Vancouver

We spent the past weekend at a conference in Vancouver BC. I had never spent much time in the city, so we took Sunday afternoon (after the conference had ended) to do a bit of exploring.

The west part of town, towards the university, is quite nice. A relatively dense residential zone with two major commercial corridors full of cafes and shops. Public transit seems pretty good, and the bike-route system seems quite extensive. We enjoyed plentiful sushi, a 24-hour coffee shop (with great desserts), and strolling on the nearby beach.

Downtown itself seems pretty boring; we headed a bit east towards Gastown and Chinatown. As is the case with most urban "Chinatowns" in cities in western north America, the vast majority of the Asian population no longer lives in the historical Chinatown, but in the suburbs. So it wasn't a great surprise to find Chinatown a shell of what it must have been before the flight to the suburbs in the '50s and '60s.

What was a surprise was the large number of junkies, bums, and rabble running around the greater Chinatown-Gastown area. We hadn't been out of our car more than 5 minutes by the time I'd witnessed a drug deal, someone shooting up with heroin, etc. Wow. Later on we saw a block-long line of people waiting to get into a rehab center. This part of town needs a lot of attention, as to the many desperate people living there.