Summer is drawing to a close way too quickly. I was saddened last week when I was working for my parents and it was frightfully dark already at 8:30. I do not appreciate all of Vancouver’s seasons equally even if the rains bring so-called lush greenery, and am only grateful that imminent cool weather will make flies go into hibernation (or die or whatever) and despite it raining seemingly 95 of 100 days, I really am grateful my commute is really short.
In some respects, I had the most boring summer …

Cari and I were at the VPD north of Chinatown to pick up/have sent our criminal records to the place we will volunteer. It was a bust because while the station is open until 7, the records office closed at 5:30. I thought I might suggest we go to The Naam or Don Guacamoles, two restaurants I have not yet gone to.
But Cari had recently read about two new-ish Asian fusion restaurants in Chinatown and I picked the one that kind of had better reviews across dinehere.ca, Urbanspoon, and Yelp: …

So, I only managed to go to three Dineout Vancouver 2010 dinners and I can’t really imagine a fourth one topping the dinners so far, if only because I’m so Dined Out now.
hidden tasting bar + lounge
I was so excited to try hidden, a new restaurant in the centrally located Westin Grand hotel, within a week of it opening, and I knew another couple would be game for the ride. Plus, if it was a real bust, it was only an $18 Dineout (3-course) menu. We joked (not that I …

Dineout Vancouver 2010 actually began on Monday, April 26 and goes full-steam for 12 days until Friday, May 6, ending just a couple days short of the restaurant industry’s Biggest Day of All-Time (Mother’s Day).
This year, over 200 (most ever) restaurants participate in the dining bonanza offering three-course prix fixe menus for $18, $28, or $38. (If you don’t order something to drink–and I don’t intend to if I’m out on a “school night”–with just GST applied to your meal, the dinners come to under $20, $30, and $40.)
Being quite …

Are periodic food reviews back on this site?? I wouldn’t say that for certain but I get sad about my photos languishing on Flickr so I thought I would share some of my favourite photos and places to eat in Vancouver.
Copa Cafe. Beefy Beef. Motomachi Shokudo. Hapa Izakaya Yaletown. Mazazu Crepe. The Cannery. Vij’s Restaurant.
Copa Cafe
Do you have a routine when you come home from a trip? NPY and I will hit up a Chinese food joint because it’s our comfort food. I think that by now, I’ve successfully broken …

February 1, 2010 marked the (approximate) five-year anniversary of me living in Vancouver. Although I did arrive in the Lower Mainland in August 2004, my first four months were spent atop Burnaby Mountain in an SFU residence, followed by a month of random, miserable south-east Vancouver living (to wit: I moved into a dump near south Main, non-stop January rains happened, it flooded, I moved out).
Five years ago, I moved into the Cambie Village area of town, the area I spied amongst my first days in Vancouver as my preferred …

As only a few people may have noticed, my blog went down for over a month. A very cool plug-in I was using (YARPP) played very badly and my hosting shut down my database because of the absurd number of SQL queries the plug-in was making. But I’m back! And I wasn’t going to blog much in the past month anyways because I was too busy soaking up and getting roped into Olympic events going on in the city.
So, to ease back into blogging, I’ve compiled my personal top ten …

It’s just like me. From afar, I saw my director’s coffee cup one day during a meeting and I was fascinated. Are those really wavy grooves on the surface? Is that the Vancouver skyline?* Is it a reuseable container that looks like a take-away coffee cup? Which coffee shop did he get it from? What other city skylines exist?
I just had to know!!
The coffee is from Cultured Coffee & Tea, the new(ish) coffee shop on the second level of City Square, the small mall local to my workplace. My source–not …

I am hoping that the title of this post binds me to publishing this entry this year… it could very easily languish in my Drafts like many other well-intentioned blog posts. Afterall, the Vancouver Asian Film Festival starts today….
Today, we’re going back to that comment made by our New York host that was just a fact of life for her but, for me, it might be the catalyst of enlightenment… of sorts. She had observed how Asian diaspora/pride/identity crisis is so pronounced where she now lives compared to what she …

Each year, the “release” of the VAFF (Vancouver Asian Film Festival) schedule is like mini-Christmas to me as I peruse the highly manageable list of films screening over the four-day festival. Each year, I identify at least two films I want to watch and for the past two years, I have managed to watch none during the festival run. Each year, I’m tempted to blather about how appreciative I am about living in a city that has an Asian Film Festival but I’ll refrain and just tell you about the …