Vancouver, BC

Day 26: Sat 16 Aug through Day 28: Mon 18 Aug: Vancouver! Vancouver is a great city, and Mario a wonderful host.

I'm writing this almost a week later, and know I am leaving things out. Sorry.

On Saturday, Mario took me on a walking tour of Sunset Beach (I forgot my camera, so no pics, sorry. Look it up in Google Earth.), and also some barhopping. I got to meet some of his friends, and generally have a good time walking around and getting oriented.

At one of the bars I got into a very heated discussion about the US health care system with a German (I think) and a Bush refugee (American ex-pat, from Minneapolis, living in Seattle, marrying a Canadian). Even though they couldn't have been preaching to a more receptive choir, it didn't seem that they had any solutions other than leave. I mean, I know our health-care system as a heavy consumer, as an advocate for an even heavier consumer, as an employer who provides insurance to his employees, as an employee, and as a business who helps providers get paid from our totally brain-dead system. It just seemed to provide a way for everyone to do some bashing without thinking about it. I mean, really, how do you implement a single-payor system in a country where socialism is a dirty word? Anyhow, it was refreshing to get into a semi-intelligent political discussion in a gay bar.

One of the things that makes Vancouver special, as a large city, is that there are no downtown freeways. It's all surface streets. This makes it eminently walkable, and bicyclable. Just think of all the places you can't go in Boston, New York, San Francisco, because you can't cross the freeways, or don't want to be near them. Not so in Vancouver. There are crosswalks everywhere.

Oh, and bicyclists beware, the police enforce traffic laws on bicyclists. We saw a guy getting a ticket for riding on a city street without a helmet.

In the evening, we went to Stanley Park, the huge park at the northern edge of the peninsula. It's the large parks that make the cities, I've come to see. Balboa Park in San Diego, Central Park in NYC, The Common in Boston, Golden Gate Park in SF, and Stanley Park in Vancouver. They are each different, in terms of size, accessibility, separateness, etc, but they definitely lend and reflect the character of the cities they are in.

We arrived just in time for sunset, and what an incredible sunset it was. Everywhere you look in this city, there is ocean and mountains. It's great.

We took a nap, and then went clubbing at Club 816: The World. Good house music, with a local DJ, that lasted into the morning.

Sunday, we laid low, since we didn't get to bed until around 8am. We went to beer bust at Pumpjacks in the afternoon.

Monday, Mario worked in the morning, but was able to solve the Apache/ PHP/ SSL problem (well, the Apache/PHP part) that had been bothering him since Friday, and was able to take the afternoon off. I had woken up late, and then struggled with the wireless in his condo (it had been working flawlessly, but was suddenly unable to connect... It went on for over an hour before I just gave up, and by then it was so close to lunch time that I didn't want to leave to go exploring because I knew he was coming home for lunch), so it wasn't the greatest of mornings. That turned around when he got home.

We had a late breakfast, and then went for a walk around downtown Vancouver -- to the cruise ship dock, around the marinas, and back home. Vancouver is in the middle of a massive construction boom, partly because of the 2010 Winter Olympics, but only partly. Business is booming, and condo high-rises and office buildings are going up everywhere. The convention center by the cruise ship dock is in the middle of an intense renovation, and there are construction cranes everywhere.

Just in case you didn't know how long it was until the 2010 Winter Olympics, there's a sign in the city centre telling you.