Normandy Adventures: Rain, rain, go away?

We anticipated a lot of rain for the day so we planned a day of staying indoors. We started off the day by going to Minami for lunch in Yaletown which reminded us of the Distillery District. Minami is a sister restaurant of Miku which is also opening a restaurant in Toronto soon! Minami and Miku are known for aburi sushi so of course that’s what we ordered! Lunch was amazingggg! We decided to order one premium lunch which had a couple of aburi sushi paired with a couple or regular sushi and an order of a regular maki roll which was not as good. Of course the best piece of sushi was the scallop sushi… mmmmMMMmmm…. It was definitely the best sushi we had during our entire stay in Vancouver J

Nom nom nom

Yaletown

Quick pic stop

After lunch we decided to take the Skytrain to Aberdeen Centre which is Vancouver’s equivalent of Pacific Mall. I decided to take charge of giving the directions and I accidentally took the wrong train and ended up at the airport L With some assistance we made it to the biggest Chinese shopping mall in Richmond! Aberdeen Centre is much more modern, cleaner, and the shops are much bigger than the ones in Pacific Mall. We went straight to the food court and everything looked yummy! I got the house special mango smoothie from 8 Juice, green tea gai danh jai, and curry fish balls J We walked around the mall and spent the majority of our time in Daiso ($2 store) where I bought lots of Japanese candy and chips. I wish we had one in Toronto!

Aberdeen food court > Pacific Mall food court

Aberdeen Centre

We made our way back to downtown Vancouver in time for happy hour at Joe Fortes. Our friend Doug recommended we catch the buck-a-shuck oysters, but because of some bacterial infection affecting west coast oysters, the restaurant didn’t have that special. However, the other happy hours were specials were especially delicious. We had the deep fried oysters (lightly battered with mayonnaise reminiscent of McDonalds Fillet-o-Fish), the lobster/shrimp sandwich (buttery and delicious) and the creamy steamed clams (clams were actually quite large). Joe Fortes also won several awards for its wine and, as drinks were $5 each, even Mandy enjoyed her glass of white wine. I enjoyed the alcohol quite a bit more, with several vodka sodas and two glasses of wine (white and red).

Deep fried oysters

Steamed clams

Lobster/shrimp rolls

From then, we took a brief shopping trip down Thurlow street, but we didn’t end up buying anything. From then, we went to dinner with Rimoun and Tina (Mandy’s high school friend). We went to eat dinner at a very popular restaurant called “Phnom Penh”, which served very high quality Cambodian and Vietnamese food. We had the butter beef, the chicken wings (a table favourite) and the beef luc lac (Norm’s personal favourite). From then, we went out to a couple of nearby bars and got slightly tipsy before we headed home. Tomorrow will be a day trip to Victoria!