granville island

Hi everyone!

Yesterday, I went to Granville Island with my aunt, who is visiting from Australia, and my sister, Orla. 

Right now, Vancouver is in the middle of a crazy heat-wave (seriously, like 30 degrees Celsius) so it started off as a good day and rapidly went downhill past 1pm. So, a lot of my photos were taken when we first arrived. I also took all the pictures on my new phone because the camera is pretty good! It's an LG G3, which is kind of a nobody phone (as in, nobody seems to have it.)

Recently, I have been ultra obsessed with France and French things. To the point that it's probably getting annoying to the people around me. One of my New Year's resolutions was to learn French but it wasn't until April that I really started to read and learn about the French lifestyle. 

So, for lunch, I suggested that we eat like the French and buy a baguette from this baker's and buy cheese from one of the stalls and share it while listening to the guy play the accordion outside. We also got a Polish sausage but that isn't French so we won't talk about it. 

The only thing missing was wine, but we still had a good time. 

To get to Granville Island, we took the mini ferry that goes across. It's cheap and costs $3.25 per person.

We got it from English Bay and I have never noticed how blue the water is there! For everyone outside of Vancouver, English Bay is right next to Stanley Park and they are both pretty central and busy spots in Vancouver. 

The pictures are back to front, but this was us walking to the ferry. The route we took meant we had to walk past all the shops we would normally spend the whole day. Of course, the day you can't go in, it seems like everywhere has sales on. 

Well, I hope you liked some of the pictures. I should be taking more pictures now considering the nice weather and the storage amount on my new phone. I'm also down to only 1 class at uni, which is on Mondays. I also got a new job but I've only actually been working weekends until now, so though the summer I think I'll have a lot of spare time. I suppose we'll see if I use it to blog or sleep!

1669 Johnston Street, Vancouver

simple banana bread recipe

I can't believe it's June, can you? I feel like summer will never come and yet we are pretty much halfway through the year. I just wanted to say that but the rest of the post has nothing to do with time and how slow it passes.

Today, I wanted to share an easy banana bread recipe with you which we make pretty often in our house. This recipe was passed down from my mum and it's fail-proof (because I can do it, ha!).
You can use this as a base recipe and add things into it like chocolate chips or dried fruit or whatever else you think might work -- but I don't normally add things because we don't have stuff like that lying around the house. Tough life is mine.

I also converted the measurements from ounces to cups (to make it easier for us in America) and, let me tell you, it took such a long time -- more than it should have. I can't do math to save my life. Anyway, enjoy!

Ingredients

1 cup self-raising flour

5/8 cup sugar

2 eggs

1/4 cup butter

2 mashed bananas

Method

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Cream together sugar and butter, add flour, and eggs and then add the bananas.

3. Put in greased pan and bake for one hour.

- 

Iona

19

Happy 19th birthday to me!

I can now legally drink in Canada which is fun, so I am going downtown Vancouver on the weekend. Fun fact: I havent tried alcohol before. Okay that's a bit of a lie, I have had a couple sips of cider.

I don't know, through school I just never really had the chance. That's what happens when you have under 5 friends, I guess!

My aunt from Australia is over visiting, which is fun. We hardly ever get visitors so it's always nice when we do. That's really the only downside to living in Canada -- we don't have any family. Although that's also a positive sometimes, haha.

I hope you are all having a great Wednesday!

- Iona