Vancouver - part trois

I awoke to the smell of pancakes. Aimee had gotten up early and began to cook breakfast (bless her!).

We began our Vancouver exploration with the novelty map that Mum had given me, but it did prove reasonably helpful. The city is like Wellington in the sense that it's nice and compact.
We walked a few blocks down to the waterfront, around the pier where the cruise ships dock and then continued down the city. It began to rain and as we huddled for shelter and we realised that we were in Gastown. The steam clock was right in front of us, and about to strike 2:30pm.
We took a look and were showered with spray as it's steam vents opened up.

History: The name has nothing to do with Gas. Gastown is actually named after a man, "Gassy" John Deighton who had the 'gift of the gab' and liked to tell tall tales.

We looked around the shops for a bit, while we eagerly awaited the 3pm tolling of the clock. It was also raining so we needed an excuse to get out of the rain as I'd left my umbrella in the hotel room.

After watching the clock imitate the Big Ben at 3pm, we headed up. Up to the Vancouver lookout. I'd seen it earlier in the day, a kind of UFO perched on top of a tall building. It looked like it should have been a tower behind another building, but it was just the observation deck.
We go a good [dry] look at Vancouver, and got talking to one of the guides up the top. He was actually French, and had only been in the country 5 months, so gave us some good tips on looking for accomodation, and also showed us how to use the public transport.

Public transport in Vancouver is incredible. It runs like a well oiled machine, the skytrain every 6 minutes and the seabus every 15. The train does a short loop around the city, before heading out into the suburbs, starting and finishing at the seabus dock, which is a 12 minute ferry ride across the harbour.
The coolest thing about these is there seems to be no driver. In fact, the skytrain really is an automated train. There is no driver.
The seabus also appeared to be computer controlled, but i did see a guy leaning out the window to control the doors.

We caught the skytrain on the advice of our french friend out to Metrotown. We got off a couple of stops too early, and had a walk around a really nice suburb, before getting back onto the train and arriving at the Mall. Metrotown was a big mall. It had lots of shops and Aimee and I really enjoyed checking them all out.
We couldn't buy too much, cos we had to carry it all back on the train, but grabbed some dinner and a few small purchases.