Right then, let’s talk VCON

userinfosolarbird and I love us some Vancouver, and we hadn’t been up there since going to see my beloved B’ys last year for the Olympics show–so we were sorely wanting even the slightest excuse to scamper up there for the weekend. VCON handed us that excuse in spades. It turned out that the convention was great fun in its own right, and assuming I have enough spare vacation time next year, we are totally coming back.

I took this past Friday off from work so that we could go up on the morning train, which required us to get up at stupid-o’clock. This would have been easier if I hadn’t had to work for four hours on Thursday night, and if I hadn’t had to spend most of the train ride up working on this year’s employee review–but even given that, and even given that we were operating on four hours of sleep, it was still quite nice to roll into Vancouver. We were kind of silly about not planning the arrival better, as we wound up missing an opportunity to go to the HMV earlier than planned. But that was all good. We dropped our stuff off at the hotel and then went right back out again for two Extremely Critical Missions!

One was me going to the HMV in downtown Vancouver, which, as I’ve mentioned in my previous post, is my current Vancouver source for Francophone music. I was disappointed to not find the live Les Charbonniers de l’Enfer DVD, but quite happy to find the Le Vent du Nord Symphonique album! Along with that, as per the recommendation of userinfoscrunchions, I also grabbed En Famille by Mes Aieux, and Dara got herself a Barenaked Ladies album she didn’t have yet. AND! I grabbed the season 1 DVDs for Republic of Doyle. I really hope I like it, because I’m buying it sight unseen here, just to work my way up to Alan Doyle’s guest spots in season 2!

The second, even more critical mission was this: hitting this place for OMG SO VERY, VERY TASTY rosemary and rock salt bagels. Dara bought every single one they had available, which meant thirteen of ’em. Because SO. SO. GOOD. We are given to understand that these are in fact Montreal-style bagels, and that the shop was founded by a guy who brought that style of bagels to Vancouver. This pleases me immensely, because if Dara and I do make it to Montreal during the Trainventure, we now know to expect to find awesome bagels.

Then we settled down to the business of actually attending the convention.

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