Portfolio, Traveling, Eating...

With some additional effort, I finally put my revised portfolio up (after a possible future employer and an uncle requested it all on the same day). I'm not completely happy with it but it will do for now.

Friday night I had the Griffon at the Vancouver Hotel with Uncle Pond, Auntie April and my grandpa. The food there never ceases to amaze as usual. The bread, especially, rocked. But then again, I love freshly baked western bread in any restaurant. I had myself fish because I remembered the awesome prime rib I already had earlier in the week at Chops. I also delivered a dozen cupcakes to my uncle by request, though he has yet to tell me what he thinks of them.

Sunday, the Team Cupcakes (+Mina's sister) went to Seattle for a day. Met up with everyone at Mina's place a bit after 7 (Lisa forgot to wake up and we ended up waiting in front of her house for a while). Mina and sis brought us awesomely disgusting mcdix breakfast and we were on our way.

Our first stop was the Seattle Premium Outlet. The museum and tours we were going to visit don't open until later, so we decided to do shopping first. Unfortunately it was only 9am and it didn't open for another hour so we went next door to visit the casino. Everyone played at least a dollar worth of penny slots and only Vee 'earned' anything (which she got rid of by losing it all). After the amusing diversion, we split up to do some personal shopping for an hour. An hour was not enough for me, even though I only wanted to visit 4 stores, but I barely made it through. We continued on our way down the i-5 to the glass museum (for Chihuly) in Tacoma but we lost our way. I regret not bringing the GPS. It was a bit past noon already and there were other places we wanted to visit, so we decided to skip it and perhaps leave it for another day.

We found the EMP|SFM (for Frank Gehry!) and ended up unintentionally spending a few hours in there. We also found out that the penny stamp machines don't do well with Canadian pennies. As much as we wanted a shinier and newer penny for mushing, they're too thin for the whole imprint to fit. The Canadian penny attempts turned out to be rather awkward shaped circles instead of ovals.

Our next stop was the Underground Tour, which we made in time for next scheduled tour at 5pm. The lady we ended up following was rather monotone and talked rather fast, so we didn't really catch most of her jokes. The way she spoke felt quite memorized so it did feel rather boring. However! The story itself about Seattle was rather interesting. They tried to worry us about the rats but we only really just saw one (and that was outside in the back street) and another, which was already dead. I got a bit of a headache from all the smell but I managed.

The Mcdix breakfast was rather filling for me so by the time the tour was over (~7pm), I finally felt hungry. They wanted to eat at the Cheesecake Factory so indeed that is where we went. MOAR BREAD. I did some serious bread hording and that kinda prevented me from finishing my meal and having dessert but no fear, I brought some to go!

Before we continued on, we stopped at the gas station for a refill. There were some rather frustrating complications but we managed to get gas at the end. The gas was also a lot cheaper than we expected (damn you amerikans and your cheap gas *shakes fist*).

The last stop was Walmart - yay for 24 hours! They did some serious shopping but I only ended up getting a drink and some USA-exclusive Iced Tea flavoured Ice Breakers. Though I do regret not getting Kingdom Hearts RE:Chain of Memories when I saw it there. I was turned off by the exchange rate but now that I think about it, the game's rare now. DAMN. I'll probably never see it again.

We took Pac Hwy back to avoid the rather frightening 80+ min wait that was shown on the announcement board on our way to the Peace Arch... even then, we still didn't get home until after 2am. The day after, I did some serious sleeping. Serious. 12 hour serious.