The rain’s back, so here we are today, exploring the city instead. There’s a new coffee shop in Vancouver, called The Garden Strathcona:

The interiors were beautiful, and there was actually a garden wall with lots of beauitul plants. Hopefully, those plants are still thriving in a year. Seating was limited though, so if you’re not too enthused about sitting bum to bum with a stranger, then I suggest getting your coffee and pastries go.



I like the aesthetic, and it’s a nice beautiful place to visit. I wish they had more seating, and less retail (there’s a corner with shelves of skincare/beauty products and a table of hand made pottery). I also wish the latte was stronger.



This place reminds me of La Foret in Burnaby. Probably not revisiting this spot in the near future though, because it’s slightly out of the way, but it is exciting to see this beautiful addition to this strip of East Hastings. I’m sure the locals are stoked.

Next weekend, I will be in Banff! Gonna be winging this trip mostly, with car camping and not a lot of research.

Finally, we had a sunny Saturday in Vancouver, where I was free to go for a bike ride and explore coffee shops. C and I met up at The Narcissus at Powell and Commercial:



I had the cortado, and a chocolate croissant (they didn’t have the almond ones available). The pastries obviously were not baked in house, so I asked the barista where they were actually from. The Korean barista took a few seconds to undestand my question, and replied in broken English, “Cadeaux, downtown.”



The coffee shop was fairly empty at 1030AM, very quiet, with music playing unobtrusively in the background. The coffee was made from beans roasted by Agro, and it was very flavourful. The croissant was fresh, and I’ll be back to check out their sandwiches (there was a prosciutto one). They even serve beers from 33 Acres! This would be a great place to work and be inspired to work.



I really appreciated the peace and quiet today, after all hell broke loose this week in the office. It's just another rock that we'll jump over though. Will Smith said it best:

“It don’t matter whose fault it is that something is broken if it’s your responsibility to fix it.”

When there’s a problem, there’s no point in pointing fingers, laying blame, but at what point does it become a liability to keep throwing bandaids at the cut? Let’s just fix the problem. Let’s nip it in the bud, get rid of the root cause. Let’s MacGyver the shit out of this.