Hi folks!
Well now, another weekend has passed for which I went to Vancouver Island. The three of us – Stephanie K. from Germany, Marc from Ireland (Stephanie’s boyfriend) and I left from Kamloops on Friday afternoon. Two more girls were supposed to go with us, but skipped on Friday morning. After Stephanie had some trouble getting the rented car and finally arrived 1 1/2 hours late at Hospitality Inn we left around 5.15 p.m. from Kamloops. We went straight on to Vancouver with just 1 stop at McDonald’s in Merritt 
Because we left so late we were in danger to miss the last ferry on Friday evening, because we were supposed to be there 1 hour earlier as we reserved for the car.
We finally managed to get onto the ferry 20 minutes before it was leaving towards Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. We arrived at Nanaimo around 11 p.m. and started searching for our hostel (Nichol Street hostel), which Stephanie also booked in advance. As we were not able to find it we just stopped and asked some guys, who were passing by for the direction. Funnily enough one of the guys stayed there as well and he got onto the car to show us the directions.
As we got there at 11.35 p.m. no-one was there, responsible for check-in. Sijjad (the guy showing us directions) told us, that there were 2 beds left in the room he was sleeping in and so we took them for the night. After our “check-in” 
we went downtown with our new acquaintance consisting of Sajjid (from Kenia), Brady (he lives in Nanaimo) and Vincent (from Quebec). We quickly realized that Vancouver Island is “the Amsterdam of B.C., maybe even of all Canada”, as we were told some weeks ago – the same sweet taste in the air every couple of metres; moreover Brady was offering joints all the time – think that guy’s got a serious problem we finally dropped into Cambie’s pub where we had some beer after that strenuous day and went home around 1.30 p.m. Sajjid stayed even longer, checking out a girl he took home some time later
I got up 8 a.m. on Saturday and waited for the others to get ready while watching Spongebob Squarepants. We then went to Thrifty’s to buy some stuff for cooking and preparing sandwiches. We then decided not to stay at the same hostel for the 2nd night, as we found out that they simply forgot about us the first night. We paid them 30 C$ for Friday night and went to the HI hostel in town centre, which again was a very good choice. The whole interior seemed to be pretty new and we just paid 82 C$ for our own room that night (and all the employees there seem to be Germans). While checking in I met Steve (from Quebec) who I had already met on our trip two weeks before at the HI hostel in Banff. After having breakfast we went to our car to drive to Cathedral Grove, which is about 1 hour north of Nanaimo.
Cathedral grove is one of the oldest Canadian rain forests with some of the tallest Red cedar trees on the West Coast. After walking through the forest there we took a 15-minute ride to Little Qualicum Falls, which is a series of quite impressive waterfalls. Back at HI hostel we prepared dinner after having a short break. Dinner was composed of pasta “á la Bolognese” and salad with italian dressings (mjam). Of course we prepared too much and offered some of our salad to a French guy staying at the hostel – think it was a good balance to the raw meat he was eating :S We then discussed the next days schedule and went to bed early.
On Sunday we made a short round trip around Nanaimo and we were lucky to see some seals very close to the coast. We then went on towards B.C.’s capital Victoria (sorry to tell you folks: Vancouver is NOT the capital of British Columbia). We stopped in Chemainus, a typical tourist town, beeing an attraction because of 40 huge paintings on several buildings of the town. After buying some chocolate for 8 C$ (!!!) we went on to Victoria. We wanted to go downtown there but couldn’t because a man, who had climbed to the roof of the Custom house building, claimed to have a bomb. He already had surrendered, but police still was searching the area for a possible bomb. We just stayed there for a short time anyway because we had to catch the ferry at 6 p.m. leaving from Swartz Bay.
We had dinner on the ferry and I took some amazing shots of the sun setting over the several smaller offshore islands. We arrived in Tsawwassen south of Vancouver around 8 p.m. but it took us more than an hour to get back onto the n° 1 Transcanada highway – therefore we crossed more than 40 of Vancouvers’ avenues between 57th and 12th and finally had to bypass an accident on 12th avenue, where a car had hit the pylon of a traffic light. On the drive home to Kamloops I did some of my readings for sports events management, while Stephanie was driving and Marc did what a good co-driver would do: SLEEP. We again had a stop in Merrit (this time at Time Horton’s) to get some caffeine and a smily cookie for the driver.
Finally we arrived in Kamloops around 1.30 a.m. The trip was really great with lots of great landscape around Nanaimo and especially around Victoria – I just can recommend going on a trip to “the Island”. PICS will follow soon.
“Back to school” today I got back my first mark on last weeks Spanish quiz – 45 out of possible 50, which is quite o.k. for the first quiz I guess 
So far so good – hope to hear something from you.
Greez & blessings,
Gergi
ah, yeah and PS:
what’s up with people in Austria? I see that SP and VP are no choice at all, but that huge amount of blue s*** – I don’t know – seriously.
