I stayed in Granville St., to say it is not the most trendy part of town is an understatement, across the street there was an adult shop, with peep shows for 25 cents, other neighbours included a tattoo parlour and several night clubs. On the day I left women were shouting from their hotel room's balcony asking for men to come and meet them upstairs (I am not talking about a cheap hotel mind you). I should have researched better the area :-/

Vancouver provides 2 things in abundance: Starbucks coffee shops (and several other chains) and homeless people. I think each building has a resident tramp or homeless person, it should be the law or something, and maybe it is also the law to have a Starbucks on your line of sight at any moment while in town...

Activities included whale watching (awesome, I saw several killer whales, as well as sleepy sea lions and bald eagles), a visit to the aquarium (where they have a beluga whale that was pregnant, the baby may have arrived by now), museum with lots of totems (very interesting), running in Stanley Park (exactly 10Km if you go around it all) and lots of good food.

The Vancouverites  are the most polite people I have ever met (seems to be a Canadian trend) in my travels. They even beat the Thais, which is some achievement. People actually approach tourists and start small chat with you. London it ain't on this respect.

The triathlon was mostly a joke. It was scheduled 1 month too early (the weather was truly horrid: cold, rainy; some of the older competitors had to abandon the race with hypotermia), it is pretty obvious that the good weather does not really start until July; they could not measure the distance for the swimming (hello! GPS is here!), so both sprint and Olympic distance  athletes swam the same (which until now nobody knows exactly how much it was), on the second day the weather was so bad that they decided to cancel the competition (people are paying big buck to come and compete, so this was not really very popular). After the obvious embarrassment (why not postpone for later, when it was sunny and calm!?!) they decided to do a duathlon, which was the cup de grace for many participants, some of whom did not participate in protest.

This is an Olympic sport, organized in a town that is going to organize a Olympic Games in two years time. A lot of people in the Triathlon community and in Vancouver have to clean up their act, because the experience was very negative for most participants.

 To top it all up, people finishing got nothing (a medal, a diploma, nothing). Even the shittiest 10K race give you a medal nowadays. That such competition gave nothing is unforgivable. No , wait, they topped it all with the closing ceremony in the Canucks' hockey stadium, where a group of Chinese performers, from what I suppose was a local school, subjected us to sugary unsynchronized dancing to the obvious delight of their elders and the general puzzlement of everybody else. In any case, if you go to Canada, do you expect the closing ceremony to have only Chinese people?

Next year competition is in Australia, so I hope the Aussies put a proper championship next year.

If you would go to the Quilchena hotel, a lovely place in the shore of a lake, you would find my name in their visitors' book (there goes one more bit of my anonymity out of the window), they get a foreigner once every couple of weeks, and as is often the case, I seem to be the first Mexican ever to have stayed there.

Revelstoke was a bit of a let down. The landscape is absolutely gorgeous, they have black bears roaming around, but the restaurants are not very welcoming, catering obviously to the youngsters that come to break their bones and get drunk during the winter sports season.

Banff is absolutely fantastic. Bang in the middle of the Rockie Mountains you are surrounded by high snow capped mountains, the river (unlike  Revelstoke) has a nice promenade to go for longish walks, and I saw some elks placidly eating in the vicinity of town.

I took a tour to several points of interest on Friday 13th of June. I mention this to note I am not superstitious, so when our transport almost crashed, Boo the grizzly bear living in a wildlife refuge, decided to hide never to be seen (to the administrators of the refuge: gee, thanks folks, to take us to watch the bear to see nothing was greatly appreciated), our transport broke down (which meant cancelling the trip to Lake Louise) I  began to fear the appearance of a black cat was just a matter of fact.

What happened to close the day was that I went to a restaurant were the server (Canadian for waiter :-) ) was flirting with most guys and "did not understand my accent", so instead of a veggie burger she got me a bacon burger.

To complain would have been to test fate, so I humbly proceeded to eat the greasy thing.

Calgary is eerily horrible. I have to say I only saw the suburbs and did not go to downtown, whose high rise buildings could be seen in the distance.

The sameness of the houses was unsettling, the bus stops nothing but a stick in the ground with a few markings, life seems to move around the cheerless shopping areas.

When I found that the only place to have a drink before reaching the airport was a Starbucks, the circle  completed, the pretty "barista" gave me my hot chocolate with the broadest of smiles and two stunning women, out of nowhere, came to have a drink, once they noticed I was a foreigner (the accent again? Or my dashing Latino looks?) they started small chat that filled my last minutes in the land of the maple syrup (which seems to be concocted mostly for foreigners...) before heading for the airport.