The best, cutest and most lovable dogs in the whole world!

Smokey (left) and Tux (right).

The Venneri sister's do Robson St. with style!

Thursday night my sister, Jackie, jumped on a plane in Toronto and 5 hours later jumped off in Vancouver! Tom & I went to the airport to pick her up, which turned out to be harder than we thought...firstly, there was no where to stop at Arrivals, so Tom had to drive around in circles until I found Jackie and got her suitcase (which she checked) and, secondly, she changed her hair colour once again. So while I was looking for a brown with blond highlighted curly head, a girl with brown reddish straight hair head was standing in front of me waving - oops! Once we got the massive suitcase and found Tom driving by we were on our way to a late dinner (8:30pm). We went to a restaurant around the corner from our place called Rugby Bar and Grill and ironically, out of all places in Vancouver, Jackie had been to just this past summer with her Air Canada crew - how weird!!!

Friday, we headed over to Robson St. for some shopping! First things first: we needed boots. It was pouring rain and the first 30cm of our pants were soaked. So we headed over to Coach to check out their galoshes. Unfortunately they didn't have any in our size so we opted for the winter boots which would probably be more handy on the east coast anyway. As we left the store, we realized how funny we must have looked since we were both wearing our new boots (merci Maman!) and carrying the big Coach bags. We walked the whole Robson St. strip with a few more stops which included Starbuck's, Blenz Coffee House and Mongolian Grill for lunch. We did however have a little shopping splurge of our own: black suede dresses at Danier!!! I saw the add for the dress on sale in the newspaper that morning and I thought it would be perfect for Tom's office Christmas party. Jackie ended up getting the dresses because it was such a great deal and a beautiful dress! Now all I have to buy are shoes....
That night we went out for a sushi dinner where Jackie learned an important fact: always keep antihistamines in your purse. Althought Jackie was ranting and raving about Vancouver sushi, turns out she only like California rolls with real crab and avocado rolls (Jackie!!!). The funnier part is after her first avocado roll she realized - oops! I'm allergic to these avocados!!! Hence the antihistamines in her purse fact. Too funny.

Saturday we had the most rain we had yet seen since we moved to Vancouver so unfortunately we couldn't go for the hike we planned. Instead we drove to UBC with a stop at a beach where Jackie touched the Pacific, then had lunch downtown and finally ended up at home watching a movie: Friends with Money, drinking wine and being stupid which resulted in Tom getting so annoyed with us that he ended up on the computer with headphones playing video games - poor Tom!

Sunday morning we hung around the apartment, had breakfast and then drove Jackie to the airport for her flight back to Toronto. It was too bad the weather was so awful but we had fun nonetheless. Good thing Jackie had already been to Vancouver and got a driving tour from one of the flight attendants that is from here so she didn't miss too much. Hopefully next time she comes it'll be better weather.

We took a lot of pictures of nothing...ok so I may have gone a little too camera happy on our drive downtown on Saturday but at least you get to see what the neighborhood looks like!
PHOTO ALBUM.