Shopping in Vancouver
One of the first things I do on reaching Vancouver is buy flowers for the hotel, or in this case, our Airbnb apartment. There wasn't anything exciting in our local Safeway this time (although being a Brit, going to Safeway is exciting in itself as we don't have the stores anymore) so we waited until the trip to Granville Island's market on Saturday.
The second thing is to buy sugar cookies, which has proved a bit trickier in recent trips. Yes we have plenty of biscuits in the UK but like the flowers, what they have in British Columbia is different so for me, sugar cookies are top of my list. When I did find them, they turn to be the spring version, exactly the same as those picked up a year or two ago! There's just something about how they melt away in your mouth and are too sweet to have more than one at a time.
We'd promised ourselves some indoor shopping time (mooch around the shops) on a rainy day but they didn't really come as forecast. Yes we had some rain, but on those days we were in and out of coffee shops meeting people anyway and both long weekends turned out to be mainly dry and sunny. So, once our meetings finished on Friday morning, we took ourselves out to Metrotown for some mall time and gauged in shopping fuel! The key lime pie yogurt was lovely but the pretzel balls with BBQ flavour were the real winner!
On a sadder note, I paid my respects to the wonderful Chapters book shop, which is due to close. Their Indigo brand will continue and was showcased to good effect here. It's a lot more than books now - hey, whatever it takes to get people buying books. So the world may have plenty of books but it sure needs more Canada!
