Around the corner, less than a minute's walk from the house, is a twenty-four hour vegetarian restaurant called The Naam. I knew of it before I left England and have wanted to go in there but not by myself. Well I've been in there two nights in a row, now! Haha.
Thursday 14th, day 127
On Thursday, Anais, Jamie, Audrey and I went there for a meal. A girls' night, if you will. Jamie had suggested it last week, while I was making a korma for dinner. (I was ever so happy to have found some Sharwood's curry powder in Whole Foods a month or so ago. The Safeway stuff tastes nothing like what I'm used to so I don't like it.) By the time everyone got back from work or uni, it was a bit late to get the bus across town to the Indian restaurant Jamie had in mind, so we walked round the corner to The Naam. (Turns out, as Ian informed us yesterday, there's an good Indian restaurant just one block further west.)
It's a cool little place with wooden tables, a wooden floor and casual decor. There were no available tables in the main inside area, so we were seated out the back, which during the summer would be outside. Thankfully there were plastic wall things up, which didn't have gaps in, and decent heaters so it was warm. A lot on the menu sounded good, but I went for a Thai curry "dragon bowl": rice, broccoli, cauliflower, and fried tofu with a coconut curry sauce topped with bean sprouts and grated beetroots and carrots. It was nice, not amazing but good. To the surprise of the others I consumed the whole huge bowlful, while they each only managed about half of their chosen dish and took the rest home. To my surprise, I ate it all with chopsticks.
So that was an enjoyable couple of hours, and we might go out more often, either for meals or maybe even a yoga class or something of that ilk now and again.
Friday 15th, day 128
In 1867, the Hastings Mill sawmill was established on the southern shore of the Burrard Inlet. Later the same year, "Gassy" Jack Deighton built a pub on the edge of the mill property, in what was then just a clearing in the forest, to serve the loggers and workers. "Gassy's Town" quickly built up around it and two years later was renamed Granville, after the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, when the colonial government surveyed the settlement and laid out plans for a township. In 1886 the Canadian Pacific Railway chose the town as the terminus for the transcontinental railway and it was renamed again, this time as the city of Vancouver.
Gastown is now a National Historic Site of Canada, with cobbled streets and late-Victorian buildings. After the Great Depression in the 1930s it became a largely forgotten neighbourhood of the larger city and fell into decline until the 1960s. Since then a lot of the area has been renovated, and there are now fashion boutiques, art galleries, music studios, restaurants, bars and nightclubs, offices of lawyers and architects, etc...
On Friday evening, Mark and Claude were planning to go out in Gastown and invited every Zenhousemate they saw - which, seeing as it was dinner-time, was almost everyone. Of course at first I was hesitant, but when they made it clear they weren't going to a club and Jamie said she wasn't going to stay out too late, I agreed to go. So an hour later Audrey, Ian, Mark, Claude and I squeezed into the passenger seats of Jamie's car, and Mark put an AC/DC song on for me because it was my "Zenhouse debut".
The pub we went to is in Maple Tree Square, which looked really pretty with the trees covered in little white lights. It was still relatively early, about nine-thirty, so there wasn't a queue outside, but the split-level maritime-themed inside was busy and we were lucky to find a table to fit all six of us. Being "so English", I bought a cider, and we sat talking around the table for a couple of hours, barely able to hear each other over the music (which wasn't bad, I neither disliked nor liked it). Of course, it was a social situation in a busy place so I wasn't entirely at ease, and looked down at the table and up at the ceiling and opposite wall while trying to think of conversation topics... anywhere but at people. We moved to the upper level, the dance floor, for a while, but stayed to the side where I could lean against a table and didn't have to dance, haha. Moving to music I don't enjoy is not a natural thing for me. Is it for anyone?
Jamie, Audrey, Ian and I left around midnight, leaving Mark and Claude to their dancing. Audrey went inside when we got back to the house but the rest of us were hungry, so we walked around the corner to The Naam. Even at that time of night it was busy, surprisingly with a few families with children. Jamie had a slice of rich chocolate fudge cake, I had a slice of Dutch apple-and-cranberry pie, and Ian hadn't eaten since breakfast so he had a bowl of noodles. We spent maybe forty-five minutes there, and Mark and Claude were already back at the house when we returned.
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