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Adventures with Sushifune and Book-Offs
Today, Carl and I went to Canada.
I got woken up at 9am again with people coming in to demolish more of our bathroom. They were turning off our plumbing, so I pretty much had to go down and take a shower RIGHT THEN AND THERE or go to Canada smelling like a sleepyhead.
We hit the road at like 10:30ish, but first stopped in Alderwood to get lunch, get ATMed, and get some idea of what to do in Vancouver besides Book-Off (and to get a map, or so I thought, but it turns out I have one after all). Carl likes Panera and there aren't any near us, so we went there and got sandwiches, and Borders to look through stuff, but we weren't particularly inspired by anything. I also took Carl to the Daiso shop in Alderwood, where he was really amused that I could pretty much sing along to any song that was playing in the background. Due to rain and timing, we decided to abort our mission to go to the Tsubaki Shrine on the way, which we will head to some other weekend, since it's only an hour away or so.
Hit the road again around 12:30ish and didn't stop until we got to Book-Off at 3pmish. No real problem at the border but the guard was like "There's a Sun Run going on tomorrow, so if you're planning to stay overnight you're going to be screwed for hotels", but we weren't, so it was okay.
We found an underground garage for cheap. We also found out that Koji, the awesome restaurant next to Book-Off that I was looking forward to returning to, has gone out of business. We walked around downtown Vancouver for a while, went to this tall tower building with a restaurant uptop, but decided it wasn't worth paying to go up and look out. Went to the train station, saw a guy playing an electric bagpipe chanter. I forget where else we went, besides that I went to Tim Horton's and got a big thing of Timbits to bring back. Yum.
We sold off a big stack of books, mainly mine, at Book-Off. We got $8 CAD for them, and uh, the US dollar sucks so that's actually really like $8 for real. I bought one CD single, and Carl bought a whole pile of manga after tachiyoming for 2 hours or so. What bugs me about the north american Bookoffs is that the prices can be pretty retardedly high -- as in, they'll have a used CD for $35 that I can buy new for $35 at Kinokuniya, or the DVDs will still be near new price, etc. There's some deals to be had, especially if you are looking for older music -- all SMAP albums were $5, for example -- but yeah. I actually sort of wanted to get a Hikawa Kiyoshi CD (yeah yeah, shut up) but I'm pretty much completely unwilling to pay $35 for it.
After Book-Off we decided to seek dinner. This was a problem as I'd counted on going to Koji. Thing is, I mean, it's freaking Vancouver, we should go get sushi anyway. I debated going to Metrotown since I knew there used to be an all-you-can-eat kaiten place there, and then I could maybe play PNM at CHQ, but instead looked up various Japanese places on my phone since it seemed like Burnaby was pretty far out of our way. I remember people had told me in the past that I had to go to Tojo's, but alas, we couldn't offhand figure out where it was, so instead I suggested we try to find a place called "Tsunami Sushi" that was like a 4-block walk or so, on Robson. I found it mostly by spotting a tsunami-like logo on the second floor of a building, and lucked out.
Tsunami is a kaiten sushi place also -- except there's no conveyor belt, they simply have sushi boats in water going around and around and around, with about three trays per boat. Overall the plates are about the same price as Blue C... or would be if our economy didn't suck ass (it was like, $1.85, $2.45, $2.95, and $3.95 -- I ended up having four plates of the $3.95 and four of the $2.95, since a lot of normal/great stuff was more expensive). The katsuo nigiri (a rare treat, I don't see it at a lot of places in Seattle) was fantastic and so was the tai. I had several rolls that were good too, including a genius one -- spicy tuna with avocado. I don't like spicy tuna rolls but the avocado actually takes off the edge of it to the point that it's a great blend of sweet and spicy.
Phone pics of the kaiten-fune-sushi:
After dinner we walked around some more -- stopped in a Chapters store, then decided to pretty much hit the road and come back because it was already 8pm and we figured at this rate we'd be back around 11pm. And aside from a minor screwup where we ended up looping around the Vancouver Airport to get onto 99 south -- oops -- things actually went fairly smoothly. Even at the border there was a 5 minute wait or so and we had no trouble.
So yeah, I suppose we spent about 6 hours in the car today and about 6 hours actually doing stuff, but I think it was a good day. And yeah, next time I'm up there I'll actually give people a call... this was more of a spontaneous trip.
I got woken up at 9am again with people coming in to demolish more of our bathroom. They were turning off our plumbing, so I pretty much had to go down and take a shower RIGHT THEN AND THERE or go to Canada smelling like a sleepyhead.
We hit the road at like 10:30ish, but first stopped in Alderwood to get lunch, get ATMed, and get some idea of what to do in Vancouver besides Book-Off (and to get a map, or so I thought, but it turns out I have one after all). Carl likes Panera and there aren't any near us, so we went there and got sandwiches, and Borders to look through stuff, but we weren't particularly inspired by anything. I also took Carl to the Daiso shop in Alderwood, where he was really amused that I could pretty much sing along to any song that was playing in the background. Due to rain and timing, we decided to abort our mission to go to the Tsubaki Shrine on the way, which we will head to some other weekend, since it's only an hour away or so.
Hit the road again around 12:30ish and didn't stop until we got to Book-Off at 3pmish. No real problem at the border but the guard was like "There's a Sun Run going on tomorrow, so if you're planning to stay overnight you're going to be screwed for hotels", but we weren't, so it was okay.
We found an underground garage for cheap. We also found out that Koji, the awesome restaurant next to Book-Off that I was looking forward to returning to, has gone out of business. We walked around downtown Vancouver for a while, went to this tall tower building with a restaurant uptop, but decided it wasn't worth paying to go up and look out. Went to the train station, saw a guy playing an electric bagpipe chanter. I forget where else we went, besides that I went to Tim Horton's and got a big thing of Timbits to bring back. Yum.
We sold off a big stack of books, mainly mine, at Book-Off. We got $8 CAD for them, and uh, the US dollar sucks so that's actually really like $8 for real. I bought one CD single, and Carl bought a whole pile of manga after tachiyoming for 2 hours or so. What bugs me about the north american Bookoffs is that the prices can be pretty retardedly high -- as in, they'll have a used CD for $35 that I can buy new for $35 at Kinokuniya, or the DVDs will still be near new price, etc. There's some deals to be had, especially if you are looking for older music -- all SMAP albums were $5, for example -- but yeah. I actually sort of wanted to get a Hikawa Kiyoshi CD (yeah yeah, shut up) but I'm pretty much completely unwilling to pay $35 for it.
After Book-Off we decided to seek dinner. This was a problem as I'd counted on going to Koji. Thing is, I mean, it's freaking Vancouver, we should go get sushi anyway. I debated going to Metrotown since I knew there used to be an all-you-can-eat kaiten place there, and then I could maybe play PNM at CHQ, but instead looked up various Japanese places on my phone since it seemed like Burnaby was pretty far out of our way. I remember people had told me in the past that I had to go to Tojo's, but alas, we couldn't offhand figure out where it was, so instead I suggested we try to find a place called "Tsunami Sushi" that was like a 4-block walk or so, on Robson. I found it mostly by spotting a tsunami-like logo on the second floor of a building, and lucked out.
Tsunami is a kaiten sushi place also -- except there's no conveyor belt, they simply have sushi boats in water going around and around and around, with about three trays per boat. Overall the plates are about the same price as Blue C... or would be if our economy didn't suck ass (it was like, $1.85, $2.45, $2.95, and $3.95 -- I ended up having four plates of the $3.95 and four of the $2.95, since a lot of normal/great stuff was more expensive). The katsuo nigiri (a rare treat, I don't see it at a lot of places in Seattle) was fantastic and so was the tai. I had several rolls that were good too, including a genius one -- spicy tuna with avocado. I don't like spicy tuna rolls but the avocado actually takes off the edge of it to the point that it's a great blend of sweet and spicy.
Phone pics of the kaiten-fune-sushi:
After dinner we walked around some more -- stopped in a Chapters store, then decided to pretty much hit the road and come back because it was already 8pm and we figured at this rate we'd be back around 11pm. And aside from a minor screwup where we ended up looping around the Vancouver Airport to get onto 99 south -- oops -- things actually went fairly smoothly. Even at the border there was a 5 minute wait or so and we had no trouble.
So yeah, I suppose we spent about 6 hours in the car today and about 6 hours actually doing stuff, but I think it was a good day. And yeah, next time I'm up there I'll actually give people a call... this was more of a spontaneous trip.
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I'd heard of them, but never saw them anywhere in Japan and certainly not in Seattle, so.
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