Although Vancouver is less than 3 hours away from where we live we never visited it before. Main reason: we needed a visitor visa to get into Canada. We would have probably postponed the visit to Canada for much longer if we didn’t have to get out of the US to renew our visas.

We found Canada, at least the British Columbia part we saw, to be different from the US. The speed limits were posted in km/h, the lanes were narrower. The artificialness we grew accustomed to in the US was gone. Vancouver itself is way more European than any other city we saw in the US. It reminded us of Bucharest - in a good way.

The “experience” at the US Embassy was priceless. The only thing that went well was the fact that we got the visa renewed. The whole experience feels very un-American, from being made up sit in line in the rain, having people bark orders at you and having to wait in at least 4 queues. It reminded us of how things work in Romania.

Overall we really really liked it in Vancouver and we will probably be going back to thoroughly explore the area.