Canada - Jan 12

This morning we took Rick and Bretto out for breakfast at a De Dutch Pannekoek House. Afterwards Rick gave us (mostly Bretto) an excellent driving tour of Vancouver. You can only see so much of Vancouver from a car, but we did pretty well.At the end of the tour we ended up downtown, where J spotted a Karaoke box. Of course, we made reservations for after dinner and did some shopping.After shopping, Rick dropped us off at the Commercial Skytrain station, where we met Anisha. We were also supposed to meet others, but due to scheduling conflicts only Anisha could come. A decision was quickly made and we went to Cafe Deux Soleils. They have great vegetarian fare here, even for a hardcore meat eater, as well as good coffee and tea.Holly was scheduled after Anisha, but we had to kill some time in between so we spent some time in Shopper's drugmart and Safeway. Groceries were bought and time flew by. Our friend Holly drove us to her place where she entertained us and she gave Bretto an astrology reading. A little before 9PM she dropped us off at Tsolia's Greek Taverna.To our surprise we saw that people were already there, and that my highschool grad/prom date was now living in Vancouver! Tim and Tara, Colleen, and Lori(my grad/prom date from highschool) were there. A few minutes later J.Dean and his partner, Carolin, showed up. Finally Dan, my brother, showed up after he finished work. I had lamb/chicken combo souvlaki and had a good chat with everyone.Dinner wrapped up and some of us headed to karaoke. Jamie, I, Bretto, Tim, Tara, Colleen, J.Dean and Carolin went to Konbiniya(Japanese/Engrish). It was a Japanese style karaoke room, but the machine must have been ancient. It was a cyberdam or anything that looked remotely like the ones in Japan now! The books were worn and tired. The song list didn't even include well known bands like U2! To make things worse the sound kept cutting out and sounded terrible. Unfortunately for us the place was full so we couldn't relocate to another room. The guys tried to fix the system, but it took so long that we were moved to another room after people had left. In this new room there was insane feedback/line noise because the mic cords(Yes... no wireless mics!) needed to be jiggled just right. Luckily Jamie was able to jiggle the cord just right.They didn't charge us for karaoke, just drinks. We had a good time.