The wireless tour of Vancouver

I'm now in Vancouver, and am finally back on the net, albeit temporarily. I'm writing to you from Take 5, a coffee shop in downtown Vancouver that's kind enough to offer free wireless net access.

Getting said wireless net access has been harder than I initially anticipated. Before I left home I downloaded some pages from Wi-Fi-FreeSpot, and hoped to be able to find some in the cities we were traveling through. Unfortunately we haven't found any before today because either there weren't any spots listed, the spots were too far away from where we were, or we were too busy touring to look for places. Also, I was on a relatively undeveloped island for much of the past week, which didn't help anything.

So, today my SO and I decided to hunt out some free net access. We found one coffee shop on the map and drove across town to find it. Somewhere along the line the 245 address turned into 345 in our heads, and thus we arrived at a check cashing place instead of a coffee shop. There was a library nearby so we wandered over to there, only to discover it was closed on Mondays. Upon driving away unsatisfied we saw the coffee shop at 245, and stopped in. We spent about 45 minutes fiddling with settings and talking to the helpful barristas, but alas all we got out of that coffee shop was a very good iced chai.

We then headed downtown, where there were two locations near each other. We couldn't access the first of the two wifi points, but were able to access the second. I would have loved to see a MRI of our brains, as I'm sure the pleasure centers lit up the moment we saw we were online :)

This searching has given us a very nice introduction to Vancouver. After driving around we've concluded that this is an amazingly diverse city. Along one street (Broadway) we found the following types of restaurants all within 2-3 miles: Japanese, Szechuan, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Malaysian, Greek, Indian, Italian, American, southern BBQ, Afghan, generic middle eastern (falafels etc.), a horde of coffee shops, and your usual fast food places. And we only have three days to try them all!

I just found out that this coffee shop is closing within the hour, so I'm going to post this, send off a much delayed e-mail to a friend, and then see if I can get some pictures online using Blogger's new photo hosting tool Hello.