Since I'm still not going to have any videos to post for another week, and I can't quite get my brain around the boneheaded moves happening in the Obama campaign, I thought I'd finally get around to posting some Vancouver trip round-up.

Instead of flying into Vancouver, we were able to save some money by flying to Seattle and renting a car to drive up. Neither of us had ever been to Washington before, so we spent the afternoon of our arrival poking around the campus area and visiting an indie craft store that Emily wanted to check out. The thing that really struck me about Seattle was how much more foreign it seemed than every other big city visited recently. To a certain extent, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, New York, Boston, San Francisco, etc., all have a very similar feel to me, where the only variable is magnitude. The woody and mountainous geography around Puget Sound really made me feel like we'd gone somewhere new, as did the kind of odd traffic idiosyncrasies.

Our hotel in Vancouver was about 1km from the conference site at Simon Fraser University and was situated on a fairly busy near-downtown street. We had a full kitchen, but no free wireless, so I found myself venturing over the Blenz coffee shops fairly often; one of them was right next a liquor store, which was helpful. The only time we went out for drinks was at the Tokyo Police Club we saw at the Plaza -- we paid $30 for four drinks. Conversely, we bought a bottle of vodka for the room for $24.

Due to an entirely preventable mistake -- I left the microphones plugged into the filter box, which is how the filter knows it should be running -- my mics had no battery and so my clips of the show have no audio. It's too bad, because the show was fun and the venue was really weird. It's a really big room, but we estimated that, due to it's ridiculous floor plan, it probably holds about as many people as the High Noon Saloon. The opening band, the Virgins, were pretty good and are Emily's favorite new band. Next, the Meligrove Band, were well-received but bored the hell out of me; I think they might be local. Tokyo Police Club were a lot of fun, but I'd forgotten how damn short their songs are. They played everything they've released, plus a bunch of new songs, and it wasn't much more than a half-hour set.

We spent a lot of time wondering around, checking out thrift stores and other interesting stuff, including a cupcake shop that looked like it could have been right across the street from the Pie Hole on Pushing Daisies. We also found another craft store, Occupied, and a suburban mall full of Japanese pop culture stores, where we bought a ton of $2 stationery and Emily got a Gloomy Bear cellphone charm. Also there was a conference mixed in there somewhere.