Day 2: Decidedly fishy

Stanley Park, one of the world's largest metro parks (1,000 acres I think someone told me) is just north of the Westin Bayside, so we set off after another typically massive North American-ized breakfast. 

As usual Emma was keen to find vivyurki ("squirrels" for those of you who don't speak Polish). In fact she *demanded* to see vivyurki. Because everybody knows squirrels respond to tourists' demands.

Thirty seconds later they started showing up. Emma proudly took credit, observing this was another of our "matrix moments". We seem to have these quite frequently when we travel. We say " wouldn't it be cool to see X", and it appears. 

I tried it with "wouldn't it be cool to see a  twenty kilogram gold nugget", but it didn't work.

Anyhow we figured walking the full 1,000 acres was an overly ambitious target, so we set off for the Vancouver Aquarium, which is near the middle of the park.

It's not the largest aquarium I've been to, but it's a particularly nice one. The entry has a sampling from various other parts of the acquarium, with a spectacular collection of jellyfish. After this is a section dedicated to sea creatures off the waters of British Columbia, a small freshwater tropical section, an extensive colection of frogs, beluga whales, an otter and twao dolphins.

And my favourite, an amazing Amazonian walk-through wildlife environment. They've created a massive greenhouse, complete with 99.9% humidity and a constant spray of water. There were two gorgeous blue macaws, stunning butterflies and moths, beautiful leopard-spotted rays, two or three not see pretty but rather cool sloth, and a superbly well-hidden basilisk (so well hidden we couldn't actually find it). Plus some bats, marmosets and a couple anacondas in enclosures. Separate enclosures, of course. Probably a good thing, if less entertaining.

Emma's favourite was the beluga whales. We caught the whale demo twice, once above the water, once from the undersea view.

The otter and dolphins were rescue animals, the latter caught in fishing nets off the coast of Japan. They're now part of a research project on dolphin echolocation (basically animal sonar) to see if they can find ways to design nets dolphins can detect.

When we returned we had to shift to a new hotel, the Westin Grand in downtown Vancouver. Newer, and shinier, with great views from our room on the 25th floor.

Dinner was at a small Japanese restaurant a block away. It had several tables of Japanese customers inside, and a brilliantly cheezy 2009 New Years Eve gala spectacular on the wide screen TVs, so we figured it had to be reasonably authentic.

We went for the dinner combo for two, $16.95 each. We should have just bought one. Gyoza, two platters of sushi, New York steak teriyaki, tempura, chicken karate... The food kept coming. And coming. And coming. We had enough leftovers for dinner the next night.

Best of all, the food was fabulous. 

Then we collapsed, around 9.30, which was a feebler effort than day one. Must be something in the water.