Vancouver

I’m conflicted.

He’s young. He’s kind of foreign. He’s pretty. But in many ways he is so annoying.

And he’s not very big.

But he is so pretty.

He doesn’t know anything about dining, or music, or the arts at all really. Does he even read? He thinks he does, but he mostly reads glossy magazines that talk about real estate strategies. It doesn’t really matter though because he’s so pretty.

He does like to shop though.

I haven’t spent much time with him lately. It’s good to see him again. He hasn’t really changed as much as I expected. I thought I hated him, but I don’t. I’m just jealous.

I have as big a crush on him as I ever did.

Yep, I’m conflicted.

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This week my job was all about refereeing fights between VP’s and VP’s, directors and VP’s, directors and directors. I’m exhausted. I’m still brand new in this job and I do lots of stupid things. As such I haven’t been sleeping and I’ve been working every weekend since I started. I really needed a break. On Thursday I decided that I needed to get out of town, go shopping for new shoes, drink martinis, stay in a nice hotel, and spend too much money on dinner. Since I didn’t decide this till Thursday and I want to leave on Friday, flights down to San Francisco are running around $450. I am not going to pay $450 to fly to the Bay Area when I can get a flight to Maui for $435.

Mark really needed a break too. Two weekends ago he had to put his cat to sleep. Then a few days later he had to get surgery on his shoulder so it would stop popping out. Hate that, the popping out. I can’t imagine how stressed he must be. I should stop whining and be more supportive.

Now back to me.

Last time I was a giant stress ball we went to Portland for a nice weekend of shoes, hotels, and dinners. I don’t want to go back there so soon. An $89 flight to Pasco doesn’t really meet my needs. I guess that leaves….

Vancouver.

Vancouver, BC.

Vancouver, BC, Canada.



Canada. “Just different enough to be annoying”.

I used to love Canada. I used to watch the CBC Evening News every night on CBUT Channel 2. I use to listen to CBC radio every Sunday morning. I used to buy hardcover copies of Margaret Atwood’s poetry for Christ’s sake! I knew the name of the Prime Minister. Then something changed. The whole place just started pissing me off.

I don’t know what caused this shift. Maybe it’s not Canada per se, but Vancouver specifically that bugs me. Younger, skinnier, prettier than Seattle, maybe I’m just jealous I’m not so sure of that however. While I used to go there a lot, I always felt about Vancouver the way people in San Francisco feel about Los Angeles. Scratch the surface and there is not much there. No good restaurants, no real culture, no good radio stations, no reason to go back. It’s all hype and bluster, Vancouver. Bluster until you are on the beach in English Bay in the summertime or you are having a martini in the lobby of the Hotel Vancouver and then suddenly you want to move there more than anything in the world. Then I remember the place could not even support a symphony orchestra.

I am conflicted.

I went to Vancouver a lot in my late 20’s and early 30’s. I could never afford to spend the night back then so I’d just do day trips. Shop on Robson Street, go to Stanley Park, drink bad beer, eat Asian food, walk around and pretend that I lived there. As much as I liked Vancouver I was always annoyed that the single tiny freeway for a metro area of 2 million people stops right when you get to the city limits. Suddenly you have to turn left on 41st St. and drive though people’s neighborhoods to get downtown. Very annoying.

Now here at home, where there are nearly 4 million people, we have several freeways. And left turn arrows at stop lights. Our green traffic lights do not start blinking suddenly to freak you out. And we have real restaurants that are good. And radio stations that do not have a federally imposed quota of Anne Murray songs for 68% of the hour.

OK, clearly I have some issues here. Methinks I doth protest too much. But also, as you know, since W got “elected” I have been trying to get the hell out of this mostly red-stated country. Canada, France, Fiji, someplace that at least speaks French so I can read the signs. Coupled with my work stress is the absolute pandering Republican horror of the Terri Schiavo train wreck. I have to get out of this place.

Fine then. Off to skinny, pretty, younger Vancouver. Hey, they have a French language radio station!

I cannot get the $99 Friends and Family discount at the Kimpton Hotel in Vancouver (sold out to other likeminded would-be American ex-pats), so I decide to get a suite at the Wedgwood Hotel. Conde Nast Traveler magazine tells me that this is the 5th best hotel in North America. It’s just off Robson St, near the museum, shopping, and near Lush.

Sign me up!

Try as I might I cannot get out of work on Friday even though I have blocked the day out. This will need to be an early Saturday morning pilgrimage. I don’t have a passport! Do I need that now to get over the border? Crap. I get up at 6am on Saturday, do all the housework and laundry I would normally leave until Sunday, and pack. Mark shows up at 8am. I am making us take his car because it has seat warmers.

We stop to get gas, go to Starbucks for coffee and pastries, and hit the road. By 9am I realize I have globs of low-fat orange loaf stuck to the front of my black shirt. I can’t check in at the 5th best hotel in North America with globs of low-fat orange loaf stuck to my chest. “I know, lets stop at The Bon, I mean Macy’s, in Mt. Vernon and I will buy a new shirt”. At 10:24 we pull up to The Bon, I mean Macy’s, in Mt Vernon. It does not open till 11am. We go to the nearby Target store and look for shirts. Mark makes his requisite comment about the smell of popcorn in Target. I find a nice chartreuse linen shirt that costs $7.95. I try to go pay, but there is only one cashier open. Ma and Pa Kettle and the 14 children they had with their cousins are all in line. They are using food stamps to buy socks. Get me out of this country, now!

Soon freshly clad in Target we are on the road again, listening to KD Lang sing Canadian songs on my iPod. Goodbye Bellingham, international border here we come!



Secret identity border ploy works! They don’t even ask for our drivers licenses. It’s good to be a white guy.

Now we are in Canada, driving on this tiny freeway. I have absolutely no idea what the speed limit is.

What the hell does this mean? I ask again, why can’t W do something good and get rid of the metric system?

In the distance I see mountains, and skyscrapers.

Pretty boy. Bonjour Vancouver.

The sign says we are in Vancouver and the freeway stops. Both lanes of it. Suddenly we are supposed to turn left. There is no left turn arrow however. 30 minutes later we are able to turn left and are now on a regular residential street. I think it’s a good idea that all international traffic from America travels though this residential street at 27.4 KPH so that we can see up close the homes of real Canadians. Except that these homes are all horrible ugly monster houses. They are way too big, but they have good feng shui. They were put up by rich Hong Kong families in the middle of this older single family home neighborhood. It’s like Houston with chop sticks.
It’s lunch time so we head to SUN SUI WAH SEAFOOD restaurant, It’s in some old scary neighborhood that looks like Lake City. The Frommer’s guide book says, “One of the most elegant and sophisticated Chinese restaurants in town…” The New York Times hints that this is the best Chinese restaurant outside of Hong Kong. OK, time to scratch the surface.
We are almost the only white people here, which is a good sign. There are some skinny young mo’s wearing sunglasses and stripped jerseys however. They look so silly they have to be from Quebec.
This huge room is filled with happy Chinese families eating and talking. They stick us white guys in the corner so we can observe the show. I am optimistic until the food starts to show up. My past experience is that Dim Sum in Vancouver can be scary. No one speaks English, the food is variations on a theme in vague aquaticness and it’s all fried. As I pull some deep fried shrimp thing out of its pool of grease I am disappointed to see that SUN SUI WAH is just like the scary Dim Sum places in Vancouver’s Chinatown that I remember. It just has better lighting and clean bathrooms. Scratched the surface and there is nothing there. Boo.
After the lunch, we head downtown. It is pouring rain. It is cold. No one uses umbrellas here like it’s some kind of rite of passage. 20 years ago I heard that real Seattleites don’t use umbrellas. That is just stupid. Be wet fools.

We can’t check into the hotel till 3:00 PM, so we go to Yaletown!. Yaletown!? There are billboards around town that say things like, “That is so Yaletown!”

When I used to come up here a lot 15 years ago there was no Yaletown! There still isn’t.
There are two or three blocks of shops in old warehouses surrounded by dozens of sexy new condo towers. A bit like the Pearl District in Portland, but more calculated to look cool. There are some chain restaurants (Rock Bottom Brewery, ack!), some upscale restaurants, a cookbook store, a First Nations (Indian) mask store that sells masks made by white men with ponytails for $3200, a knock off design store or two. In one of these stores there is a woman with a 300lb dog. She will not stopping about her “upcomings” on Oprah, at MOMA, and in Toronto. The woman won’t shut up and she won’t leave. Even the owner of this store is embarrassed by this creepy LA-ness. As we slip out the door the owner thanks us for coming in and gives us a pained look. She is embarrassed. At least a hint of the old polite Vancouver is here lost in this forest of condo towers. But they are pretty, the towers, and skinny.

Yaletown! is boring and sad so we leave and decide to just drive around for a little while before we check in to the hotel. The traffic is horrendous. Lack of freeways and left turn signals will do that. I almost get stuck on that stupid road that goes though Stanley Park and goes over Lion’s Gate Bridge. But rather than just going with the traffic flow like a lemming I stop in the middle of the road, block traffic going the other way, and do a U-turn. I see why they hate Americans.

The traffic has made me grumpy as I pull up to the hotel. This is the 5th best hotel in North America and there is no valet to greet me? It’s raining dammit! I go in and find car boy. He’s polite, but apparently doesn’t know he needs to stand out in the rain if I am going to pay $300 for a hotel room.

Mark deals with car boy as I got to check in. At the 5th best hotel in North America all the employees are on the phone when I walk in. I stand their waiting, wishing I had low-fat orange loaf on my chest right now so that someone would notice me. Hello, this is costing me $300 a night and I am standing here aging!

Finally some young woman gets off the phone and checks me in. Like car boy she is very polite and friendly, but apparently it’s not all about me here.

We go to the room. It’s a 2 room suite, with 2 bathrooms. One bathroom has a large party tub and one has one of those giant overhead showers. The rooms themselves are dark and European in a threatening kind of way. Carpathian. But the toilet paper is all folded down to a point on the end. I love that.

We go down to the bar and order martinis. This pretty young waitress who looks like the love child of Uma Thurman and Scarlett Johansson (thanks Mark) brings us our drinks. She asks where we are from and what we are doing in Vancouver. We explain. She nods and smiles. She gets us.


After beverages it’s time to shop. We leave the hotel lobby, turn left, and suddenly we are on Robson St. Thousands of teenage Asian girls talking on cells phones scurry by.

I have 3 things to buy on this trip:

- A leather jacket
- New black shoes
- A watch

We literally have walked a quarter of a block when we see a leather coat store. A beautiful Russian woman wearing a skintight leopard skin top rushes over. Her name is Helga and she will be selling us something today. Helga starts to give me brown leather jackets to try on. I really want a black leather jacket.

I really do not want brown! We compromise. I buy a black leather jacket and Helga and I get Mark to buy a brown one that fits me.

Soon we are back on the street looking for shoes. We find a shoe store and I see Tsubos that have red, brown, and black stripes on them. I saw these same shoes in Austin a few weeks ago. I must buy them now because with the exchange rate they cost like $12. Mark buys some really nice Steve Madden’s with white stitching. As we leave I realize that my new Tsubos kind of make my feet look like parrots.

I am pumped. Now we are power shopping. Bags in tow we rush into Lush.

I love Lush. I have shopped here for years. It’s kind of a shampoo, bath bomb, shaving cream kind of store but it’s made to look like a food store. Shaving cream is sold in chunks like cheese, scrubby foot stuff comes in a container like yogurt, face wash that looks like sushi.





Several years ago I was in this store when Gillian Anderson from the X-Files walked in. She was really tiny, very beautiful, and had this hot guy with her. The show had only been on for a while so no one else recognized her. I stared right at her with my mouth open and she burst out laughing at me. Not my last brush with fame in Vancouver.

Lush. Recently I have seen Lush stores in Portland and New York. None in Seattle. I do my standard, “When are you going to open a store in Seattle?” The clerk looks up and says, “We are opening a store in Bellevue next month.” Bellevue? Gack! I tell her I will gladly leave the country before I will shop in Bellevue. She tells me that I am the 14th person to tell her this today.

This time I buy about $70 worth of stuff as does Mark. Power shopping is exhausting. We can’t carry our shopping bags any longer so we must head back to the hotel. This time car boy is at the door and he holds it open for us. Thank you.

We are hungry. We are going to Vij’s for dinner. Vij’s gets rave reviews in the guide book and The New York Times. It’s Indian, like in India, not as in the indigenous First Nation’s people who are native to Canada and who create lovely masks.

We go downstairs to get a cab. I have had enough of the no left turn signals plus I want to drink a lot tonight. Car boy is there and this time he is helpful. He stands in the rain for us to get us a cab. Vancouver cabs are very clean and pleasant -- like in New York. Very much unlike Seattle cabs where the cabbies talk on their cell phones all the time and speed and are mean.

Soon we are at Vij’s in the Broadway area. We knew that they don’t take reservations, and it’s Saturday night. We will have to wait for an hour in the bar. This is OK. The place is packed with really beautiful people all of whom seem to be from southern California. We find a place to stand at the tiny little bar. We drink some funny Australian white wine made with a grape called Verdelho. I do not know this grape but it is good. Kind of like a dry Riesling but with more body. It goes really well with spicy food. Speaking of which, they keep giving us free appetizers at the bar to keep us happy. Spicy Indian French Fries, Indian Nacho things, yummy naan. The owner comes over to thank us for waiting.

Eventually we are seated. We order some starters -- curried beef kabobs and quail cakes. They are good. Not fall down and wet your pants good, but good. We get chicken with pomegranate and “lamp popsicles” in a fenugreek yogurt sauce. This is by far the best food I have ever had in Vancouver. The service is solid, the owner, Vij, really works the room, everyone is talking and happy. Dessert was a little weak (donut holes covered in mint syrup??), but overall this is just a great dining experience. Am I really in Vancouver? There is one good restaurant here!

We take a nice, clean, friendly cab back to the to the 5th best Carpathian hotel in the world.

I’m drunk. I’m tired. I should want to go out to some gay bar where there are naked go-go boys but instead I just want to watch a dubbed version of Crouching Tiger on Canadian TV and crash.

Suddenly it’s morning. I slept though the whole night. Wow. I slept! No grinding of teeth, no obsessing about work, no nightmares about VP’s. This makes the cost of the hotel worth it. Mark is in the other room sleeping, so I make coffee and try to get on the internet. My laptop can see 29 different wi-fi networks, many of which are free, but I cannot get onto any of them for some reason. This is annoying. Can they tell I’m American and they are blocking me to prevent cultural hegemony?

Soon Mark’s up and we decide to get going for the day. But first I have to try the giant bathtub. I take one of the lemongrass flavored bath bombs that I bought at Lush and draw the water. I fill the tub, start up the jets, and throw in the bath bomb. Ah! This is what I need. A perfect mini-break from work and Seattle.

We get dressed and head downstairs for breakfast. The dining room in the hotel is decorated in this old world English motif. Not good. I order Eggs Benedict. Not good.

We head next door to the Starbucks where they give us our drinks without lids on them. This is just asking for a lawsuit. “Middle aged gay man with giant orange head sues Starbucks over coffee burns”. I need to talk to someone at work about the lids...or lack of lids.

We walk across the street to the Vancouver Art Gallery. Last time I was at this museum they had a huge collection of paintings by Emily Carr. She was a British Columbia painter who painted these amazing, lush, colorful, just fucking cool scenes of the forests on Vancouver Island in the early part of the 20th century.

I see that they still have some Emily Carr works here so I am excited to go in. The Vancouver Art Gallery is small. As so is the Emily Carr show. Small and disappointing. The other two shows are pretentious and annoying. Bad photography and some movies of horses walking showing on the walls. Again, scratch the surface and there is not much here. Not even any native art, which I am really disappointed about. I was hoping to see some Haida carvings. VAG is not a good museum. It even makes the Seattle Art Museum seem big and interesting, which is quite an accomplishment.

We get done with VAG in about 5 minutes so we go across the street to the mall. I want to buy a watch. There are a series of underground malls in downtown Vancouver. Given that Vancouver doesn’t get cold like Minneapolis or Montreal I can’t understand why they put shopping underground. But it certainly doesn’t seem to keep the thousands of teenage Asian girls from shopping up on Robison Street, so I guess it’s fine.

We get into the mall though Sears. This used to be Eaton’s, the big Canadian department store that went out of business a few years ago. I guess Sears took over the locations, but this is like no Sears I have ever seen. It feels like a Nordstrom or a good Macy’s. Tori Amos is signing the same song to me over the speakers that she was in Austin last month. There are Clinique counters, a Kenneth Cole section, and some really nice watches… Why not? Another beautiful Russian woman – Olga - comes up to help. Olga is not about making me buy anything. She just wants to help. We settle on the Diesel section. I find a nice scary black banded watch that should go well with my new leather daddy coat. But…but what about when I wear brown shoes? Their watches are selling for a little over $100 Canadian, which is what, like $7? I’ll get two, one black and one brown. Mark taps me on the shoulder and says, “Isn’t that actor William Devane shopping for watches right next to you?” Another brush with fame in Vancouver!

OK, it’s nearing 12:00 so we need to check out of the hotel. Mark finds car boy while I pay the bill.

Back to the streets without the left turn signals. It’s pouring rain. We head for lunch at Legendary Noodle, where you can get 95 different kinds of home made noodles. Pulled noodles, chopped noodles, long noodles, fat noodles. Most of the people here are Asian, which should be a good sign. There are some annoying mo’s with ponytails sitting next to use slurping noodles. One is telling the other about his various birthmarks. Unlike this man’s birthmarks, the food here is nothing special. This makes me a bit sad. We are leaving soon and I wanted to believe there was more than one good restaurant in this city. The New York Times raved about this place also. Bluster.

Before heading back over the border we go to a nearby antique shop. I find a fun green mask with scary hair to add to my mask collection. It’s not a $3200 Haida art mask, but it will look cool on my mask wall.


OK. Time to go home. I am sad. There is really is a weird energy about this place.

Maybe it’s the fact that most people aren’t white -- and that the ones who are talk funny.

I love the architecture. Few cities in the world have this density. And that certainly puts a lot more people on the street which adds to drama of the place.

The juxtaposition of the high-rise condo towers next to the water and the mountains is pretty cool.

But it doesn’t make sense that you have to listen to Seattle radio stations when you are here or that dining is such a challenge.

Why do I still love this place?

Part of me really wants to say that the attraction is the beauty, that if Lolita was a boy he would be named Vancouver.


No it’s not just that. That’s mean. Maybe in the end it is the fact that Vancouver is
just different enough…

We get on the two lane freeway and head south. I make Mark take pictures of the goofy signs. They don’t mention the International border or Washington State, no, just stay on this road to get to Seattle. OK, we will.


At the border the guard guy asks us if we have guns, drugs, alcohol, or jewelry (what is with the evil jewelry?) No sir, but we have $700 in leather coats, $200 is shoes, $140 in bath bombs, and a green mask.

We’re listening to KLPU which comes in loud and clear. NPR new tells us that W is going to send in the marines to save Terri Schiavo. My head explodes. Should we turn around and go back. No, I have cats to feed.

Goodbye pretty, sexy boy who talks funny. You are beautiful. You annoy and fascinate me.

I won’t be gone so long this time.