Small Bludger?

It’s been a solid year and nine months since Jean and I had one of our infamous hotel excursions, so when a deal popped up for The Listel back in October, Jean and I booked a room and saved the date. The Listel is the same hotel we went to for our work PD this year, so I was looking forward to taking advantage of its primo location once more. We took the first working Friday in January off and headed down.

After check-in, we walked down the block to the Japanese convenience store for some lunch. We got a motley crew of items!



Of all the items above, the one that is most curious to me is the ‘Sangaria Sherpet’ (not to be confused with sangria) – what is a sherpet?! I keep thinking of a Sherpa – maybe a pet Sherpa? A Sherpa pet/Sherpet? It was some strawberry-flavoured milky water. Tres bizarre.

The Vancouver Aquarium is now equipped with BC’s only 4-D theatre, and I absolutely love 3-D, so this was a must-see for the day. 4-D is like 3-D…only 33.3% better!



The Aquarium is always a fun time and though I was here mostly for the theatre, nothing says we can’t enjoy all the other attractions this place has to offer, though I’ve been here (and blogged about it) several times already.










Okay, enough of the scary-ass birds.








Aw! This little beluga is soooo cute! I want one! Well, not really. That would be messy. And really…where would I keep it? My tub is too small.



We finally made it to the theatre for the 4-D spectacular.



The show was ‘Planet Earth’ and it was all about sea creatures (which is totally appropros because we are at an aquarium). The 4-D effects were super-cool. I kept getting sprayed by the humpback whale blowholes and needed to take my glasses off for cleaning. The crawly sea creatures by my feet scared the crap out of me, but nothing did that more than when the sea snake poked me in the back. Vibrating coral, the smell of a sea breeze…it was all a part of this experience. I give it two massively swollen thumbs up!

We poked around at the other sea lives in the Aquarium before rummaging through the gift shop.













I love those floaty poof things. I wish I had one in a tub of water at my desk at work – I’d never get any workd done. I’d just stare at it all day.






Emo whale.



Our plan for dinner was to experience shabushabu at the Korean restaurant across the street from our hotel. I wasn’t quite sure if it was going to be the same as the Japanese version, but we had high hopes.











Not too bad! We were so pathetic…every time a server walked by, they’d help us by adding more vegetables, cutting up some of our meats and putting them into the pot, etc. We just acted like we didn’t know what to do, and they had us covered. Ah, sad little whities.

Bloated, we walked down Robson street for some exercise. It was pretty much all for naught as we planned to pick up some treats and a movie on our way back. C’est la vie.



Jean was tired, as usual. We rented the movie “Waruboro” (my choice) as it had “English” subtitles (you’ll see) and it starred the cutie-pie known as Shota Matsuda. So we popped it in and prepared for some totally rad throwdowns – it was a movie about high school gang turf wars. Funnest!




Um….what? What what what. I’m so confused.

I watched it as best as one could when watching a movie that conveys no comprehensible information. Jean ignored it and went to sleep. I give it two skeletal thumbs down.

The next morning was checkout before heading down to Richmond for lunch and some shopping.





We bummed around for a while before we decided to call it a day. Another adventure is sure to come along soon enough…