PART TWO
Back of the Canadian five dollar bill with young hockey players on it.
The text reads (in French and English): The winters of my childhood were long,
long seasons.
We lived in three places—the school, the church, and the skating rink—but our
real life was in the skating rink.
On the other side of the park is the Main Street SkyTrain station. SkyTrain is Vancouver’s rapid transit system, the world’s largest fully automated railway. The thing works pretty much the same as the driverless trains that shuttle people between terminals at airports all over the world. The big difference is that while most of those serve five or six stops in a relatively small area, SkyTrain serves dozens of stations scattered around various parts of four different cities.
Steve and I were among the first people to ride SkyTrain, which was first built for the world’s fair. At the time I don’t think I realized it was an automated train. It was one of the first places I rode public transit, and mostly it just seemed new. In 1986 it really would have been very advanced technology, and it’s still quite a system even today.
While this was where we got off each day Steve and I went to the fair, Main Street station was completely unfamiliar. In my memory, I pictured Main Street as an underground station (which the rest of the downtown stations are) In fact it’s elevated. I did remember the busy street that separated the station from the fairgrounds. Today the lone remnant left of the fair is Science World, a geodesic dome that looks like a clone of the one at Epcot Center in Orlando. It has served as a children’s museum ever since Expo 86 closed.
SkyTrain was one of the first public transit systems to use proof of payment “honor system” ticketing. When Steve and I rode the train back in ’86, there were always guards in the stations to check that people had in fact bought tickets, so it was not really a surprise to see a guard stationed just beyond the vending machines today. Vancouver’s high tech vending machines are somewhat less complicated than those found in many cities. They seem more prone to malfunctioning, though. Most stations have about half a dozen machines, but it’s rare to find more than about two that are in proper working order. Some might be described as “partially operational” (like they’ll take coins, but not bills or credit cards—or perhaps the other way around), but getting one that does everything as it should is rare.
SkyTrain was apparently extremely expensive to build. Even with a federal grant, the provincial government (which owns the system) spent over a billion dollars on an expansion of the system (the Millennium line, which opened in 2002). However, since there is no human operator, the trains are extremely cheap to run. TransLink, Vancouver’s transit agency, supposedly loses more than a dollar on every bus ride they provide, but they come out more than a dollar ahead on every SkyTrain ride.
Individual fares on Vancouver transit are based on a zone system, and they’re never cheap. A ride within the city limits of Vancouver costs $2.25 (about US$2.30—and the price rose to $2.75 New Year’s day). Rides to Zone 2 or Zone 3 cost between $2.75 and $5, depending on the distance and time of day. The best deal by far is a day pass, which costs $8 and is valid anywhere in metro Vancouver. I put two Canadian $5 bills in the vending machine and got a pass and a “twonie", the Canadian $2 coin that is gold on the inside and silver on the outside.
SkyTrain comes with amazing frequency, roughly every two minutes at most times of day. I’d missed a train while I was buying my pass, but another soon pulled up to the platform. The train was very familiar from my previous trip. They’re boxy plastic cars with rounded edges that date from that era when almond was the color for everything. These days they’re looking more than a little bit dated, but they still run perfectly well, and TransLink has kept them immaculately clean.
While it was mid-afternoon, the train was still fairly crowded. I pushed my way on board with my luggage, and a guard who was inspecting tickets directed me to a seat that was supposed to be reserved for the handicapped. I followed her direction and sat down, even though I was riding just two stops.
The linear induction motors on SkyTrain provide a much smoother ride than you get on most transit systems. There’s no jerking, rattling, or sudden starts or stops. There’s always a slight buzzing and whooshing in the background, but that’s just about the only indication there is that you’re moving.
They’ve revised the announcements on SkyTrain since the time when Steve and I took them. (They had to, since there is an additional line and lots more stations than there used to be.) They’re still given by a recorded female voice, but it seems less artificial than it did all those years ago. The voice announced that the next stop would be Stadium, and then the doors opened. There was a chime, and the doors closed. The chime sounded again and there was a clunk as if the door were trying to close again. Apparently someone had held one of the other doors on the train open, and we couldn’t move until it closed.
Stadium station is right at the entrance to the subway, which runs through what was once a freight tunnel beneath the main downtown area. BC Place Stadium itself is right at the west end of the former Expo 86 grounds. Apparently the stadium (which looks almost identical to the Metrodome in Minneapolis) was built for the fair, but I don’t remember it. The area between Science World and BC Place is all the former fairgrounds. Some of it is still not fully used (it’s mostly parking), but the vast majority has been re-developed into high-rise condominiums. The condos make the area (given the neighborhood name of “False Creek North”) look like the vast majority of Vancouver. Large parts of both the city and the suburbs look remarkably like Chicago’s Gold Coast (the high-rise area east of Wrigley Field) or the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It also looks a lot like pictures you see of Hong Kong or Kuala Lumpur, which makes sense given that virtually all the condos were built by Asian developers.
The disembodied voice announced that the next stop was Granville, and we soon entered the station of that name. I got up, and the guard suggested I use the handicapped exit at the far end of the platform. Since I didn’t particularly want to carry my luggage up multiple staircases, I followed her advice. The station was immaculate, but the elevator—though apparently brand new—had been badly scratched up by vandals.
The bad thing about taking the elevator was that I had no idea whatsoever where I was once I reached street level. Had I taken the normal exit, I’d have come out at the Granville Street Mall, a closed-off street in the heart of downtown that is surrounded by the main shopping district. I’d have just turned left there and walked southward (several blocks) to my hotel. When I exited the elevator I came out at the corner of two streets I hadn’t heard of. It turns out the elevator is at the far north end of Vancouver’s Hudson’s Bay Company department store, though it exits to the street instead of to the store. The Bay was a block further north than it appeared on internet maps I’d checked out beforehand, and being at the far end put me in unfamiliar territory. I ended up circling three-fourths of a city block before I realized just where I was and got properly oriented. I did eventually figure it out, and I headed south down Granville Street.
The subway station was at Granville and Dunsmuir, in the heart of downtown. My hotel was at Howe and Drake, at the far south end of the downtown area. It looked to be about six blocks away on every map I’d checked out. If one just counts properly named streets, that was about the distance. In addition to streets, though, there were lots of alleys—some of which had their own stop lights. I’d estimate it was almost exactly a mile from the station to the hotel. That’s a fair hike, especially when pushing luggage around in the rain.
The luggage was especially annoying because all the sidewalks in downtown Vancouver have a composite paving that seems to be as much gravel as asphalt. I think it’s intentional, trying to give the feel of old-time cobblestones. It wasn’t hard to navigate the luggage on that surface, but as the little wheels rolled on the stones it made enough noise to announce my presence for blocks ahead. I was embarrassed to say the least, but I held my head high and just kept on walking.
Granville Street is one of those places that lets you know you’re not in Kansas anymore. The section right by the subway station features elegant department stores, jewelers, and the like, but as you head southward it rapidly changes to a much more seedy type of business. While pornography is tightly regulated in Canada, they do a land-office business in “romantic” aids and accessories. Store after store after store sold strange battery-operated devices, edible lubricants, anything you could imagine that could be made of rubber, and “intimate” garments for both sexes that are best left to the imagination. The stores are mixed in among “theatres” that are nothing more than bars with “live entertainment” by scantily clad young ladies. I read in the papers that at night prostitution is apparently a big problem on this stretch of Granville. I was never in this area late enough to verify that, but it would certainly be no surprise.
While Granville was amusing, it wasn’t exactly a pleasant street to walk down. Just one block west was Howe Street, which was completely different. Howe is designed for businessmen and tourists. It’s lined with office towers, government buildings, and hotels. While the luggage still rattled unmercifully as I rolled it along, I definitely fit in better here than I did on Granville.
Eventually I made it down to Drake, the final traffic light at the south end of the city. Since much of Granville is a pedestrian mall (and a lot of what isn’t is closed off due to construction of a new subway line), traffic through downtown follows the streets immediately east and west of there, Howe and Seymour. At Drake, most of the lanes of Howe angle off to form the Granville Bridge, which carries traffic down highway 99 (and then Interstate 5) to Seattle. A single lane continues south on Howe from Drake, essentially the first exit ramp off the expressway. My hotel was located on that exit ramp.
Crossing Howe Street to get to the hotel was easier said than done. You can only cross at marked crosswalks in Vancouver, and it became quickly clear that absolutely no one jaywalks here. There was a crosswalk at Drake Street, but the light was definitely timed to give Howe the primary right of way. I waited nearly five minutes before it changed and I could cross.
My home for the next three nights was the Quality Inn at False Creek, which while not as central as I’d thought turned out to be a very nice hotel. Its location was strange, though. The seven-floor building was built on top of a parking garage and next to an office building and an elegant condo tower. It was across the street (or the exit ramp or whatever) from a Best Western and a Travelodge, and within two blocks of both elegant hotels and places that would rent by the either the hour or the month. Immediately to the west was the Canadian headquarters of Ticketmaster. Beyond there was “Davie Village”, Vancouver’s gay district. It was filled with much the same stuff I’d seen on Granville, but geared toward a different clientele. Covenant House, the shelter for runaway youth, was two blocks east, on the other side of the exit complex at Seymour Street (and conveniently close to both the Granville and Davie prostitution zones). Underneath the bridge approach were a self storage service and a taxi company. One night I counted over seventy taxis parked outside their headquarters.
A very pleasant Hispanic woman checked me in efficiently. I was redeeming hotel points for a free room, and I was pleasantly surprised that the reservation had gone through without a hitch. She directed me to a brass-door elevator, and I made my way up to the sixth floor and down the hall to a very pleasant room. The walls of the room were brick (interesting in a relatively new building), and the furnishings were warmly colored wood. An enormous window looked out over the Granville Bridge, the condo towers on the old Expo site, and provided a nice view of the whole downtown area. (I’m glad my room was on the Howe Street side, as the other rooms would have overlooked the narrow alley between the Quality Inn and the Ticketmaster building.) A Southwestern style painting hung on the wall, and the bathroom was tiled in an Indian design.
I took a quick shower and then set out exploring. I walked over to Seymour (northbound highway 99) and made my way northward through the east side of downtown. Most of Seymour seems to be trying hard to gentrify, but it isn’t quite there yet. It has that rough feel you often find on the fringes of downtown. Nothing came across as particularly unsafe, but it wasn’t a place I’d be rushing back to.
I turned east on Pender Street and made my way through Vancouver’s Chinatown. They claim to have Canada’s largest Chinatown, though Toronto made that same claim—and having seen both I’d personally put my money on Toronto’s. There’s a lovely gate at the entrance to Chinatown that is another leftover from the world’s fair. The gate marked the entrance to the Chinese pavilion at Expo 86. I didn’t specifically remember it from the fair, but it certainly fit in well in Chinatown.
Just east of Chinatown is an area I knew ahead of time would be seedy. “Downtown Eastside” is described even by the city of Vancouver itself as “Canada’s largest skid row”. I’d seen L.A.’s skid row (supposedly the world’s largest), and I must say DTES looks very similar to the southeast part of downtown Los Angeles. The century-old buildings here are some of the most architecturally interesting in Vancouver, but the area has been in decline for decades. Today beggars roam the streets and junkies shoot up in the alleys. While this was not at all surprising in a place they called “skid row”, I’d find in the next few days that the same things could actually be found all over Vancouver. Vancouver has just about the mildest climate in Canada (only Victoria, on Vancouver Island, is warmer in winter), so it attracts homeless people from all over the country. It also has the same youth-oriented culture you’d find in Seattle or San Francisco, with correspondingly high rates of drug abuse. Much of the city has the feeling of a ratty college town, and begging and public drug use are among many questionable activities that just seem to be taken for granted here.
I actually had a reason for coming to Downtown Eastside, though things didn’t turn out as I’d planned. I’d hoped to visit the Vancouver Police Museum, which is housed in the former police precinct #1 near Main and Cordova, in the heart of DTES. I found the new police headquarters, but I couldn’t seem to locate the museum. Since it was getting dark and really didn’t care to just wander around aimlessly in such a neighborhood, I decided it would be wise to head back into more civilized environs.
I headed west on Cordova, past several missions with handwritten signs on their doors saying they were full to capacity. I also passed any number of people asking if I could spare a buck or two. The beggars in Vancouver are quite different from the population as a whole. Vancouver overall is young and diverse. About half of Vancouverites are of Asian ancestry (more than half of them first generation immigrants), with Anglo-Canadians (i.e.: whites) second among the ethnic groups. There’s also a surprisingly large number of Hispanic people in Vancouver (something I don’t really think of in Canada), and there are many recent immigrants from eastern Europe and the Middle East. Unlike the city, the beggars are invariably old and white. Pretty much all of them were gray-haired or bald, and every single one of them was Caucasian.
While I didn’t give Vancouver’s homeless any of my money, I was more tempted to do so there than in some other places I’ve been. The “full” signs on the missions were a bit of a shock and made me realize that some of these people really did have no alternative to living on the street. I also know from things I’ve read that there’s an incredible shortage of affordable housing in metro Vancouver. In particular, there is almost no available rental property. Those apartment towers are all condos, for sale starting around half a million dollars. If you can’t afford a down payment, they aren’t available to you.
Just west of Downtown Eastside is the nicely scrubbed and heavily patrolled tourist-oriented neighborhood of Gastown. Gastown was the site of the originally settlement of Granville, the place that was later re-named Vancouver. Quaint brick streets are lined with old buildings that have been re-born as pricey hotels ($200/night minimum), elegant restaurants (entrees starting at $35), imitation British pubs, and countless gift shops. I didn’t buy a thing here, but it was interesting to see.
I made my way to Waterfront Station, an elegant old train station that now serves as the downtown terminal for SkyTrain and also for commuter trains that run out to the distant suburbs (like Maple Ridge, where Steve and I camped when we went to Expo). I made my way down to the subway and boarded an eastbound train. It was rush hour now, and I was glad to have boarded at the terminal. By the time we got back to Granville the train was packed with people heading home from work.
SkyTrain runs on an elevated guideway from the old Expo grounds through eastern Vancouver and on into the suburbs of Burnaby and New Westminster. It then crosses the Fraser River on “SkyBridge”, the world’s longest transit-only bridge, a cable stay structure that looks a lot like the new Mississippi River bridge at Burlington. South of the Fraser is Surrey, the same place where I had crossed the border into Canada. This part of Surrey is very different than the part down by the border, though. With over 400,000 people Surrey is the second largest city in British Columbia (trailing only Vancouver itself), and its central area comes across as more “city” than suburb. I exited at Surrey Centre station, in the middle of a sea of office towers and condo towers. I walked a couple blocks south and came out at Central City Mall, which occupies the first floor of the vertical campus of Simon Fraser University.
I had read that the Surrey Centre area was not particularly safe, and I’d see later on TV that Surrey as a whole had the highest crime rate in all of Canada in 2007. The walk from the station to the mall was uneventful, though, with the biggest danger being icy sidewalks. Being inland, Surrey is just slightly colder in winter than Vancouver proper, so what was rain back at my hotel was mixed snow and ice out here.
I spent quite a bit of both time and money in Central City Mall. The main place I went was Zellers, the down-market cousin of Hudson’s Bay Company. Most Zeller’s stores were at one time K-Marts, though the feeling the stores have is more like Target. I bought another set of headphones so I could use my Walkman on the way home, and I also picked up the DVD of The Simpsons Movie which I’d asked for but hadn’t gotten for Christmas. They had a sale on underwear, so I picked up some shorts. I also got some Sesame Sticks candy. When Margaret and I were making Christmas cookies and candy while we were snowed in, one of the recipes we ran across was for this very product, which is basically a brittle of sesame seeds in hard candy syrup. It’s apparently a Polish delicacy, and I’d enjoy snacking on it on the train trip home. When I checked out the cashier (a young man from somewhere in south Asia) scoffed at my Visa card and pointed out that I could save almost $15 with a “Club Zed” card. He was quite upset that I didn’t apply for one, and I wondered what commission he got on those applications.
I went back to the SkyTrain station and caught an inbound train. I re-crossed the river and went back a few stops to a very familiar station, Metrotown. Metrotown was the station where Steve and I boarded SkyTrain each day we went to the world’s fair. At the time it was near the end of the line, and it was a park-and-ride we could get to fairly easily.
I could pretend that the station looked familiar (though it was about as generic of a transit station as you’d find anywhere), but nothing else about the Metrotown area was remotely similar to how it was in ’86. In my travelogue about the world’s fair I described parking in a patch of gravel in the middle of some run-down warehouses. The Metrotown neighborhood I saw on this trip could not be more different than that description. Vancouver has been big to push what they call transit-oriented development, meaning housing and commercial development within walking distance of the various SkyTrain stations. Metrotown was the first and has grown into the largest of these developments. The center of the Metrotown complex today is “The Metropolis at Metrotown”, the largest shopping mall in British Columbia (and one of the ten largest in the world). Surrounding the mall are numerous condo towers and office towers, one of which houses the regional government for metropolitan Vancouver. The towers line Kingsway and Willingdon, the two major streets in the area and continue over to Patterson, the next SkyTrain station to the west.
Metrotown is in Burnaby, the third largest city in British Columbia. (The capital city of Victoria, by the way, ranks fifth in the province.) Metro Vancouver includes only about a dozen separate places, but most of them are bigger than Des Moines. “City” is also an ill-defined term here, since the primary government is regional. While there is a Vancouver city council (that can be rather fascist with its “politically correct” ordinances), most things that affect people’s lives (like zoning and taxes) apply the same throughout the Lower Mainland region.
I made my way through the skywalk that connects Metrotown station with the mall. I found a directory and pondered what route I might take past the 400+ stores on the premises. My first stop was at a Hallmark store where I picked up a bunch of postcards. My brother Steve likes postcards, and since it would be dark and dreary most of the time I was in Vancouver, I figured postcards would give me a better memory of the scenery than any pictures I might take.
Next I went to a little stand in the middle of the hallway called Gelato Fiasco. It’s not hard to figure out they served gelato, that smooth Italian ice cream. For $3 (plus 14% tax) I had a small dish of kiwifruit gelato that was awesome. After dessert I went for a “real” dinner—much needed, since I really hadn’t eaten since morning. I decided to compare the chicken kabobs served at two different places in what they bill as “the world’s largest food court”. The first was Nando’s, the South African chain Margaret and I had eaten at in London. Nando’s serves chicken marinated in a spicy sauce made from peri-peri peppers that are native to Mozambique. For $8 I got a chicken kabob, rice, and a can of orange drink. I wasn’t really full, so I also went to Opa!, a Greek food chain based in Calgary that apparently just opened a branch at the Mall of America in Minneapolis. I parted with $7 more and got another chicken kabob (this one much less spicy), together with a Greek salad and pita chips (a slab of pita bread that had been fried on a grill and then cut into quarters). Nando’s kabob was definitely superior, but the side dishes were better at Opa!. The Greek salad was mainly tomato and green pepper cubes, with olives and just a few shreds of lettuce thrown in. It was topped with feta cheese and served with a very tangy vinaigrette. The pita chips were also excellent, much better than Nando’s tasteless rice.
After thoroughly stuffing myself (and parting with the equivalent of $17.50 in American money, including tax), I did a bit more shopping. I went to the Metrotown location of the Bay, where I bought a shirt and tie. The two items definitely didn’t go together. While the shirt came with cuff links, it was very much a casual shirt (they described it as “club wear”—as in to wear on a date at a night club). I wouldn’t really have gotten the tie at all, except that they were having a sale on all their clearance merchandise where in addition to 40% off the lowest clearance price on the shirt, I could also get any clearance item of equal or lesser value free. After scouring the entire store, the tie was the only other thing that remotely appealed to me.
Next I went to Chapters, which is Canada’s answer to Border’s or Barnes and Noble. It’s an enormous bookstore that has no problem with people drinking coffee, socializing, and reading books without buying them. I bought a calendar I’ve got out at school and a CD they were pushing by two twins who were apparently the winners in Canada’s answer to American Idol. I also picked up a tube of chocolate covered cherries. These weren’t the chocolate cherries I normally think of. Instead of soft, creamy centers, these were dried cherries covered in dark chocolate—sort of like elegant raisinettes. They were different, but really quite good.
My final stop was at The Loonie Bin. This was a dollar store, as “loonie” is the nickname for Canada’s dollar coin. While all I bought there was more postcards, it was interesting to sift through all the junk they had on display.
It was shopping at Metrotown that gave me the title for this travelogue. All the stores, both here and throughout Vancouver, were having “Boxing Week Sales”. Boxing Day is, of course, traditional British usage for the day after Christmas. Here, though, they were extending the celebration from the Feast of St. Stephen all the way through New Year’s. Even newscasters used the term “boxing week”—and not just in stories about shopping, but in anything that referred to the final week of December.
I had used most of the $50 in Canadian cash I’d gotten at MSP airport last summer, so it was time to re-stock my funds. I found a Bank of Montreal ATM on the lower level of the mall, beneath the food court. The ATM asked several more questions than its American counterparts, but I eventually got four crisp $20 bills without a problem. As a bonus, even though the machine said a $3.50 fee could be assessed to “non-Canadian cardholders”, when the transaction went through my account was debited for just $81.60, precisely the exchange rate of US$1.02 per Canadian dollar.
$1.02 was the official exchange rate, though stores were most often accepting U.S. currency at a discount of $1.10. Either of those rates is dramatically different than what the U.S./Canadian exchange has been in recent years. The CBC ranked the parity of the Canadian and U.S. dollars as their biggest news story of 2007, and given that the loonie was worth only 70¢ a few years back, that’s a huge leap. As the world’s second largest oil producer, Canada’s currency is closely tied to energy prices. Expectations are it will continue to soar unless the Canadian government takes steps to lower it (which they may, as Canadian industries like auto plants are suffering greatly as their products become unaffordable in the States).
Canadian money has changed a bit since the last time I was up north (and quite a bit since that trip Steve and I made out to Vancouver). There are only three bills in common circulation in Canada today—worth $5, $10, and $20. Fives are blue, tens are purple, and twenties are green. The twenty has a not too outdated picture of Queen Elizabeth, while the other bills feature early prime ministers of Canada. The back of the five shows kids playing hockey, the ten shows the Peace Arch on the B.C./Washington border along Interstate 5, and the twenty shows a native wooden sculpture that happens to be housed in Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology. (Having two of the three scenes being from the Vancouver area was interesting to me.) The back of each bill also features literary quotes from Canadian authors in both English and French. The only poem you’re likely to recognize is “In Flanders Field” which accompanies the Peace Arch on the $10 bill. The bills are extremely high tech, with holographic foil strips running along them in addition to all the microprinting and watermarks you’d expect on modern money.
Since $5 is the smallest bill, you get a lot of change in Canada. The pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters are essentially the same as they’ve always been—the same size, color, and shape as their American equivalents, but made of lighter metals. The Queen appears on the front of all those coins, and various wildlife (a maple leaf, a beaver, a moose, etc.) grace the back. These days the main Canadian coins are the “loonie” and “twonie", worth $1 and $2 respectively. The loonie is more or less identical to the U.S. golden dollar coins (though calling the fake brass “gold” is quite a stretch in either country), while the twonie is quite similar to the bimetal two euro coin I’d seen in France and Spain. Unlike other places where high value coins are common, I will give Canada credit that the stores always seem to have sufficient change. I still don’t like having a pocket full of valuable coins, but at least the system seems to work in Canada.
There was a bit of commotion as I exited the mall. A private security guard (such people are everywhere in the Vancouver area) was in the process of kicking some high school kids out of the mall. The young people were white, and the guard was south Asian. One of the girls shouted at the guard as they left, “You’re just _____ racist, you _____! You won’t even let us _____ sit in the ____ mall.” (It’s President Nixon’s birthday as I write this, so I’ve properly deleted all the expletives.) “I’m not kicking you out because I’m racist,” responded the guard. “It’s because you’re swearing and being all weird.” The kids were indeed “all weird”, though not all that different from most other high school kids that way. That they were cursing up a storm put them right in line with most of Vancouver, too. I thought I’d heard a lot of blue language in London, but that was mild compared to Vancouver. Almost everywhere I went people were swearing, as if that were just the ordinary thing everybody should do.
The vulgar kids and I made our way to the SkyTrain station. As we neared the entrance another guy who had just gotten off the train called out to the group and asked if he could trade something (I forget what) for a cigarette. That was no surprise either, as everyone of every age seems to smoke in Vancouver. (…And at eight bucks a pack, it’s probably what makes some people homeless.) The kids made their trade, but when he got the cigarette, the boy complained “it’s _____ wet. That’s _____ disgusting!”
I hopped aboard a train and rode to Burrard, one stop further downtown than Granville. Burrard was actually just slightly further from my hotel than Granville, but I’d soon find the walk from there was much more pleasant. While there were a number of beggars on Burrard, they were relatively tame. Burrard Street is full of civic institutions—churches, schools, libraries, and hospitals. Many of these were decorated for the holidays, and the lights were really pretty as I walked down the street at night. Two decorated objects particularly stood out. One was an enormous hospital that had apparently had a drive where cancer survivors or the relatives of victims could donate lights to their display. The other was a construction crane that was working on a building that was at least thirty stories high. The crane was all decked out in Christmas lights, a towering glow over the city. I turned off Burrard at Davie Street, a block and a half north of the hotel. I mentioned earlier the “Davie Village”, and the gay bars were certainly hopping on Friday night. I had no desire to frequent any bar—gay or straight—so I just walked on past.
Back at the hotel I spent most of the evening watching Canadian TV. The hotel had very comprehensive cable service, so I had a wide variety of options. Government regulations require that a set percentage (something like 80%) of all programming on Canadian cable systems to be “Canadian content”. They show the big U.S. broadcast networks (here the Seattle stations), but not most of the American cable networks. Instead they have Canadian clones of those networks. Some of the programs are the same (just as we air programs produced in other countries on our TV networks), but much of it is produced in Canada in the style of programs that air south of the border. I watched Canadian clones of the weather channel, the food network, and the Discovery channel as well as the news on CBC. I also found two channels that programmed exclusively in Chinese and one each in French and Spanish. It was quite late when I finally turned off the TV, but it made for an interesting evening.
I was up fairly early today and took advantage of the time difference to call Margaret back in Iowa, where it was already mid-morning. After chatting a bit I walked down to Burrard station and bought another day pass. I didn’t want to use transit immediately, but the stations were the only places I knew where I could buy a pass. (Apparently some convenience stores and drugstores also sell them, but they sure don’t advertise the fact.)
I next walked down Robson Street, which is the place to shop in Vancouver. (Actually, I’d bet Metrotown does quite a bit more volume, and the two places sell pretty much the exact same merchandise. Robson has that “Rodeo Drive” or “Fifth Avenue” reputation, though.) I walked down several shopping streets in Vancouver, and it was interesting to see the contrast between the commercial streets and the surrounding residential areas. As I’ve mentioned before, almost all of the residences in central Vancouver are very new high-rises. Strangely, though, the shops are mostly in one- or two-floor buildings that date from the middle of the last century. Robson looks much like a small town Main Street, but it’s surrounded by apartment towers. Most of the other commercial streets in Vancouver are similar. Whether that’s intentional or not, it does have the effect of making the towers a bit less overwhelming. I didn’t have the feeling of being in the bottom of a canyon that I’ve gotten in New York, for instance.
My destination was quite far west on Robson, near its intersection with Denman Street, the main drag of the area called West End. In a nondescript one-floor building of blue-painted bricks was a very nice little restaurant, easily my favorite of the places I ate on this trip. DeDutch is a chain based in Vancouver that specializes in “pannekoken”, enormous savory (not sweet) pancakes that are a specialty in the Netherlands. I remember seeing Rachel Ray eating pannekoken when she visited Amsterdam on $40 a Day. I’m not likely to be in Holland any time soon, but I thought it might be fun to try out Vancouver’s version of the dish.
I was the first customer of the day at this particular DeDutch, and a very stereotypically gay man told me I could sit wherever I wanted. I found a table by the wall that faced the window and scanned through the menu. I chose item #14, a pancake based on eastern European periogies. Inside a light pancake batter—where you might ordinarily place blueberries—they’d put crumbled bacon, onion, potato, and two different cheeses. The dish was served with sour cream and real maple syrup on the side. The syrup didn’t really go with it (though given that it was real, I had to try it, of course), but the sour cream was an excellent accent. The meal was $12.50, plus another $3 for really excellent coffee—pricey, but not completely unaffordable.
The restaurant quickly filled up, but the one waiter managed to serve everyone most efficiently. By far the most popular dish appeared to be what they called “De Canadian” (all the menu items were “De” something or other, even “de coffee”), which was basically ham and eggs on top of an enormous platter-sized pancake, with a fried tomato on the side. Most people drowned their ham and eggs in maple syrup. That struck me as repulsive, but they all seemed to like it.
The restaurant was pleasantly decorated with lace tablecloths and the same blue tiles Dickens described on Scrooge’s hearth in A Christmas Carol. There were paintings on the walls with a Dutch maritime theme, and a clock on the wall gave the correct local time in Amsterdam (where it was going on dinner time, as I had breakfast). The decorations put me in the mood to pick up one of the Dutch souvenirs they had displayed by the cash register, so I sprang for a $15 Delft coffee mug. It’s kind of strange that my main souvenir of Canada actually came from Holland, but it was fitting for this particular trip.
One of the busiest bus routes in the city runs down Robson Street, and there was a bus stop just across the street from DeDutch. It’s interesting that almost all the buses in the city of Vancouver (but not in the suburbs) are electric, modern versions of the trolley-buses Paul and I saw in Russia. There are overhead wires strung on every major street in the city, so the buses can easily shift from one to another. Electric buses greatly reduce pollution (particularly when the source for them is hydropower from the mountains), and they run much more quietly than diesel or gas.
I caught the Robson Street bus (#5) and rode it back to Burrard station. I went down to the subway and took SkyTrain one stop further on to Waterfront. (A nice thing about those frequent trains is that there was no question but that taking the train was quicker than walking.) In addition to SKyTrain and commuter trains, Waterfront is also the terminal for TransLink’s SeaBus. (If you haven’t figured it out yet, pretty much all the transit in Vancouver has a capital letter in the middle of its name.) SeaBus is an enormous passenger ferry (it reminded me of the Staten Island Ferry) that shuttles people across Burrard Inlet between the city and the suburb of North Vancouver. At rush hour on weekdays they have ferries that leave every five minutes, but on weekends service is only every half hour. I had a fairly long wait before the boat showed up.
I had lots of company during my wait. The dock area was full of young people carrying snowboards. There are a couple of major winter sports resorts in North Vancouver, and they’re obviously popular with the local kids on weekends. I’ve never been snowboarding myself, but it’s always looked like fun. I can’t imagine starting at this age, though.
They had a brightly decorated Christmas tree in the waiting area, and above it a digital clock counted down the time until the next ferry would depart. When it reached about five minutes the ferry arrived. It slowly pulled up to the dock and anchored. The Vancouver-bound passengers exited through a far set of doors, and then the doors by our waiting area opened. The doors closed, they played a brief safety recording, and then we were off.
The crossing takes about fifteen minutes, and there’s a nice view of the harbor (or rather “harbour” in the proper British spelling) the whole way. We soon arrived at Lonsdale Quay, the very bottom of a city that rises rather dramatically into the mountains. Just beyond the dock was a covered busway, and I made my way to bus #229, which was waiting in one of the bays. Shortly after it departed, I thought I had gotten on the wrong bus, so I pulled the cord, walked around a corner, and boarded bus #228. While both of these buses went to the general area I wanted to go, it turned out that #229 was actually the one that went closer to my ultimate destination. I’d misplaced my bus map, though, and with such similar numbers, it was confusing. While I was technically on the wrong bus, the bonus was that by going out and back by different routes I got to see more of the area.
North Vancouver was definitely the most suburban place I went in the metropolitan area. That said, I must point out that this “suburb” is nearly as large as Omaha. What made “North Van” (as locals invariably call it) seem suburban was that the only condo towers were right near the coast. Up in the mountains everyone lived in single family homes. They were big boxy homes like those Margaret and I had seen in Newfoundland years ago, though built on much smaller lots. It was also striking that every home had a chimney with thick smoke coming out of it on this cold morning.
I got off the bus at Lynn Valley Road and Peters Street and proceeded on foot from there. That was easier said than done. There was a general snow cover throughout North Vancouver—not heavy snow, but about an inch or so of cover. What made it bad, though, was that beneath much of the snow was a thick ice that reminded me of what we had back home right after Thanksgiving. I would have like to have had track spikes as I struggled to make my way down the icy sidewalk.
I made my way to Peters and Duval, which is the entry point to Lynn Canyon Park. This provincially operated park extends from the city’s edge far up into the mountains. I hiked a tiny portion of the Baden-Powel Trail (built by the local Scout troops and named after Scouting’s founder) right near the park entrance. It led to the park’s most important feature, the Lynn Canyon Bridge. This is one of two pedestrian suspension bridges that cross gorges in North Vancouver. The more famous Calipano Suspension Bridge is part of a privately-owned tourist attraction that costs $28 to visit. Owned by the province, the Lynn Canyon Bridge is free. Built of steel cables (its floor, sides, and supports are all cables), the bridge is several hundred feet above the rushing stream below and affords magnificent views of the surrounding rainforest. It’s well enclosed (you could commit suicide, but you won’t fall off), and the deck was quite a bit less slippery than anything else in the area. It was still strange to walk along it as it swayed, though. I walked back and forth a couple of times, and I really enjoyed taking in the surrounding views.
Being the middle of winter, the park seemed surprisingly busy to me. While it was in no way crowded, I was far from the only person on the bridge, and the trails leading out to the more remote regions were also being used. The parking lot near the main entrance had at least two dozen cars, and there were two other people in the restroom I used before I left.
I walked back to Peters and Duval, where bus #229 stops. A man was waiting at the bus stop when I showed up, and he looked at me rather suspiciously. I just read the schedule posted by the stop and found a place to lean. Soon a couple more people joined us, and before long the bus showed up. (Given that it only comes every half hour, I’d timed things remarkably well.) The driver was a very pleasant young man who greeted each passenger who boarded, called out the passing streets, and answered people’s questions in detail. Many city bus drivers are among the gruffest, most rude people anywhere, but this man really seemed to enjoy his job. I wish I could have found out his name; he deserves a commendation.
The return route (down Lynn Valley Road and Lonsdale Avenue) was much more commercial than the route the other bus had taken. This also looked suburban, though. We passed minimalls and gas stations and one of those big pole building churches (the sort of place where they almost certainly worship the sacred screen). Lonsdale led through what they probably call “downtown” North Vancouver, and it seemed like the sort of strip you’d find in the inner suburbs near Chicago or New York—short or mid-level buildings with coffee bars, convenience stores, hair salons, and tanning spas on their first floors.
Tanning spas, by the way, are very big in Vancouver. That struck me as odd, given that the majority of the residents already have the tropical look by nature of their ethnicity. I can’t imagine an Asian or Hispanic person patronizing a tanning spa, but I guess there must be enough pasty-skinned Anglos in the area for the places to make a go of things.
While both the buses and the SeaBus run infrequently on weekends, they time the schedules for convenient transfers at Lonsdale Quay. When we pulled up to the busway a digital clock that matched the one at the south dock said there were less than three minutes until departure. I went down a long walkway and boarded. Almost immediately the ferry departed.
I used another ATM at Waterfront station, this time getting six $10 bills that showed up as a $61.20 debit to my checking account. Then I made my way out into the cold drizzle outside. Just across from the station was Harbour Centre, an office complex topped by a revolving restaurant that is Vancouver’s answer to Seattle’s Space Needle. It’s no longer the tallest building in the city, but it is still very much a landmark. I had thought about going up to their observation deck, but the $13.50 pricetag was just a bit too much (…and the $49 brunch in the restaurant was even more ridiculous). ...
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I made my way back to Gastown, where I stopped and snapped a photo of one of Vancouver’s most famous landmarks, the Gastown steam clock. This enormous iron clock decorates a sidewalk in Gastown and gets its power from steam pipes that mostly supply heat to area businesses. Steam comes out of the clock, which makes it a fascinating sight, particularly in winter. The clock’s most interesting feature is that it plays Westminster chimes on calliope whistles operated by the steam. I heard it play on the half hour, making quite a raucous sound. I don’t know that I’d detour far out of my way to see the steam clock, but given that it was on the way to my next destination, it was fun to see.
Since it was raining again, I caught a bus to Cordova and Main, the Downtown Eastside location where I’d turned around yesterday. I was determined to find the police museum, and this morning I found it rather easily. It’s about a block east of the new police headquarters, in a rather nondescript building that is old but doesn’t look particularly historic. It’s not well marked, so you have to know what you’re looking for to find it.
Once I had found it, the police museum was really quite interesting. No one will pretend it’s a first rate world-class museum, but they did a nice job of displaying a surprisingly wide collection. As you might expect, much of the museum traces the history of policing in Vancouver. It’s not that long ago (just over a century) when Vancouver was a rough-and-tumble frontier town. In the early 20th Century it grew rapidly, and they trace how policing changed as Vancouver became a modern metropolis.
(c) 2008 davidmburrow@yahoo.com
The background music on this page is the Christmas carol "Good King Wenceslas", chosen since the text makes reference to the Feast of Stephen--Boxing Day.