Jeans out of the deal so that made things a bit better.

All in all a very successful trip.  Will have to go back again soonish.

Friday fun

Nothing really to report on...just wanted up throw up some random pics.

I'm here for your soul.

Snoozin' after some vigorous circles around the coffee table

You can't tell but these trees are actually sea monsters...they're invading the area.  Consider yourself warned...

Delicious rose petal beery goodness.

Ok, who let the secret out?

Went to Remix at the Sculpture park this weekend.  It was a ton of fun, great music, yummy drinks, and lots of people watching.  And the 'paint by numbers' exhibit was a lot of fun.  The weather that night was gorgeous, perfect for dancing outside under the sculptures.  Unfortunately it was really too dark to see anything other than where they had the tents set up so I'll have to go back another time to see the actual exhibits.

The DJs were set up under here

Space needle!!

It was an amazing night...

Happy DJs

So we decided that we wanted to keep dancing after Remix shut down at midnight.  Which meant on to a gay bar for more fun times!  We used to do this all the time when we wanted to go out dancing w/o dealing with lots of harassment.  However.  Apparently SOMEBODY told the straight boys that this is what girls like to do and so now the bars are kind of confusing.  Oh well, we still had fun dancing and if we hurt your feelings, well, too bad.  I was just looking for a fun dance partner and compliments on my sparkle shoes.  Oh!  And there was a drag queen show so that was all kinds of awesome fun.  Except for the realization, as Laura put it, 'Goddamn it.  He's more of a woman than I am.'  Gentlemen, you should not be prettier than us!  This is very disheartening.

Fabulous Darling.

Pseudo Cousins on the Loose

My 'cousin' came to see me this past weekend and we had tons of fun!  As always this included lots of drinks and food.  Hooray!

We started things off at Bottleworks, love this place.  You can go in and get a pint while you shop for beer and the selection is great. http://bottleworksbeerstore.blogspot.com/  Yum for Dogfish Head's peach beer.  After that we headed in to downtown and hit up my favorite coffee place http://www.bauhauscoffee.net/ for some much needed caffeine assistance.  We ate that night at Quinns (yum yum) and then went over to Knee High Stocking for some after dinner drinks.
Saturday morning we got up and grabbed some much needed breakfast at Tilth and then headed out to Woodinville for some wine tasting.  While we were out there we saw eagles!!  It was so amazing, I'd never seen a bald eagle before and we saw two, an adult and a young one.  I took some (bad) pictures of them and I'll post them below.  The wine was pretty spectacular too, the latest release came out so I got to pick up my order and we got a special tasting along with it.
That night we went to a sushi place called Umi. http://www.umisakehouse.com/ It was good but hot as hell in that place, they seriously needed to work on their ventilation or something.  Afterward we walked over to Bathtub Gin for a drink but were run out by the eurotrash and the oddly orange tinted women they were hanging out with.  There's only so much annoying conversation that one can overhear.   So we walked over to Black Bottle from there.  It was kind of deserted but we had a fun time hanging out.  Also, we got to see a hooker that was walking around sans pants.  So that was fun.  Or gross.  Whichever.
Sunday we went out to Discovery Park for a hike/walk.  It's so beautiful out there.  The trees are amazing and there are some incredible views of the water.  We ended up going downtown later and walked around a little so she could see the water and whatnot.  We had dinner number 1 while we were there http://www.campagnerestaurant.com/cafe_home.html Granted it was a small dinner, just some glasses of wine and cheese (and salad but that doesn't count).  Then we ate at one of the Via Tribunalis later on for dinner number 2.  YUM.
On Monday we had our pizza leftovers and did a little more shopping. We had our last dinner at Bizarro and it was amazing.  As always.  She had the gnocchi with sausage and I had the house made fettuccine with lemon, asparagus, and olive oil.  Oh, and we had some tiramisu.  Awesome.
And that's about it.  I'm going to have a separate post covering all of our drinks but have to get my hands on the pics first.  It should be entertaining for everyone.

Rose before heading out.  With a side of dog ears...

Mimosas at Tilth

Look!  It's a bird.  No, really.  It is.

Theres's an eagle in the top of that tree.  Can you find him?

Drinks with a side of annoyance

HUGE tree

Amazing views at Discovery Park

The spooky old tree...