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Scott and I celebrated our 3 year anniversary last weekend. We had a really nice day, except for the 20 minutes we accidentally spent right in the core of the downtown East side. Yikes it’s pretty bad there in the summer!!!!

Anyway, first we overloaded our senses on the FlyOver Canada ride at Canada Place. It’s like one of those 4D theatre rides they have at amusement parks where the seats tip back and forth and they spray water on you except this one is REALLY WELL DONE. The big curved screen covered our ENTIRE peripheral vision. You really feel like you are flying through the Canadian landscape! It had smells and mist as well. It was so short though, I wish it was like 5 times as long. And they skipped right from Newfoundland to Toronto! Poor neglected Atlantic Canada. I have pretty high standards for things like this and other than the length I thought it was great. Really cool!

After the ride we headed over to Dark Table for dinner to deprive our senses. It’s one of those restaurants where the waiters are all blind and you eat in complete darkness. When we arrived at the restaurant we were given menus outside and directed to a bench on the patio to pick what we wanted to eat. You actually only pick the main course, the starter and the dessert are always a surprise. You can choose for the main course to be a surprise too, actually. I picked the prawn dish and Scott went for the mystery main course. Please don’t worry about me spoiling the surprises because they are supposed to change every day.

When they say dark they mean DARK. There is not one bit of light coming into the place. Our waiter led us to our table in train formation. We sat down and then he left us for a little while, I guess for us to settle down and figure out the lay of the table. It was sooo funny trying to figure out what was going on. We touched everything, haha. I kept worrying that I was going to knock over a flower vase or something but that’s pretty silly… obviously they don’t need table decorations. You keep expecting your eyes to adjust to the darkness but they really do not! It took a bit to realize that if we didn’t say what we were doing or thinking the other person has no idea what you are doing or thinking. We had lots to talk about though, like trying to figure out how many other people were eating there as well, or a packet of butter that you found on your side plate, hahahaha.

The starter dish.

I’M HILARIOUS.*

We got salads for our starter. Salads are hard to eat in the dark! I brought an empty fork to my mouth so many times, haha. Eventually I just used my other hand to ensure I actually got something on my fork. Classy.

Main course. Hehe.

My prawns and risotto were very nice. I was relieved to find that they had removed the shells for me. I wasn’t sure how I would do that on my own. Scott still isn’t sure if he had chicken or pork (I think pork.) Sharing bites of food was NOT EASY. Scott dumped his prawn sample on to his shirt. I got sauce all over my hand.

Dessert. Is this joke old yet? Hope not cuz I’m still laughing.

Raspberry cheesecake! It was tasty and I appreciated that it was not chocolate (chocolate late on a worknight is not ideal for me).

After eating we got led train style to a semi-lit room to pay the bill and then led outside into the BLINDING LIGHT. It was funny to see the damage to Scott’s shirt and my arms, haha.

Overall very funny experience. Definitely will be a memorable anniversary. The food was good but not the greatest thing I ever ate or anything. I recommend going there though, it’s a pretty unique experience.

Dark Table Menu, Reviews, Photos, Location and Info - Zomato

*Actually Rosemarie is hilarious cuz she told me to post those “pictures”.

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It is so so nice not having homework. And one benefit of very early morning starts is that I’m usually finished work by about 3PM. To make it even better the weather in Vancouver has been PERFECT for the past week and a bit. Life is good here, at the moment. :D

We saw Monsters University last weekend. Have you seen it? I liked it quite a bit. I laughed a bunch of times. Then the next night I watched Monsters Inc again. Cute.

I can see Canada Place from our balcony so I was planning on watching the Canada Day fireworks from here, but I fell asleep and missed them!! I actually did wake up from some booms and ran out onto the balcony but it must have been the very last ones from the show because I didn’t see or hear anything after that. Bummer.

I went to the gym with my skeleton friends on Thursday and my quads are STILL sore. We did bench press, front squats, power cleans, abs, and core. Chris pushes Matt and I to lift as hard as we can. I am still pretty weak but I am improving. BTW, they still haven’t announced the dates for BC skeleton tryouts yet and I still haven’t decided if I’m going to bother trying out this year or not. It might be kind of fun to do all the tests, but I’m worried that I would still be embarrassingly unqualified. I haven’t even tried any of the sprints or jumps yet. We’ll see, and I’ll keep you posted.

The end of last week was dramatic at work. We got a call near the end of the day on Thursday from a camera manufacturer that said we could no longer use their cameras until they have been checked out, effective immediately. The hospital exclusively uses that brand of camera so we had to cancel everything for the next day that we could and figure out how to get the urgent inpatients their tests in other facilities. I thought I was going to get the day off but instead they sent me back to the outpatient centre (that uses a different brand of camera). Friday was pretty chaotic with all the extra patients from other hospitals so I helped out with that. I’m not sure when things will get back to normal… hopefully by tomorrow but I’m not sure.

That hospital rotation really was exhausting and tough, but I ended up getting a very good review so I’m happy. I’m glad I got that rotation over with as well… the rest of the summer should go pretty smoothly.

Yesterday Clare and I went to see our classmate Gillian get married. We just went to the ceremony so we weren’t there very long. We got to see their first EVER kiss!! Gillian looked so pretty and I loved her dress. Congratulations Gillian and Bryan!

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It was my birthday on Wednesday. :) I didn’t do anything too crazy on my actual birthday, just ordered some food and relaxed in my hammock. I was pooped from another long day at the hospital (which thankfully did not involve any actual poop). I got lots of phone calls from family and emails from friends and Scott had hidden some presents all over the apartment, so I still feel like I had a nice birthday. HELLO 27.


Nice candle, Scott.

We actually had a party the weekend before Scott left. A housewarming/birthday/goodbye party. It was a really really hot day so everyone was out on the patio. We had tons and tons of snack food and then fired up the bbq for some sausages and bacon wrapped chicken and corn. And DQ ice cream cake!! (PS I just ate the last piece tonight, yum.)


I didn’t take any pictures. Whoops. Too busy sweating and mingling. Thanks Clare for making us take this one!

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My dad says all I talk about it food. Oops. It’s true that I think about food a lot, but I do have other stuff to talk about! I declare this post a food-free zone.

I am now in the 5th week (out of 14) of my summer clinical. Most of the summer I am at the outpatient centre in Surrey and it is awesome. The place was only built 2 years ago so everything is new and clean and lovely. The facilities are definitely good there. And to make it even better all the patients are in reasonably good health. They all come there willingly, from home. They don’t require too much extra work.

BUT…. everyone has to do a two week rotation through the hospital as well. It is old and dark and crowded. EVERY patient is an inpatient (admitted to the hospital) and requires LOTS of extra work. They usually can’t walk on their own so we have to transfer them from their stretchers to our camera beds and back. They also can’t get up to use the washroom. Or get something that they need. And to make it even worse lots of them have contagious infections. And terrible veins. AWESOME.

This week and next week I am at the hospital. Monday was bonkers. The last couple days haven’t been TOO crazy but it’s still lots more work than other rotations. My legs are killing me!

I am not looking forward to next week when Scott is gone and I have to cook for myself!! I see a lot of frozen pizzas in my immediate future. (Oops I’m not supposed to talk about food…)

Long weekend coming up though! We’re having a little housewarming party on Saturday and then Scott leaves on the Monday for Australia for Jessie’s wedding. He’ll be gone for two weeks. Hopefully we can get in some good quality patio time over the weekend before he leaves.

At least my next rotation after this hospital one is going to be very easy. Hopefully this crappy non-summery weather finishes by then too!!

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via http://thedapperdude.com/2011/07/04/meat-bread-vancouver/

This Vancouver restaurant is known for their simple and delicious sandwiches. Their most popular sandwich is the porchetta, which has juicy pork and crunchy crackling in between a ciabatta bun. Very tasty.

So tasty that we wanted to eat it again. But we can’t afford $10 per sandwich!! So instead we tried making it at home. I mostly followed this recipe and these butterflying instructions, and it turned out AMAZING. The only tricky part was actually preparing the meat because my piece of meat was not exactly the same shape as the ones in the instructions. So I took a few pictures of the process to hopefully help out a bit.

First I prepared the salt rub and the herb rub. I didn’t have fennel seeds because I don’t like the taste, so I just left that out. I used fresh parsley, but everything else was just dried spices.

Have I mentioned that we live a block away from a real butcher now? I bought this 4 lbs piece of pork shoulder with the skin on for $12. The actual shoulder was much bigger but the lady cut it down into a 4 lbs chunk for me. (This odd cut was why the butterflying instructions seemed really hard.)

My butterflied piece of meat. Butterflying SEEMED really tricky, but actually it’s not! I promise!! You don’t have to do as good of job as you think you do! My piece of pork was very thick in some spots still and it still turned out perfectly.

Put the meat skin down (the yellow is the skin)and cut out any bones. Then cut your meat horizontally from the left so the piece touching the counter is reasonably uniformly thick. Cut almost all the way to the right side and then unfold your meat like a book. Then repeat! When you are done you are left with an oddly shaped flat piece of meat.

Cover it with half of the salt rub and all of the herb rub.

Then you roll it up and tie it up as tight as you can with string. You want the skin to be totally on the outside of the roll, otherwise it won’t crisp up and won’t be nice. It doesn’t matter if there isn’t enough skin to cover the whole roll, my skin part only covered about 50% and that was fine. Oh and don’t worry about making lots of rolled layers, mine barely went around 1.5 times and it still turned out beautifully like the pictures.

Then you rub the rest of your salt rub on the outside, place it on a paper towel on a plate and refrigerate uncovered for 24 hours.

The next day place it directly on your oven rack with a pan underneath to catch drips. Roast at 275 F until the inside of the pork reaches 150 F (if you don’t have a meat thermometer, go get one!! They’re like $5 and WORTH IT.) This took about 2.5 hours for us. Then turn up the heat to 450 F and roast until the skin looks brown and crispy and delicious. Keep and eye on it because it doesn’t take long (maybe 10-15 minutes).

This is when our smoke alarm started going off non-stop. I suppose there was a bit of smokiness from the splatters. Made a bit of a mess of the oven but… the smell…. oh it was amazing.

Cover it with foil and let it rest for 20 minutes. Then slice up and enjoy!!!! We had it on chewy rolls from Safeway with a bit more salsa verde on top. DELICIOUS. Oh how tasty was that crunchy skin. Mmm.

PS did you notice that our pork had a tattoo?? WE ATE THE TATTOO. Kinda weird.