A day in the city

Downtown Vancouver

Caught the Skyway into Vancouver and when we arrived at Waterfront Station headed down to Gastown precinct, known for its eateries and art sellers the brochure enthused. Walking along just out of station noticed a lot of homeless people around the place. Window shopped down the street and ended up at the statue of the Gassman some local pioneer character named for his storytelling, decided to keep walking to Chinatown. Passing a LOT of homeless along the street, next street I could see ahead that the homeless were in even greater numbers crowding the sidewalk. We quickened our pace with Phan clinging to her Aunt and me hoping they would just keep up without me having to yell “Lets get out of here, run for it!”. OK, next street has to be better...no it isn't. We were sidestepping an arguing homeless group, avoiding begging homeless men, avoiding eye contact with angry looking homeless lady who just yelled “Go home!” to the Asian girl passing her metres in front of us. Looked down an alley as we passed and saw a crowd of misery so large it looked like Simple Plan were about to come on stage down there. Turned the corner hoping to see a crowded Chinatown pleeease! No, we still had some way to go, there was some asian signage a block away but between that and us was ranks of homeless standing around and doing the things homeless people do when waiting for something to happen. I keep glancing back at Phan and Ming and they have their eyes to the ground and are right behind me, before we reached the asian signs we come to a corner and see an empty street. Phan is already heading down there before I can suggest we abandon our Chinatown exploration and head back to where we started via clearer streets.
Back at Waterside station and with that experience behind us I had not given up entirely on Vancouver and suggested we head for the Downtown precinct. Heading up the hill nothing really caught our eye until we spotted the art gallery. We paused out the front next to a dead fountain where I noticed on my map that tourist information was located around the back of the gallery. Hoping I could get a more detailed map (maybe with homeless shelters to avoid marked) we rounded the building and covering the back steps were another hundred homeless people. Pulling up as we turned the corner was a police car with lights flashing to take delivery of a lady arrested by an officer already on the scene. As a soundtrack to this scene a bum was singing opera from the top of a terraced garden across the street at the top of his lungs punctuation with body thrusting spasms of air guitar. The tourist info van was across the other side of the square so we rounded the police car, giving the arresting officers a wide berth as one searched through the woman's bag and the other pushed her into the squad car. I quickly grabbed a map and walked away from the scene deciding our next destination would be Stanley Gardens.

I won't bore you with details of our walk through the downtown area but we ended up after about half an hour down on the harbour at a marina that happened to have a pub. Stanley Park had been abandoned due to blisters on Ming's feet and I really needed a drink.
It was nice watching the float planes taking off and landing with the snow capped mountains appearing just across the water.

Now how else could you end a perfect day in Vancouver? How about some gun related street crime? After enjoying our rest at the marina pub we walked along the harbour foreshore before arriving at Waterside station. As we are walking past a row of taxis a woman in her late 20s comes jogging across the road. The only reason we notice this is because we can hear a man yelling “Stop her, stop her” from a distance. I was wondering to myself if this woman I'm looking at is who he's referring to and as the woman rounds the taxi right next to us and tries to get in a man in a suit and coat has run to the road side of the taxi and when he gets to the rear, yells at the woman “Stop! Police!” and he threw his coat back to reach for his gun. The woman just kept replying, “ You stop, you stop”, which I thought at the time was quite funny, meanwhile, the man runs back a bit as she says this and at the same time she is trying to look around the back of the taxi at the cop. Its then that I notice the black handgun sticking out the back of her jeans. Now that the cop backed off the woman managed to get the van door open and pulls out the gun from her pants as she climbs in. I decide to keep moving into the station and jump onto the escalator hoping to avoid any bullets that may start flying. I was trying to think which would she take, stairs or escalator if she tried to escape down here because I wanted to be on the other one. As I jump on I hear Phan's aunt telling her, “Go, go. She has a gun”. The last thing I saw as I looked back was seeing the taxi pull away from the kerb and thinking about that poor taxi driver in there with that gun. Only a few seconds later police sirens were sounding.
We got on the train and headed back to the safety of the suburbs.

Read online that evening that the woman had run past the hotel where the Canadian Premier was staying after robbing a jewelery store with two other guys. The swat team and everyone in the area was on to her thinking she was threatening the Premiers life but she was just dumb enough to run past his security team with her gun sticking out when trying to flee a robbery.

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