111118009653406238
March 18th, 2005 
After what felt like an hour long car ride (it was just under six), Katherine and Jeremy and I arrived in Vancouver for our visit with Patrick and Kelly. Despite they’re being no freeways in the city, it was pretty easy to get to downtown, where all three of us were like ‘Whoah! That’s a lot of gray buildings’ It’s like when you see an illustration of the skyline of Manhattan and every building is basically the same, except for the Empire State and Chrystler buildings. And whoever sells green glass here must be a bazillionaire.
Really, like every building is nearly the same. Before we left I read Douglas Coupland’s book ‘City of Glass’, a collection of mini essays about this town. And I learned all this construction is from mainly Chinese investors who thought everybody from Hong Kong was going to move here in the 90’s when it reverted back to mainland control. And it kind of looks like pictures of Hong Kong a little bit.
But obviously, the chief architectural influence was the film Blade Runner, which is kinda cool in a nice-place-to-visit sort of way. What was weird was that despite all this verticle density, most of the town felt shockingly deserted, like midtown Manhattan on a Sunday. And Every Single Store was a chain. Not even a ‘good chain’ but like airport foodcourt chain. It was a more unifying principle than even the green glass buildings. I could kick myself for not taking pictures to show this, because otherwise, you get a really false notion of what their downtown looks like.
Despite this, it was great to see Patrick and Kelly, who had flown in the night before and hadn’t done much exploring yet. I think everybody had looked at the same tourist brochure because we were all salivating to go on this suspension bridge that looked super dramatic and scary. An overly helpful dude in the street came running up to us and told us how to get to the bridge, which entailed taking a seabus, which was kinda fun and felt very vacationy even though it was just regular old public transit.
On the bus, Katherine and I struck up a conversation with this nice old British lady who was like ‘that bridge is a straight up ripoff.’ (and she used the expression ‘donkey’s years’, which I’m going to try to work as much as possible) And Jeremy was mesmerized by these super strung out junkies sitting next to him who had wads of cash.
When we got let off in another food court mini-mall in North Vancouver, I made a call and found out the bridge was in fact $30 and two long bus rides away. Plan B was a gondola ride up the mountain (like the one over the Queensboro bridge) that was $50 (!!!) and even further away. We shoulda stuck with that old lady on the boat. We kinda wandered around the food court for a while in vain, saw the junkies eating ice cream and then look the ferry back to town.
The next thing on the list (and it was a few blocks away) was Chinatown, which I’d read (starting to hate Douglas Coupland) was this spectacular and enourmous Chinatown that would put all others to shame. I think I’ve been to most of the c-towns in the US and this one couldn’t have been more phoned in. Everything was closed and deserted.
I was kinda dying to see what Miss Rainy’s act entailed, but later that evening, nobody wanted to return, me included.
I bought a cheap old board game from the 70’s in Gastown, kinda touristy street with fake Irish pubs and souvenir shops (it is kind of culturally hillarious how they hawk Cuban cigars here). The guy in the store warned us about not walking further down the street cause it gets rough.
Of course we did and it was the one part of town that I really liked. It was all run down with great signage. In situations like this, I’m like Wylie Coyote walking straight off the cliff for a while and not realizing it until I look down and fall.
I saw this boarded up place and my heart started beating fast. I turned around to say ‘everybody, look at this, Gone With the Wig!!!’ but everybody had already high tailed it out of there because this street was literaly crawling with junkies. It was dawn of the dead junkies everywhere and I hadn’t noticed it until I’d stopped looking through my camera.
It’s so shocking to see people shooting up and buying drugs on the street. It kinda reminds me of the early 90s, but never in this kind of volume. Junky town was no fluke, though because no matter where we went we got pretty heavily harrassed by cracked out people.
We had dim sum on the big main street, Robson, where you can see Canadian bling at its finest. I thought everyone was going to be wearing fleece and down and have old eyeglasses, but was all juicy tracksuits and metrosexual and euro-trashed out. For some reason, everyone was wearing those ugly new sunglasses that Chyna Doll wears on Surreal Life.
These aren’t the right sunglasses, but a good example of how every single person looked.
Patrick and Kelly’s room outclassed ours quite a bit.
Their view.
Our view.
More walking around the empty streets, which are now making me think more of J.G. Ballard than Bladerunner, since there was a lot of hubbub in that movie.
We had dinner at this collegy bar near Gastown and then went to another place that was exactly the blues club they go to in Ghostworld. It became pretty apparent that we weren’t going to find a cool dive bar to have a drink and catch up with P&K so we decided to buy some beer and head back to their nice room.
But you can’t buy beer anywhere in this city. Back on the main ‘fun-kay’ shopping strip, you could only buy booze at one place. And it was $15 for a six pack. And since the dollar is in the toilet right now, that was just about $15. It all became very clear why everyone in this town was either a junkie or a metrosexual.
So we did what anyone would do and went to Shennanigans.
Every day is St. Patricks Day at Shennanigans!!! And every glass of beer is six dollars. This was the kind of place where every drink was called ‘Sex on the Beach’ or ‘Fort Lauderdale Rapist’ or ‘Choad’. It was mainly Asian businessmen drinking in large groups. I wonder if this seems cheap and festive if, say, you were coming from Shanghai or Taiwan.
By now we were starting to fizzle, literally, and calling it a night seemed like the only alternative…
