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Published: July 29th 2018
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As you are all no doubt well aware Canada is a whopping great country and one I had not been to other than flying over it, given it is on the flight path from London to California. I've seen thawing ice sheets in Hudson Bay cracked in hypnotic patterns and many thousands of miles of frozen tundra, without seeing any sign of human influence for hours of flying. This July however I got the chance to take closer look at the country for the first time, as Maria Chiara and I were invited to a wedding... in Saskatoon!!! Never heard of Saskatoon? We’ll get to that in due course...
Given that the wedding would be in a fairly small and (don't shoot me Saskatoonians!) obscure town in the Great Plains, we were keen to extend our stay to include some parts of Canada that get the tourist hype. This started with a visit to Vancouver, a city so marvelous it's getting its own blog - this one! Vancouver is widely regarded as one of the most livable cities on the planet, like my town of birth Auckland would be if it had public transport system (sigh!) or my current hometown
A-Maze-ing Laughter
A much loved and respected permanent installation by Chinese artist Yue Minjun. London would be if it didn’t have massive economic inequality and the threat of terrorism (double sigh!)
Flying in, it was immediately apparent that Vancouver is in a stunningly beautiful location. The city is surrounded with water and has bridges, barges, and beaches. All of this is protected from the indifferent power of Pacific waves by the long mountainous Vancouver island which looms in the distance and acts as a barrier. Inland from the city are huge mountains covered in majestically tall cedar and spruce trees and caped with snow even in the height of summer.
On the ground and installed in our rather old school hotel we wondered the streets and were captivated by the lushness of the nature. On the second day we hired a bicycle and rode around Stanley Park which is a rather large piece of wilderness covered in forest right next to downtown, even with several totem poles which are exclusively made by the native Americans of the north west Pacific coast. Fringing this jewel of a park are three beaches (the imaginatively named Beaches 1, 2 and 3) and stunning views of the skyline, a gigantic bridge and distant suburbs climbing up
Beach 3
In Stanley Park forested hills.
Vancouver has been heavily influenced by waves of Asian immigration going back to the first railways and gold rush times. We ate in Japanese restaurants, the first a heaving izakaya bar where the staff yell out hello as you arrive (I assume that’s what they are saying, given my lack of Japanese). The only time I’ve experienced this before was walking into shops in Tokyo, so this was all reassuringly authentic. The other evening was sushi and sashimi prepared to order. Big wow.
Chinatown on the other hand was quite a contrast. We arrived there and found wide unappealing roads, and a lot of businesses that seemed closed, or at least barely open. We asked a local young millennial for advice on where to go. She advised: get out! We did get out eventually, but via absolutely the wrong direction, as we passed hundreds of homeless people, drug addicts and mentally unstable. As with The Tenderloin in San Francisco, an entire district of the inner city has become a ghetto. I would like to hope there is some good reason for this, but we didn’t stick around long enough to figure that out!
Having escaped
we had a small lunch while watching Belgium beat Brazil in the football/soccer world cup in an Italian cafe. Maria Chiara was impressed to see a scarf on the wall from FC Udinese, her own local football team. Vancouver could at times be impressively authentically European. Most especially when we visited our token posh restaurant of the trip, Le Crocodile, a French restaurant. It had been given a ringing endorsement from an actual French person!! (Thanks Elisabeth). Thanks to the referral I think we got a particularly royal treatment, but looking around I didn't see any other guests suffering by any means. This meal was an exception to every other lunch or dinner as it didn't involve the bounty of the Pacific ocean (i.e. fish). The fish and chips we had on Granville Island, as touristy as that part of Vancouver is, were quite simply world class.
We managed to take in culture too on our brief visit: the Anthropological Museum was filled with beautiful and enigmatic wooden sculpture of the native Americans (or as they say in Canada "First Nations"). And we even sneaked in some Shakespeare, watching "Macbeth" in a tent at Bard on the Beach on
our first night. It seemed a great idea when we booked our tickets hours before when we were still running on adrenaline. By evening though we had hit a wall with the jet lag, and unfortunately we had fluked very good tickets near the front so I had the horrible pressure of having to keep my eyes open so as not to offend the actors. Unfortunately in my case Macbeth didn't completely "murder sleep". From my intermittent phases of genuine wakefulness I can say the production was absolutely excellent.
From Vancouver started our epic Canadian road trip which justifies its own blog. Watch this space...
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