Journey to the Pacific Northwest (Part One)

The Misanthrope was on the West Coast visiting his friend Brother Tyler (scroll to the bottom). Nothing beats spending time with a friend you never get to see.

I landed in Vancouver, BC on Friday afternoon after a long flight from JFK. The most bizarre moment of the flight came after the in-flight movie had just finised. Air Canada treated us passengers to a short video that reminded us that using children for sex is wrong and we could be prosecuted for sexual tourism, even if the illegal acts had not taken place on Canadian soil. Bienvenue au Canada!

Visiting Canada is always a strange experience for me. I feel a sense of excitement at the prospect of being in a foreign country, but the visual landscape is almost exactly the same asit is in the United States. It is the little things that remind you where you really are. Being a New Yorker, I cross the street anywhere I can as long as the traffic is more than 10 feet away from me. When I did this in downtown Vancouver, I actually drew stares of disapproval. Similarly, Vancouver's subway/light rail system, the SkyTrain, provided a reminder that this wasn't the U.S. There is a C$2.25 fare (for a one-zone journey) that, according to Brother Tyler's Canadian co-workers, everybody pays. Why is this amazing? There are no turnstiles or ticket takers; it's an honor system. Can you imagine this in the United States? Neither can I.

After some awe-inspiring dim sum, I spent the afternoon walking around Vancouver. The city itself is not particularly attractive and seems to be in the process of being overrun by hundreds of undistinguished apartment towers. From the number of apartment towers, you would think that Vancouver had a population of five million. What is amazing about the city, however, is its setting. With mountains to the north and east and Vancouver Island to the west, it's had to imagine a more beautiful location for a city in North America.

My attempts to find an unrecognized 1958 Les Paul Goldtop gathering dust in one of the pawn shops on Granville Street were fruitless, so I headed to Yaletown, the city's Yuppie/Soho sector. I still cannot understand how so many coffee houses can possibly exist in such a small city. On one block, I saw a Starbuck's and two indie coffee houses within 200' of each other. Still, the city is clean and pleasant and close to so much natural beauty. I give it a thumbs up.

Eventually, I ended up at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where I checked out their new Picasso exhibit. The collection on display was decent but not incredible, being drawn almost exclusively from works held in Canadian collections. The intro text to the exhibition hall was so quintessentially Canadian I had to read it about three times to savor it properly. While noting with evident pride that the collection on display was almost entirely Canadian in origin, the curator could not help but point out that Canada's Picasso collection was pretty thin because, well, the Canadians were so damned stuffy until a few years ago that nobody really liked modern art. I wish I had copied down the exact text. Only in Canada can you find such a hilarious mix of deep national pride and heavy self-deprecation.

After the exhibit, I followed a few of Vancouver's many attractive women around for a while (in a non-stalking way, of course) and then rejoined TY for the trip back to Bellingham, Washington.

Coming up next: Part Two - In which eagles soar and The Replacements reunite to win the Battle of the Bands.