Birthday present for a friend

If you can't find crazy, cool and unnormal oven mittens...make them special yourself...

Happiness

I wish sometimes I could share my happiness with others...

 The feeling of warm sun on your skin, music in your ears and mountains on the horizon

 Walking

 All this little in between. Sparks of colour. Reminder that time changes and moves on constantly but that it also provides space and opportunities for new things to happen...

 I could either see 6 lines in front of our house, noise and litter...

 But you can also see flowers, black and shiny crow feathers on your way...

And and endless blue sky

Happiness inside your stomach :)

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and a bit late, but better late than never: My weekly instagram addiction 

Being up early, road trip pizza at steamworks, cooking with friends, my mornings, persuaded someone to buy a kindle, Canada place, leaving ships, nails, that or that or maybe that :P, lunch, new things, old things, sushi with my class on Friday, daily lunch, yum fries, home ♥

Day 50 {The day I got my Piercing}

I know I keep repeating myself but it really really smells like autumn every morning now. Actually it smelt like winter this morning. Crisp air...
I love the view from my bus stop. I can see all the way down to down town, grouse mountain and North Van. This morning, only downtown was bathed in sun, everything else was more or less gray. I still love it.
Apparently we are really lucky with the weather right now. It is the driest period since 30(!?) years. Which made me think of: I only had two days of rain since I arrived in Raincouver...not that bad, isn't it?

Anyway. I didn't have to make a sprint to catch the bus this morning, but was able to catch it just in time and even got a seat to sit. Score!
School was just like everyday (though I love school...here...) but my mood somehow changed in my Elective class. And definitely not to its own improvement. So we were sort of stuck after school. What do you do when you feel blah? Get your friends to persuade you to go down to the water! And what do you do there? Right! Find a starfish!...I'm really easily entertained ;)

My mood was good again for sure. But here's this thing with me: I normally come up with stuff quite quick and I normally decide on things just as quick as well. This time it was getting a piercing...
poor people around me ;)

My journey on how I got my piercing
Since we didn't really knew where we could go, someone came up with the idea to go to the tourist information. Poor information. I sort of saved them by asking someone who was selling tickets inside the building. We got our map but had to make a stop first at a certain place for someones craving for sweet things in the afternoon ;)

Not mine though ;P

Another thing I forgot to mention and which I love about Vancouver are all those really really friendly people. So while we were buying our lemon coconut thing our Barista actually turned out to be from Germany as well. And being an open person to people in general, I introduced her to our quest of fining a piercing store. Which led us just up Granville in general (left side though! Thank you Blenz Barista girl!).
Up and up and up and up...to the more scary part...
I have to admit I was sort of nervous at this point. But sometimes that's ok in life.
The store turned out to be a really good find (can you say that?). Nice, open and friendly people! And half an hour later we had a happy someone and slightly shocked friends (but in a good way).
And what's the lesson of this story? Never ever judge anyone for their outer appearance and don't think that you can't turn a boring day into an exciting one ;)

SK instead of DK {The Burger Edition}

So Sunday was DK Time again. Which means meeting a group of awesome girls and cook and bake together! Sounds good doesn't it? And it is good for sure ;)

Chopping up the Onions for sweet maple onions

Measuring up ingredients

Doesn't this already look awesome?!

Don't say that girls can't handle a knife!

Salad from Anna :)

Four girls in the kitchen...lucky I was being busy taking pictures outside the kitchen ;)

Kat's Yum Fries. Being turned around half time through...

Someone's really serious about their job :)

Carly's Vegan Milkshake...really really good!!!

Colleen teaching us on how to cut Avocados...apparently we messed it up the last time :P

Can you find me?

Burgers ♥

Ready to go!

And I think it was definitely worth all the cutting and chopping!!! Really really yum!

That along with chatting, laughing, design pages, blogs, photos and Toby ;)

A roadtrip on saturday

One thing about being away from home is, that your realize what you are actually missing. One of those things, for a Friend and me, turned out to be driving a car. Well actually, I don't really mind driving or not, but just being in a car, driving, being able to stop, to take another route...I missed it. It's this thing about cars I think.

So since the last week was sort of a roller coaster, we decided that it was time for some change. Change as in: We went to rent a car.

For renting a car in Canada you have to be at least 21...which I'm not...but my friend is.
We met early at the Airport (btw: It's sort of weird to be at the airport but not using a plane...especially if your not at home...) and just went with the cheapest option available.
After some calls and some changes we were ready to go.

Doesn't this look a bit like San Francisco...?!

The weather was sunny with a cloudy/foggy tendency...which I love.

Further west...getting away from the city...

It's nice to leave everything behind for once. Listen to music, sing along (try to do it quite so it doesn't get awkward...in my case :D) and take pictures...of course ;)

Haha...or from my feet, or my food, or...

Our first stop was after Shannon Falls (which we went to with my host family last time). They are already quite far away but I would definitely recommend them. So after we had some food, we went to see...well those other falls :)

I designed my own lunch box!

Water falls...and feet pictures

We were really lucky. The sun always just came out in time. After that we went away from the water and more into the mountains...

More music and more driving...

...through an awesome landscape. Did I ever mention that I love Canada!? If not: I really do love Canada!!

Our destination was Whistler. It is an apparently really famous place to go skiing and they had the Winter Olympics in 2010 up there. So everyone who comes to Vancouver eventually ends up at Whistler.
But before we went into town we had a few looks around the area (the advantages of having a car...)

First stop: Lost Lake...and some one's is definitely thrilled to have the car keys...

Guess who went on that boat-thing and jumped hysterically back when it became obvious that it was slowly going out on the lake...right that was me...

We walked around the lake...listening to scared squirrels and discovered that they actually have a special beach just for dogs and their owners (with specials ladders on the swimming platforms so it's easier for the dogs to go up there...)

-"I'm in Canada, from Switzerland, eating English Chocolate..." -"...and talking to a German girl in English...I know one could get confused" ;)

There was another lake. It was all filled up with golf balls...would be interesting to know how they got there...

"You should take a photo of our license plate as well...if you're taking pictures of everything else...you know?!" -"Yes sir...missions accomplished!" So here you go with our license plate...

I actually got a picture of myself...not having to hold the camera myself in a weird angle...

And then we went to Whistler. For those of you who don't get to see whistler, it's a bit like Europapark. Everything is matching and seems somehow...wrong. Like: Everything was built to look like this cute mountain village but you can see that it was built at once, not developing like any other village would have. Though it was still really cute...oh and there's a lot of sport going on. Obviously.

biker

If you were here you'd have to take a picture in front of that! Check!

And forest everywhere

We had lunch, walked around, ate some ice cream (the weather is never too bad for ice cream) and I just love how it was all quite up there. I'm not really comfortable to live in the city all the time (which I wouldn't have thought before) so it was nice to be able to come down again and just be...well out of city for once.
And we had a wonderful way back for sure.

Viewpoint

Haha in this one, there were actually really ugly buildings on the right side...good thing about photography!? You can crop out reality :P

And a beautiful sunset on a blue sky with pink clouds....

I wish you all a wonderful MondayI'm going to start my day with that: