anoisette

I was reading the TripIt blog, because TripIt is so awesome and I almost wish I traveled more so that I could use it more, when I came across JohnEckman.com. I like the idea of this action stream thing he has going on. Apparently I must be living on a rock to not have seen something like that sooner. I’m going to investigate the options for wordpress. And what would be the best thing to use to have blurbs saying ‘just read title-of-interesting-article’ like this one titled How a lottery winner spends his multi-million dollar jackpot. If anyone has any suggestions, I’m all ears!

Had a bit of a rough day today so I made a point of getting out of the office for my lunch break. Since the weather was kind of meh I ended up having to walk through Holt’s and go distracted by these shiny cuties.

So I tried them on. And it made me feel better. Cliche, I know. At $400something on sale I couldn’t take them home though.

When I was backpacking in SE Asia I remember having a conversation with my friend/travel partner about how cool it would be to be able to send postcards to our friends and family with photos of on our little adventure. I sure wish Hippopost had been around at the time because it would have been so totally perfect! Hippopost lets you upload a photo, which it prints onto a postcard and mails for you, for free (it’s advertising supported).

I tried it yesterday and hope to see the fruits of my labour next week.

A lot more, even, in this post over at Lifehacker.

Maybe admitting I don’t own an iPod makes it blasphemous for me to call myself a geek, but I don’t and I’m not apologizing for it. I just haven’t succumbed to the hype yet, but I’m slowly being suckered in.

While there are those who like to keep their gadgets separate, I’m the exact opposite. I travel light and when it comes down to having to take an mp3 player, camera, cell phone, gps, etc. I will just leave them behind rather than fill up my purse (in fact I’m happy when I don’t even have to carry a purse). So to me an all-in-one iPhone sounds sweet, but what I’m most excited about is the possibilities for aps from a device that takes pictures and has a GPS. I haven’t read whether pictures can actually have location info encoded right in to them automatically on the new iPhone, but I’m sure that functionality is right around the corner… I have been waiting for so so so long for a camera that will automatically tag photos with location info. I think geotagged photos are a lot of fun and anything that could make the process automatic would be so awesome.

I’d love to be able to have a mobile photo blog… But it could also be so useful for all kinds of things. For example it looks like the best way to find an affordable apartment in the West End is good old fashioned pavement pounding. But I know from experience that an intense apartment search can quickly result in information overload, and it doesn’t help if you’re targeting apartments in a very small area in terms of differentiating apartments from each other. I can just see possibilities for an ap that would let you take a picture of the building, somehow automatically assign it the correct address based on location and just leave you to enter in any notes you may have such as the price of the rent, whether you were able to reach the landlord when you called from out front, etc. That could also totally work for people cruising open houses. Then you’d just get to come home and check out a nicely organized list showing all the places you visited on a map and you could run them through Walk Score or do what ever else you needed to do.

Or… omg something like that for scouting wedding venues. That uploaded to a big local wedding venue site. Because everyone in my circle knows how I am tearing my hair out looking for a wedding venue…

I just like maps a lot. Maps with lots of useful information and ways to easily effortlessly add more useful information to them.

A few of my friends have been going on for months about some sushi place off Main Street that’s really good but annoyingly always has a huge line outside. On Sunday, one of them suggested we go there for dinner so I figured I should finally go see what all the fuss is about. The place is none other than Toshi Sushi.

We thought if we got there early, it would save us from having to wait in line. We arrived at about quarter to five only to find a line of about 15 people waiting for the restaurant to open at 5. It was actually kind of entertaining to watch bewildered passerbys look and wonder what all the fuss could be about.

I’m not going to go into minute detail about every aspect of the experience but I would say that overall I thought it was a good place and if I’m in the mood to wait in line I’d definitely go back. I was pretty happy to find that they had a natto roll, which I ordered, and it was quite tasty. I also ordered a cream cheese and green bean tempura roll (it originally had salmon in it but when I asked to get a vegetarian version they were very accommodating) which was quite good. The only thing is that half the roll had roe on it, so I gave that to my friend to eat. Next time I’ll have to remember to be very very specific and make sure they don’t put any roe/tobiko on my rolls. After that I was still hungry so I ordered a soy film and veggie roll which I actually didn’t care for too much. It was basically one of those overloading on the veggies rolls that just ends up tasting like crunchy water in rice (blaaaaand). Overall though the sushi was good. The service was great, they were always refilling our teas and waters, and the waitresses were super friendly and chatty. This is definitely a good place to go if one is missing Japan, it’s got an authentic Japanese atmosphere to it which is nice.

I was just catching up on my blog reading which has been neglected this past week when I just found out about a great new service called Offbeat Guides. I was surprised by a lot of the negative comments in the TechCrunch post, but I agree with the one commenter who questionned how much travelling those people do.

I don’t consider myself a jet setter world traveler by any stretch, but 2007 saw me on 4 different continents so I’m no homebody either. And I have to say that the traveler in me see this as an exciting product, and more than an exciting product I see a vision of what travel guides should be.

One big problem with travel guides is that they are basically out of date when you buy them, and to really plan a trip you have to spend the time reading the out of date travel guide and then spend the time scouring the internet for some updated current information. And that is basically what I ended up doing a lot during my trip to SE Asia. For a longer trip especially, where you are making up your trip as you go along, having the ability to instantly print off a guide like that would save so much time. I’d rather pay $9 and print out a PDF at a net cafe on an island in Thailand than have to spend a few hours searching wikitravel and other sites to figure out what there is to see and do in the next place I’ve decided to visit. That way I can spend less time on a computer and more time on the beach. And let’s face it, if I just wanted to spend time on a computer I could just stay home.

Another example was when reading another out of date travel guide I found out about some cool art museum in Geneva, Switzerland. Decided to hit it up the next day, only to get there and find it closed for renovations. Wasted the morning and then had to scramble to figure out what else was nearby that I’d like to check out. After that experience I’ve learned to try and google stuff the night before and try and find a website with updated operating hours for a place I want to check out. But internet isn’t always readily available and sometimes it’s really expensive and slow, and most of all sometimes in the evenings I Just want to relax and not be furiously trying to make sure my travel guide information is up to date.

Or there was the time I went to Bali. I had picked out a guesthouse recommended by my Lonely Planet guide in the town of Ubud. The guide said this guesthouse was very busy and full of travellers, which I thought was perfect because I was traveling alone and staying in a busy guesthouse is the best way to meet people. I got off the bus (at the wrong spot no less) and spent a grueling hour walking around the town with my heavy pack and trying to ignore local touts yelling ‘room here! room here!’ and trying to figure out the lay of the city and match it to my map and find the guesthouse. Eventually I walked for the second time by the place where it ought to be and asked someone only to be told the guesthouse had closed. At that point I walked down the street to some random guesthouse to inquire about a room, they showed me a lovely lovely one that was unfortunately out of my budget (awkward and embarrassing). Left and walked in to another random place where I ended up staying but being the only person there for the first night. A crappy experience that could have hopefully been avoided with an updated travel guide.

Another customization option that sounds great to me that was mentioned is special needs, for example if you’re a vegetarian. This is huge for me when I travel, travel guides pretty much never have much in the way of vegetarian restaurant suggestions and every time I travel I spend a good chunk of time on the internet researching restaurants to check out and looking on google maps to figure out how to get there. In fact this is something I’ve often thought there is a total lack of on the web, solid information on restaurants with vegetarian options. I don’t need to eat in strictly vegetarian restaurants when I travel, but I’ll definitely choose one with vegetarian options over one where I’ll be stuck eating a lame salad.

Anyway, it made my day to read about Offbeat Guides and watch the video interview with the founder (which I’d link to but in 5 second attention span couldn’t figure out how to link to on blip.tv). I love that people are coming up with awesome ideas and implementing them despite all the possibilities for failure. And I can’t wait to get my beta invite so I can check out the service myself.

Since my last couple of posts were about food and restaurants, it seems fitting to share this: Miss 604 recently posted about Vancouver restaurant health standards. Let me just say that I will be checking the BC food establishment closures pdf before I pick my next place to eat out.

It’s actually quite amazing what information is online in terms of avoiding places with dirty problems. For example I was pretty relieved to see that my new apartment does not turn up on the Bedbug Registry (although it’s a bit frightening how many places in the West End do). The only thing with initiatives like the Bedbug Registry is that you gotta take that information with a grain of salt since anyone including disgruntled bad tenants can write slanderous posts just as easily as legitimate complaints.

I finally got to try The Eatery a few days ago. I had great hopes for it, despite hearing mixed reviews from friends. While I wasn’t disappointed, it was no Sushi Island replacement either and so my search for awesome inexpensive veggie sushi in Vancouver continues.

I started with the Veggie Croquettes which I thought were pretty authentic-like for a veggie version, I mean as far as I could tell never having really eaten tonkatsu or the like. The sauce was authentic anyway.

Then I had the Tasty Trio veggie sushi combo. Nothing special about the avocado and yam tempura rolls (well ok the yam rolls were very nicely arranged), but I had high hopes for the Mango Paradise roll. Unfortunately, all I can say is that it was ok. I think the mango kind of got lost in with all the other stuff. It wasn’t bad by any stretch, but didn’t blow my mind either.

Anyway, the food was good and there are all kinds of interesting and enticing things on that menu so I’ll very likely be back. The Mochi Okonomiyaki definitely has me intrigued…

I’m starting to accept that I’m not going to find my replacement for Pizzaiolo or Amato here in Vancouver, or even Bitondo’s (in fact I’m seriously starting to question whether Vancouver even knows how to make a decent cheap-by-the-slice pizza), but with a sushi joint on every corner I for sure am convinced there must be a place where a girl and go to get her fix of tempura and green grape sushi?!

Where is my Vancouver version of Sushi Island hiding?! I’ve made it a point to try different sushi places every time I go to one, but I’m started to get worn out by always finding the same veg options everywhere I go. Some lame combination of avocado, iceberg lettuce, and shredded carrots. I mean, it works, but come on Vancouver sushi joints where is the excitement and innovation for us populous vegetarians who happen to enjoy their veggies (and occasional fruit) wrapped in some rice and seaweed?

I am however excited to try vegetarian dim sum at the Hon’s Wun-Tun Hous on Robson one of these Saturdays, which I was very happy to discover at the Dine Out Here Vancouver blog.