Vancouver

Earlier this week, I chanced upon an opportunity to take advantage of an all expense-paid trip to Vancouver. The occassion was a job interview. The company flew me in and put me up at the Hyatt downtown for two nights. I took advantage of my brief time there to explore the city.

Vancouver is hemmed in by mountains to the north and water to the west. This allows for scenic views but makes it difficult to expand. And so the only way to build is up. Vancouver is practically Manhattan-esque in its vertical sprawl, and teal-tinted glass condos dot the skyline. Think City Place x10.





The weather is absurdly mild by Canadian standards. The Pacific has a moderating influence on the climate, so they don't get the ridiculous fluctuations in temperature that we get in Ontario. You can walk at night without a tuque or a scarf or gloves - the temperature rarely dips below freezing. And there's even some greenery... in mid-January!





Vancouver isn't the huge cultural melting pot/immigrant magnet that Toronto is (affluent Hong Kongers aside), and it's reflected in the population which really isn't all that diverse - 2/3 white (WASP) and 1/3 Asian (Chinese). And so you have an economically dynamic city, but also the two most reserved populations in the world sharing the same peninsula... making for a rather quiet, reserved city.



The city has a decidedly upper middle-class, white-collar feel. There doesn't appear to be much heavy industry, and Vancouver is very much a service-oriented, post-industrial economy. Glass condos and office buildings are the order of the day in West Van... which is a lot nicer than Toronto's steel and concrete mix, but it lacks the quaint rustic charm of our Victorian walk-ups.





On the flip side, there's extreme urban poverty to a degree unlike anywhere else in the country. The mild weather attracts a lot of homeless from the rest of the country and homelessness is endemic in this city. The Downtown Eastside, Canada's poorest postal code, is hella sketchy, abound with strung-out drug addicts and pawn shops and a lot of Natives. And while the bums in Toronto are relatively sedated shivering over heat vents, the ones here like to wander around and are more aggressive with the panhandling. One guy almost had me fooled - he told me he was from Viriginia. I asked him what he was doing here on the eve of Obama's inaugural. He told me he voted for Obama, went off on a tall tale of being a lost tourist and needing money for transport, and started pestering me for 10 bucks!







Public transport is decent. They have a Skytrain, resembling the Scarborough RT, that loops around the city. The service is fast and frequent. There are lots of buses, many of which have stops with GPS indicators, and some run along electrical lines akin to our streetcars.





Vancouver is a coffee shop mecca! Downtown Toronto has retail banks and ATMs on its street corners. In Vancouver there are coffee shops. The coffeehouse culture is a staple of the Pacific Northwest, and the Starbucks effect has spilled over from Seattle. There are also many independent coffee shops and coffee chains I'd never heard of.



This is the brown guy's coffee shop.



Fiona, again. I run into this girl at every city I fly to. She's a BC native, moving down to Obamaland next week. What a loss of talent.



The talent in Vancouver is comparable to Toronto. The girls are slightly better looking and slimmer and have that hipster aesthetic going for them. You'd think all the coffee here would make them wired, but they have the same stonefaced, stiff upper lip quality as the ones in Toronto.





The "James look" is very trendy here - a lot of the guys sport the light hoodie draped with a coat. You can do that here in January and not bust out a North Face jacket to take refuge from -30 windchills. But the guys here seem kind of effete and faggy, lending credence to the rest of the country's perception of Vancouver as a den of pot-smoking hippie homos. And it seems that a lot of guys here still think it's 1991. The grunge scene is still big here in the Pacific Northwest where it started, and there are way too many guys roaming around thinking they're Kurt Cobain - beards, flannel, long stringy hair... The only people with beards in Toronto are bums, Muslims, and that Idomo guy.





One would think the cornucopia of coffee shops would make this city ripe for Day Game, but Vancouver still strikes me as a guarded, reserved city - not the sort of place one can strike up a conversation with a stranger. It lacks the upbeat quality of Sydney, the joie de vivre of Montreal, and the folksiness of St. John's. It's a lot like... Toronto, but more relaxed and mellowed out.

More pics here.