Skyberries and Voidmelons or Voidberries and Skymelons

Wednesday, I visited Granville Island, but like many other places I tried to visit in Vancouver, the main gallery at the Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design was closed due to the weather. I consoled myself with an apple green bubble milkshake (tapioca pearls!) and concluded it was too cold to be outside, so decided to go to the cinema. Fast Food Nation, directed by Richard Linklater, was the film I chose and then cried while watching.

Thursday, I headed to UBC, to visit the Museum of Anthropology, where stunning totem poles and masks and other articles related to First Nations culture were stored. After that, I climbed down treacherously slushy steps and over a fallen tree to reach a nudist beach. Wreck Beach was beautiful - a deserted beach covered completely in snow, with a forest for a backdrop. Sticking up from the snow were various pieces of wood, which looked quite odd. I walked down to the sea and found a stretch of sand, where the tide had just washed away the snow, and there were purple shells and bright orange and red logs there. As the sun got lower in the sky, I headed back to the UBC for a pint.

That evening, I reached 50,000 words of my NaNoWriMo novel and concluded that what I gained the most from participating in NaNoWriMo this year was a great travelling companion. The novel forced me into coffee bars when it needed words added and up mountains and skyscrapers when it needed me to find inspiration, but the best thing about travelling with my novel was that I rarely felt alone.

It was 4 a.m. and less than 24 hours before, I had booked a flight to Vancouver. I ate Daffy Duck raspberry jelly for breakfast, out of a star-shaped mould that once belonged to my grandmother. I then stumbled around my flat, gathering items to stuff into a large rucksack, unsure of what was needed. I packed Douglas Coupland's City of Glass, print-outs with the addresses of goth clubs, my half-written NaNoWriMo novel, not enough jumpers, and eventually, sushi at the airport.

In Amsterdam, between flights, I bought postcards of tulips and prostitutes and sent text messages to friends and relatives detailing my current location. My black jeans became sticky with someone else's chewing gum.

I watched My Gym Partner's A Monkey and consumed more jelly on the plane. As it flew across Canada, towards Fort St John, I looked out the window and saw a landscape that looked entirely lunar. I wondered if I was flying to another planet and what was actually there on the ground beneath me. On the in-flight radio, space exploration was mentioned.

As the plane began to descend and Vancouver came into sight, the sun began to set and the snow-covered mountains, skyscrapers, sea and clouds looked dreamy, so dreamy, glowing with shades of pink and blue.

Before I was allowed to enter Canada, immigration officers asked me to name what Douglas Coupland books I had read, amongst so many other questions that made me feel scared about travelling alone.

Eventually, I found ellescriba, bickichick, wrldtravlr2, elzbthpdx, Erin and Darlene, and we drank cocktails at Cloud 9, the rotating restaurant on the top of the Empire Landmark Hotel, where I felt giddy viewing the skyscrapers, that were lit up brightly in front of me.