Day 17 - Barbeque

Today we'd been invited to a house warming barbeque at Lauren and Woody's new place in Kitsilano. Since we had the morning to fill we went to downtown Vancouver to check out the shops. Amy's still hunting for a particular perfume which is curiously hard to find (even though it's freely available in England - albeit more expensive) and I was checking out the price of the Nintendo DS - which you'll know from a previous, but chronologically misplaced, blog post I did eventually buy, although not on this occasion.

On the way to the barbeque we stopped into a supermarket called Urban Fayre, which is surely what Marks and Spencers food hall aspires to. You can buy just about any kind of meat or vegetable (including musk ox, rattle snake and huge crab claws, I didn't pay as much attention to the veg) and it has so many giveaways you could eat in there for free. Due to stupid licensing laws though you can't buy alcohol so we had to pop into a state-owned liquor store afterwards to buy some overpriced win. I can't remember if I mentioned this before but wine is always more expensive than in England, both in shops and in restaurants - this seems particularly silly in the case of the Californian wines.

We arrived at Lauren and Woody's house in the early afternoon. It's a lovely house, clad in wooden slats and painted pale blue but the balcony was rather small for a barbeque. Nevertheless we squeezed out there and stuffed our faces with all the sausages, kebabs (spelt kabobs here) and burgers we'd purchased in Urban Fayre. At one point the barbeque got slightly out of hand but luckily the wooden house remained uncharred.

As the afternoon wore on the Canadian guests gradually left until by 10pm only the 9 Brits were left - the 8 from the curry last night and another guy, John I think, who previously worked at Codemasters. After a quick trip to the local off-license (which frustratingly doesn't sell crisps or chocolate) Woody got out the whiskey, stuck Orbital's Snivilization in the CD player and we all argued the finer points of music until 1am before someone finally pointed out the time.

Getting back to the flat was uneventful except for the discovery of a wheelie chair in the elevator and the ensuing hijinx.