nadsat

For the uninformed, I spent March 1st – 7th in Vancouver (yes, the one in Canada). Why go to Vancouver? April is there, of course.

It was a good trip overall. Obviously the main focus of the trip was to see April but I also got to experience the city and get a feel for life there (which I’ll get plenty of this summer). It’s a different place for sure. How so? Well I’ll give you my impression.

First off, April lives in downtown Vancouver (the Gastown area for those that know the city), so that is what this impression is based on. Also, her part of the city is not the nicest part. She lives on the edge of a tourist area right where it starts to get seedy. Not that the area is unsafe, but it looks a lot worse than it is. To be frank, it looks like shit.

This leads me to my first complaint; the bum problem is monumental. Atlanta has a lot of bums but it does a good job of cleaning them off the street (to where? Who knows. I’m waiting for Soylent Green to hit the market). Vancouver needs to take a lesson from this. People do not like to step over sleeping bums on the sidewalk or being hit up for change at every corner and bus stop. To Vancouver’s credit the bum problem seems to disappear when you get to the nicer areas of downtown. So I think it is just concentrated near April because that is where a lot drug dealing takes place and most of the bums are junkies.

My second complaint is the price of alcohol. I was under the impression that Canadians were big drunks and beer flowed like water, apparently that stream stops somewhere east of Vancouver. Since when is $3.50 a pint a special!? Ok, so beer cost a lot in the bars, just go the grocery store, buy it yourself, and drink in the comfort of your own home, right? Wrong.

There are no grocery stores downtown (no gas stations either). There are these little corner grocery places and some shops that sell groceries so you can get food, just not beer/wine/liquor. Even outside of downtown grocery and liquor stores are sparse. By now you are thinking, people have to get beer somewhere and they do. Some of the bars do “carry-out” beer. I did not investigate this but I’d imagine it’s the doggy bag of the bar world. I’d assume the price is the same or more than what you pay inside, which brings me back to the price of beer in bars. All the local beers I tried were very good though, so that’s a positive.

Those were pretty much my only complaints. Sure things are pricey but I chalk that up to being downtown and the lack of big chain stores like Target and Walmart to drive prices down. There is also the issue of coin money versus paper money (I can’t stand coin money) but that is a Canadian thing and not specific to Vancouver.

What did I like? I’ll post that in part 2 sometime later.

Related posts:

1. The Vancouver Experience Part 2
2. Vancouver observations
3. snatch arrives in vancouver

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