Jason, the girls and I enjoyed a lovely three day business trip to Vancouver, including visits to herbal dispensaries, meetings with herbal medicine practitioners, a pet food kitchen visit, a trip to the biodiversity museum, and of course, several great eats in local restaurants.
If you are interested in some of the pictures from the business side of our trip, please check out my blogpost on Pandosy Village Veterinary Hospital’s website. Jason has been studying herbal medicine, and we wanted to visit a few experienced practitioners and build the foundations of his herbal pharmacy for the clinic (which opens mid July!)
We brought the girls along for the ride, with promises from them to do their assigned homework. I made up these little booklets for them with check boxes for math and writing pages, as well as places for book summaries and scientific journal entries. They’ve been working away like busy beavers!
The first day our new friend Dr Katie took us out for sushi at a fabulous resturant (Tomoka?) on West Broadway. I warned her that the girls could pack the sushi away… And they did me proud! The highlights for us were the amazing yam rolls with fresh mango on top, and the decadent fresh oysters. I cut Sugar off at three. She could have eaten them all evening!
The next day we visited a vet clinic and a herbal dispensary, and the girls busied themselves with toys at each stop. Such good little business troupers.
Mid day, we stopped at the Kids Bookstore and they had a delightful half hour browsing (ok, so Daddy and I had a blast too.)
Then we went just a couple of doors down for the most deliciously healthy donairs, at Al Basha. The man who owns the place was such a charmer with the girls, and gave them some free sweets. Yummy. I totally recommend it! Spice got her fill of meat, and Sugar even got a Mirinda, an orange soda she hasn’t seen since Ethiopia. Cool.
After some serious swimming at a waterslide pool, we asked the girls where they wanted to stay. Sugar, the Little Chef, has seen Vikram Vij on a poster on the street earlier that day. “I want to go to Vij’s!” She begged. Well, we took them to the next best thing: his casual restaurant Rangoli next door. Again, the little monsters ate and ate and ate… My goodness, it was good! And reasonably priced too- just like an average Indian restaurant. Except that the food was anything but average. It arrived insanely quickly, too. For me, the portobello mushrooms and beet salad took the cake. Sugar was with me, but Spice died at (what else?) the lamb with dates. That kid is such a carnivore. Jason loved the pakoras, he wants me to add.
The next day, while the kids and Jason recovered from their gluttony by sleeping in, I met up with a super nice lady who is going to make dog coats for our shop. Then once the gang was up, we took off to the Beaty Biodiversity Museum at UBC. I didn’t even know it was there, but thanks to a groupon, we discovered this lovely natural history archive.
It wouldn’t be for every family, since the museum is basically a library of natural history. But for our animal crazy kids, it was delightful. They loved studying the stuffed specimens. We had another great hour in the back of the museum, as the girls wrote their scientific journals: field reports on an animal. We all got a story from the interpreter on site, who was amazed at the girls’ depth of knowledge, and we inspected more specimens with microscopes and magnifying glasses. Super fun. And yes, we are geeks.
To conclude our wonderful trip in Vancouver, we had lunch at the French Cultural Centre at the Café de Salade des Fruites. So yummy… There is nothing as pleasing as a light white fish in lemon butter sauce. “The food is so good here!” Exclaimed Sugar. “Why is that?”
“Because it’s French,” ubiquitously replied her father.
“Butter,” replied her mother.
Then we were off down south to Washington for the Mother Earth News Fair… More news from our trip soon!
