Vancouver

I went to Vancouver for the Memorial Day weekend. It was a nice trip. Hadn't been out of Colorado in a while and Vancouver seemed like an interesting, large, foreign, but not too far away cause I don't want to fly for like 13 hours or something, place.

Misc facts about Vancouver - It's a little over 100 years old, has one of the largest ports in North America, has the 2nd largest Chinatown in North America after San Francisco, is located on a small peninsula, and (party for that reason) has one of the highest population densities of any city in North America.

It was green. It was cloudy. The weather was mild, you might want a light jacket but didn't really need one. There were nice, gentle breezes coming off the water.

Canada is an English speaking country. It has Queen Elizabeth II on some $. The money there is dollars and 1 US dollar is worth 1.06 Canadian. Vancouver is going to have the 2010 Winter Olympics (well someplace in the area is, but I think they are calling it the Vancouver Olympics). It is interesting to note that books cost more in Canada. If you check the back of a book sold in the US, you can see, for example $7.95, $10.95 CAN. I don't know why that is.

The newspapers there had an article about a woman who was sent to Seattle for specialized neonatal care, an issue which caused some concern about the Canadian health care system and it's capacity. The papers also talked about The Police being in town, opening up their new reunion tour there. (IMHO The Police had a few good songs but were kind of lame and Sting is truly lame.)

I didn't hear anyone say 'aboot' or talk like that. The TV shows were largely the same ones you get in the US, but they had their own versions of some of them.

They have government run liquor stores, though they seem to have private ones also. Marijuana is illegal there but it's not much of a crime supposedly and I did get a few whiffs of it walking around town.

Here is the photo album on picasa: Vancouver.