Our hotel, of course, was right smack in the middle of Vancouver's rough stretch. But the outside of the hotel didn't look too bad. We walked into the quirky little lobby and the unmistakeable crowd of an international budget hotel. There was a German family in the corner, a group of camera-toting Japanese tourists, and a few worldly couples that were just a bit too old to stay in a hostel. I had a sudden flash of self realization. After all, I'm not German or Japanese.
The clerk at the desk had the type of personality that made the crypt keeper seem like Lucile Ball. He did his best to sell us on the "very popular" blues band that was playing the hotel bar that night. It was an honest try, but I was going to have to take his word for it. He gave us a map of the area and our room key, and we headed upstairs.
It was surprisingly hot in Vancouver that day, and as we rode the tiny elevator up to our floor, Aimee said that as long as the room had A/C, we’d be fine. As I put the key in the door, I joked and said that you have to pay extra for that. Turns out you have to pay extra for that. This was going to be interesting.
For some context, I booked the room on an online travel site. I didn’t know anything about the place, except that the photo of the front entrance seemed nice enough.
There was no brewhouse.
But the real reason I booked this place was because it was, hands down, the cheapest option in the city. And it wasn’t actually all that cheap. It was $80, but the next cheapest option was at least twice as much. A few weeks before we left, I casually mentioned the price to my dad, since he occasionally travels to Vancouver for work. Without missing a beat, he said, “Man, that place is going to be a shit hole.” I said, “For $80, that’s a pretty nice shit hole.” He just nodded slowly and said that he'd use some frequent flyer miles to book our other two nights in Vancouver. I gladly accepted the free nights, but I didn’t believe him.
I should have believed him.
Yes, that’s a toilet in the closet. But the room wasn’t even that bad. Aimee and I had both stayed in worse. The real issue was the neighborhood. To illustrate the point, Aimee was fairly certain she got peed on as we walked to dinner. There were people sleeping on the streets down every alley, and a chaplain was passing out bananas, muffins, and bibles.
Little did we know, but we should have accepted the muffins. Aside from the three blocks of condensed homelessness, Vancouver was crazy expensive. We didn't have much of a plan for dinner, and we wandered from place to place trying to find something that would cost less than a hundred dollars for the two of us. Seriously.
By 9pm, I was pass-out hungry, and I have no idea how Aimee was keeping it together. She knew that one of us had to stay strong.
We finally found a little hole in the wall Thai restaurant, and almost knocked the door off its hinges on our way in. It was no Pok Pok, but it was easily one of the most amazing meals of my life. And that was based on nothing more than my first bite of rice.
Walking home, we noticed how European the place was. There were designer stores on every corner, and there were even kids lining up to get into some shitty disco. It was like a more polite Paris.
As we got closer to our hotel, we saw someone huffing crack using a butane lighter and tin foil. It was good to be home.
