Chancouver

In Vancouver there is a store with 218 flavours of ice-cream. Many of them are normal flavours like vanilla, chocolate, and pecan. Others are questionable like wasabi, and cheddar and apple. Still others are crap, like balsamic vinegar, black pepper, and charcoal.

I can't tell you exactly where the store is located, only to say it's opposite a paint factory, which may account for the wide variety of colourful ice-creams.

This store is a fairly useful analogy when it comes to describing the city.

Anybody going into the ice-cream parlour is incredibly excited to be there. You sample the crap flavours, and you buy a scoop of the decent ones. I got a scoop of chocolate-peanut butter.

People in Vancouver are incredibly excited about living in Vancouver. And well they should be. It's got thousands of flavours, usually having to do with sushi. The weather – which, in fact, is not a straight drizzle throughout the winter months – beats the hell out of the rest of Canada. It's richly multi-cultural, and there are things to do.

Of course, coming from Powell River where there is absolutely nothing to do, I was just happy to see actual humans wandering around doing actual human-type things. The thought of sitting in a café made me very emotional in terms of it's high activity value.

Here are some things I did:

The Vancouver aquarium which contains, not only beluga whales, otters, and grumpy-looking fish, but the Northwest's only 4D movie theatre. Now, we've all become accustomed to 3D thanks to Avatar, so what is the fourth dimension in film-watching?

Well, as it turns out, it's a theatre that lulls you into a false sense of security, then suddenly attacks you with gadgetry. Someone tweaked a 17 minute clip of a BBC documentary to make it 3D. The theatre was then rigged with automated gadgets timed to squirt you with water when a whale exhales through it's blow-hole, whip your ankle when an octopus strikes, and pokes you in the kidney when an anemone gobbles a fish. I had a hard time focusing on the show because I was in a state of tense fear waiting to be zapped with 50 volts every time an eel moved across the screen. It's one of those ideas that seem great in theory, but ends up scaring the crap out of you in practice. Having to clean off your 3D glasses with your shirt because you've just been sprayed in the face with water is a little counter-intuitive in my books.

There is also the newly re-opened Museum of Anthropology, which could also be called "Hall of Elaborate Masks and a Few Weapons that Maoris Used to Brain People".

Also there is cross-country skiing on Cypress Mountain. An excellent place to wobble on skis while being repeatedly lapped by a fit guy wearing a body-condom.

Being a bit arty I also checked out the Vancouver Art Gallery – or VAG, –located in downtown Vancouver. Being new to the VAG I wasn't sure what to expect. I discovered that most of the VAG is empty aside from lots and lots of Emily Carr. Being a fan of abstract and surrealist art I wasn't particularly impressed. All the other artists featured seemed to be from BC featuring installations about BC. Which is fine; I get it, you love being here, and we should too. What was most interesting to me is that I counted the word "banal" about a dozen times in the little description plaques beside the pieces. Usually it had to do with the artist choosing a "banal" or "mundane" subject to show the "normalcy" of day-to-day existence in an "ordinary" context. I couldn't help thinking, with that sort of thing happening outside the VAG for free, why pay to get in? Mocking aside, though, the VAG was a nice experience. Particularly cool was a life-sized baleen whale skeleton done entirely with lawn chairs.

I also saw a beautiful woman take a crap in an alley-way, but I'm not sure it was an exhibit.

I attended a musical called Debt. It was nice to see a performance by professionals in close quarters. The singing was bearable, but the show was beleaguered by the very un-musical recitation of economic theory by a fatuous over-actor. I believe the show focused on debt in a Vancouver context, but early on I became distracted by one particular performer's magnificent legs and missed a large part of the plot.

Despite the fact that most of the population of the city is stoned all of the time it is a healthy city. People generally tuck in at 9pm so that they can get a start jogging at 5 the next morning. It is a rule abiding city. Everyone pays close attention to the cross-walk signals, and are easily duped when someone like me comes along and flagrantly ignores them.

I recall standing with a group of people at a cross-walk waiting for the light to change. I looked up and down the street, didn't see a car, so I proceeded across. Everyone followed me. Then I stopped because I saw a car approaching. Everyone behind me stopped. I turned around, cut through the confused melee, and returned to the corner. There was some milling about in the middle of the road and then everyone followed me back. No eye contact was exchanged amongst us. Not even sheepish.

A friend tells me that Vancouver was a very pedestrian city. This is no longer the case. . . On second thought maybe Vancouver is walking-friendly, but because no one knows how to drive (possibly because they are stoned) the normal rules for pedestrian right-of-way become moot.

This is a slightly scary concept when you consider that every single person in Vancouver has a car. This can be illustrated by the commuter lane (which only requires one passenger to qualify) being practically empty while the other two lanes of HWY 1 are parking lots. The movement during rush-hour in these lanes is so scant I find it hard to believe that anyone goes home when they've finished work. I suspect they park on the highway (one of the only places you can park without getting hassled) and then turn their cars around the next morning to head back into the city.

Except back-tracking in Vancouver is like trying to return to your spot at an AC/DC concert after you've gone for a beer.

While I was house-sitting in North Vancouver – the part of Vancouver containing white people – I had access to a car. I decided to head a short distance down the road to pick up some food from a drive-thru. My attire was unfit for a long sojourn. On my way back to the house, perhaps five minutes away, I missed a poorly indicated merge and found myself on a long bridge heading into Vancouver proper. Immediately my highway instincts kicked in and I tried to determine where to get off and use that information to go back the way I came. Undeterred by the lack of on-ramps corresponding to the off-ramps I pulled off on a promising street. I believe it was Pender, or possibly Hastings. Not that it mattered because when I got off the highway I promptly found myself stuck in a Gordion knot with no means of escape. Cursing and sweating I did an eventual U-turn and the highway had disappeared.

It turns out there is one major highway in Vancouver. Sadly it is nowhere near Vancouver. It starts on the North Shore and barely brushes the centre before abruptly turning east. To further complicate things Vancouver is criss-crossed with rivers, inlets, and estuaries with very few means of crossing them.

Now, not only was I far from North Vancouver and all it's white people, but I wasn't sure if I had just gotten off a highway in the first place. Not only that, but signs were telling me that I was in some place called "Burnaby". In the end, a trip that should have taken 5 minutes took 2 hours.

People familiar with Vancouver will read this, chuckle smugly, and say, "Oh, I see what you did there." And you probably do. But for a city that's inviting the world to come see it's games, having M.C. Escher design your streets and putting up vague and confusing road-signs seems a little like smacking the audience in the head when they enter the circus tent. Also, choosing about six different names – aside from provinces, and numbers – to call all the streets in the GVA is confusing and somewhat cruel for the uninitiated.

I don't know how many "Main Streets" I saw, but it immediately seemed like too many considering not even Ottawa doubles up on street names.

For the most part I lived on Alberta St. Alberta St. is parallel to Yukon St., which in turn is parallel to Columbia, Manitoba, and Ontario streets. You see where this is going? These are provinces in the dominion of Canada. There is a even a Quebec street. A clever naming-scheme as any. And you can almost ignore the fact that there are no PEI, Nova Scotia, or Newfoundland and Labrador streets. That's fair, the Rockies are high and it's difficult to perceive existence that far Eastward. But no Saskatchewan street? But they're so close! Practically on your doorstep, and far closer than Quebec.

The message here is clear; while BC laughs at some provinces, they find others too hysterical to even mention. Particularly the flat ones.

Ethnically Vancouver is as diverse as Hong Kong. As a matter of fact, perhaps Vancouver is Hong Kong. Whole portions of the city is entirely in Cantonese. The other ethnic groups include South Asian, and people from Port Coquitlam. I counted 8 black people, which hardly qualifies as a "group"… More of a "session".

Regardless, everyone was very healthy-looking and shiny. Even the homeless people looked okay. It was easy to find them, because, when they aren't all congregating around Main and Hastings, they can be found giving life-lessons in front of the London Drugs. Here are some life-lessons I received:

"Hey man, can you spare some change?"

"Why are you all dressed in black?"

"Man, you gots to feel it happen."

"It's a beautiful day, get your smile out."

And, "Your face! Your face! Heeeeragh!"

I'm still not sure why they all gather at Main and Hastings, but I got the distinct feeling of a corral.

Port Coquitlam, by the way, is very much like an old, better-looking Kanata. It is where they filmed the latest Twilight movie and nobody there is embarrassed about it. It also seems to be common policy to swerve at pedestrians in it's suburbs when they wear stupid hats.

Speaking of stupid hats, there is also a proliferation of hipsters in Vancouver. These are the skinny, hairy, ironic-handle-bar-moustache, tight-pant wearing denizens of a sub-culture that severely needs to have their faces adjusted. Luckily they all congregate around Davie St. so can easily be found for beatings.

It's hard to find bitter people in an ice-cream parlour with 218 flavours to choose from. Similarly it's hard to find bitter people in Vancouver. On a scale from Rage to Joy most Vancouverites hover around Smug. Mostly people there are just plain nice. Ignoring my natural distrust of utterly nice people there is an element of the Davidian Cult going on. Of course, they have a lot to be nice about. The city sits in the shadow of many glorious mountains which can be seen on a clear day. Practically everywhere you go in the city affords you a breath-taking view of old-growth forest and the glassine towers of the downtown core. The modestly named Seymour Creek gushes green water through a crevasse in which kayakers furiously stroke in the middle of January.

It is definitely an outdoorsy city. Vancouver begs to be walked, biked, paddled, skied, rolled, swam, waddled, and limped. Which begs the question; if practically nobody is ever in their house why is the real-estate so damn expensive? That's the thing. They've designed the city so that new-comers find it impossible to get out again, yet living there is like living in Manhattan while working at the 7-Eleven. This is a real downer if you've gone in blind trying to find work

As a friend put it, "There must be millions of millionaires." Personally, with all the houses, I couldn't figure out where everyone worked.

I say, let the nature reclaim the land and give all the Vancouverites massive Mountain Equipment Co-op backpacks stuffed with tents, sleeping-bags, and hibachi stoves. They'll be fine. Trust me.

It's also a city buzzing with human life and activity – until 9pm. I didn't really get a bead on the nightlife in Vancouver; either because I was belting out My Way in a karaoke bar, transfixed by the enormous busts on some mannequins in a shop window on Granville, or stuffing my face with pizza near Robson – sometime all three at the same time. I did see nightlife in Port Coquitlam thanks to some dear old and new friends. Nightlife in "PoCo" consist of a bar called "The Fox and the Fiddle".

Sitting here, with a perforated ear drum, and a brutal cold, (A friend asked me today how my cold was doing. I said, it's doing great, very successful, it's kicking my ass) it's easy for me to be bitter about the place. . . What? Who am I kidding? That's my modus operandi, I'm bitter about every place. But here's the thing. I'm really not. Vancouver is pretty damn cool. Even with a black cloud hanging over my head when I got there I could still appreciate the city for being great. I had the benefit of some very good friends and family to show me around and get me to the heart of the thing. I think to myself, "Would I have liked it as much without them?" The answer is yes, but I wouldn't nearly have had as much fun.

See? Just like and ice-cream parlour with 218 flavours to choose from.