Jilted Jaunts Series - Table of Contents
| Entry | Notable Places/Events | Start of Day | End of Day |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day 0 - May 22-24 2025 | Introduction, Planning | - | - |
| Day 1 - May 25 2025 | Edmonton > Calgary > Canmore | Edmonton | Canmore |
| Day 2 - May 26 2025 | Banff, Tunnel Mountain | Canmore | Canmore |
| Day 3 - May 27 2025 | Three Sisters Pathway, Canmore, Lake Minnewanka stargazing | Canmore | Canmore |
| Day 4 - May 28 2025 | Canmore > Calgary | Canmore | Calgary |
| Day 5 - May 29 2025 | Calgary > Vancouver, Crystal Mall, Aberdeen Square, Aberdeen Centre | Calgary | Vancouver |
| Day 6 - May 30 2025 | Parker Place, Main Street, Chinatown, Gastown, Shipyards Night Market | Vancouver | Vancouver |
| Day 7 - May 31 2025 | Richmond Public Market, Vancouver Aquarium, Richmond Night Market | Vancouver | Vancouver Airport |
| Day 8 - May 31 2025 | Vancouver > Calgary > Edmonton, Vancouver Airport, Lilac Festival | Vancouver Airport | Edmonton |
Thursday, May 29 2025 (Day 5)
My plane right with Flair Airlines was scheduled for 11am at the Calgary airport, so I was up bright and early. Not that early though, it was 8:30 am by the time I left my Airbnb and past 9 by the time I reached the airport. However, I had already done checkin the night before (and gotten an aisle seat, my favourite, via “random selection”), and security clearance for domestic flights took all of 5 minutes. I was into the airside area by 9:37 am. I strongly dislike that Flair Airlines did not have a machine that I could claim a physical copy of my boarding pass at though. I like physical copies of those things, not digital ones. Oh well.
In return, I actually committed a little crime today. I had noticed two things while packing the night before. Firstly, my bottle of sunscreen was 120 mL, whereas the maximum allowed bottle size for liquids, aerosols, and gels was 100 mL. To get around this I removed the entire label from the bottle and hoped they didn’t look too closely. Secondly, I didn’t have a resealable plastic bag to keep them in, but the security lady at the front of the screening line actually had extra resealable bags that she was giving out, so I got around that part by taking one of those. I then partially concealed the 120 mL bottle behind the label on the resealable plastic bag. Anyway, suffice to say that this worked and my little crime was successful. Stupid arbitrary aviation rules.
Ah, how I’ve missed airport gouging prices for things. Check out these shops at Calgary and then Vancouver airports. I certainly did not buy a thing at either place.
The Flair flight from Calgary to Vancouver was pretty much full, but the flight was fast and I had my preferred aisle seat so time flew by anyway. The F8801 plane started coasting at 11:01 am, lifted off from the runway at 11:25 am after realizing that it had wings, and touched down on the runway at Vancouver at 11:33 am local time, 1 hour and 8 minutes later.
Vancouver has a much larger Asian community than Edmonton and Calgary combined, and I decided that I was going to go check out some of that in lieu of actually travelling to Japan or China or similar this year. I even Googled for nice places to try Singaporean food at, and got recommended a place in The Crystal Mall in Burnaby, north and east of the airport. I bought a transit card and a daily pass and travelled from the airport north to Vancouver City Centre, walked to the nearby Granville station, and took the train southeast to Metrotown. This building might or might not be around much longer, so I took the opportunity to take yet another picture or two of the Bay building there as I went by it.
Last 4 days!
Upon arriving at Crystal Mall, I saw that it was a circular mall with a straight passage that went through a courtyard in the middle with a weird fountain and statue.
That through passage had side passages branching out from it that curved away to form circular passages that I think eventually connected back up to the main passage on the other side.
There were lots of Asian style shops in there, though at this point they were more business-like, stuff like travel and immigration agencies, computer repair places, florists, gift shops, etc. But eventually I found the part of the mall where the food was. Beneath the food court was a market, which I took a picture of on the way up the escalator:
The food court upstairs looked like this. This called to my soul.
And the Singaporean food stall that was recommended was Ipoh Malaysian Cuisine:
Well, close enough to Singapore, since we’re neighbouring countries. The guy on staff recommended some fried kuay teow or hor fun, Hainanese chicken rice, laksa, or nasi lemak, and of all of them I hadn’t had nasi lemak for the longest time so I tried that instead of one of the more common dishes. That dish looked like this:
And was pretty good, I don’t know about the weird coloured rice but the curry in particular was on point. I liked it. I wish I had more time here to try all the other dishes. There was a Metrotown Hilton connected to the Crystal Mall and that would have been a great place to stay at so that I could have tried food from multiple stalls here, if only I could afford $400 a day for the hotel.
After the meal, I walked around the market area below for a bit. I absolutely love the pungent smell of Chinese spice stores, even though I have no idea what any of those spices are or how they could be used. I took a number of pictures here to try to capture the variety of shops in the market, which was very much like something one could find in a multitude of East and Southeast Asian markets.
I took a bus, then a train, then another bus over to my Airbnb in Richmond from there. Vancouver definitely has a lot of areas where you need at least 2 transfers to get from place to place, so the day pass that I had bought from the airport (station which had a $5 premium, but all tickets from there do, even the single use ones) seemed worth it. And according to my calculations at the end of the day, the day pass ($16.50 with the airport premium, but usually $11.50) did save me quite a bit in travel costs, especially since I travelled between Zones 1 and 2 in Vancouver several times. (The zones are an annoying division of the train routes into basically low fare and high fare areas, and it’s dumb. Apparently buses are not affected by this zoning.)
My Airbnb host was still at work or something when I reached the place, so I let myself in with a PIN code and put down my bags. I had almost cancelled this place because they had an effective curfew of 9:30 pm or so which was not listed on the public Airbnb listing, because they said that the shower was only available to use between 7 am and 9:30 pm and I was worried that that would mess up my intent to visit the night markets. I decided to stay in the end though since I already had four places that cancelled on me (even though I had that Vrbo voucher that I could have used to get a motel room or something — but by this point everything was super pricey), and since the host eventually adjusted the “curfew” to be fine as long as I was done using the bathroom by 10:30 pm. I figured that this would only possibly affect Friday night anyway — tonight was Thursday and there was no night market, so I did not plan to be out and about after dinner. There were two markets on Friday, but I could also just visit one of them on Saturday as well, the night that I was planning to spend overnight in the airport anyway.
My room in the house looked like this:
And the view out the window:
It was just a roof, but serendipitously enough it faced the same direction as my Calgary place, and later that night I could also see the crescent moon through the window.
Their bathroom was also super cool, it had a big skylight in the ceiling that illuminated the place during the day and evening. No need for lights most of the day!
The shower was tempting, but for now, I set down my bags and set off again to explore! For the late afternoon into the evening, I took the bus back to the nearest train station, Richmond-Brighouse, and took the train north two stations to Aberdeen to walk around there.
Connected to Aberdeen station was a strata mall called Aberdeen Square. While also an Asian mall, this one felt a lot more Korean with some Chinese touches — a lot of the clothing stores and gift shops were Korean in aesthetic for sure. A number of the shops were closed, and most of the others were open but just quiet as there wasn’t a ton of foot traffic going by. Due to a couple of spice shops in the mall, the entire place smelled so great.
After walking through this place, I walked out and around the building and found that there was another mall right behind it. The names were so similar that I thought it was the same mall at first, but it wasn’t — this one was Aberdeen Centre and it looked much more like a traditional REIT mall.
There was a store here named Mei Jan Hong that was purpotedly selling Singapore jerky, but I didn’t try it as it’s generally too expensive for me to try, only accepted cash which I didn’t have on hand and apparently according to a quick Google search has (or had) a rather unfriendly proprietor (local). I hate no photography rules as a Chronicler of Things. So here’s a photo since that policy isn’t actually stated on a visible sign.
I then found a Japanese tableware shop named Utsuya-no-Yakata. I liked this shop a lot. I love looking at bowls and plates and always want to buy any pretty ones I see.
A surprise was waiting for me inside though, and it wasn’t actually a piece of tableware. It was this reusable bag:
It was on sale for $17 and the cashier said that it was an import from Japan. But I was shocked because I had the exact same bag:
We shared a laugh over the coincidence and she suggested that I maybe had picked it up when I had been to Japan previously, but I actually remembered that I had picked that one up from Mai Do in San Jose on Nov 10 2021, when I was there on a day trip, and looking back at my notes showed that I had picked it up for $15.26 after tax. I also reversed searched for it online and found it on sale at another Vancouver store called Murata (local) for $12 anyway. I do really like this bag, it’s been my workhorse reusable bag since the Canadian government ended plastic bag usage in stores and supermarkets, and I was surprised to still see them around and purchaseable so many years after I first bought them. Instead of the same bag, I figured that maybe I’d either stop by that store at some point to see if they have any other patterns in stock so I didn’t have two bags that looked exactly the same, or see if I could order them online once I got home. We’ll see!
Another store in the mall that I spent some time in was called Oomomo, a Japanese home goods and lifestyle store. Apparently there used to be a branch in Edmonton but it no longer exists, at least for now. I loved the place though, and walked around here for probably half an hour, but managed to resist buying anything this time, largely due to a lack of remaining space in my bag.
Edmonton is such a dead market for Asian stores, I swear. Even Calgary has a large branch of this store there. We never get anything good.
After leaving that store, and just before leaving the mall, I saw this store, which immediately reminded me of my visit to China. This sort of store is very mainland China to me, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this sort of shop in a mall in any other country (until now), with the exception of Sembawang Shopping Centre in Singapore that one time. That was an indie mall though, and this is a REIT mall like the ones in China.
The store in question lets parents rent a little vehicle that kids can ride around the mall in while the parents do their shopping. Like this!
Finally leaving this mall, I crossed a couple of roads and ended up at a place called President Plaza. Most of the stores in it, including a food court, were already closed though.
However, that one store over in that last screenshot above that was still open, was an interesting one. It was called Rolife:
And it’s a store that makes miniatures and dollhouse figures and props and such. I learnt of the brand due to a store in Southgate that used to stock these products, and I liked them quite a bit except for the little bubblegum thing that all their characters have in front of their mouths. It’s apparently their signature thing, but I dislike those and it always completely ruined the aesthetic for me. However, it was still neat to randomly run across one of their actual stores. While I don’t like their characters, their miniaure houses are very nice, and if I ever find a house I plan to have a room or shelf that contains miniatures based around Asian restaurants and food places, and will probably pick up a couple of Rolife’s offerings for that too.
But again, nothing for now since my bag has limited space left. I walked on a bit further and found a Yaohan store. Yaohan is a name that’s very familiar to me from Singapore, as they own large stores like this there too.
Oddly though, in Singapore, they were a supermarket and departmental store, and here.. it was just a building that they owned and that was named after them, with no actual Yaohan store inside. Instead, there was an Osaka Supermarket on the ground floor, which is a chain that I’m fairly sure does not actually exist in Osaka (and is apparently owned by T&T Supermarket):
And upstairs there were some small stores squirreled away in places where no one will ever find them:
But downstairs, there was also a huge food court:
Mostly if not fully Chinese, and with some strange stores like this herbal tea one with very high prices that I’ve never seen even at any other Chinese food court:
Anyway I had my dinner at a stall named Chopstick Express:
My dish was stir-fried noodles with lamb and cilantro, and it was decent and spicy (though I still added my own chilli sauce).
I walked to the nearby train station after that, not Aberdeen where I had disembarked earlier but Capstan, the station north of that. I was listening to the end of the Edmonton Oilers game on 880 CHAD AM radio station as they closed out their Western Conference Finals against the Dallas Stars, and that broadcast accompanied me and made the time pass quickly as I took the train and then bus home, retracing the route I had taken to get here.
I finally met my Airbnb host once I got home, as well as her teenage daughter, and she showed me around and told me how to use the water filter set up next to their sink to get clean water. I then took a shower and called it a night, hiding in my room to catch up on my blogging while listening to my night time Twitch channels that were now offset by one hour due to time zones, and then abruptly falling asleep in the very comfortable bed!