Vancouver, Day 2
Oct. 24th, 2011 02:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
leahbobet(...and I can't quite believe that I've only been here two and a bit days. It feels like years.)
Woke up yesterday to beautiful sunshine, clear skies, the works. There's a free breakfast at the hostel before 10am and I wasn't meeting![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
subject_zero until noon, so I went down for that and ended up eating with the severely cute Dubliner and one of his roommates, a dude from Sweden who's backpacking six months in North America and then six months in New Zealand. Nothing fancy, just bagels and fruit, but it was warm and good.
Met up at noon at the coffeeshop and decided that no, we were most definitely not doing as much walking as the day before, even though I was (and am!) surprised at how well my legs are holding up to it. I've got a recurring twinge down the side of the right one, but otherwise they're perfectly good to go. All that night rambling I've been doing this summer must have paid off more than I thought. 0.o
Danny suggested Gastown, since it has a steampunk clock, is fancy, and was on the way to Chinatown anyway. So we set off to see what we could see (and scope the Gastown Fluevog store).
Gastown's interesting: part of the problem I've been having so far is that we're very much in the downtown here, and the core downtown of any North American city resembles the core downtown of any other North American city to a ridiculous degree. Part of what I want to get a sense of (for words, and also as a filthy tourist) is character. At which point we turned the corner into cobbled streets and the architecture changed into these long brick rows of buildings, and, well, character.
Gastown's pretty. It's also really gentrified, which gets interesting: you have all these galleries and restaurants and trendy things in old, old buildings, but it's almost set like a layer over what you can get the feel of it being not all that long ago. There are a lot of people panhandling or whatnot. An older street artist dude came up to us, did a sketch on what used to be a cardboard box, and used every line of patter in the book to keep us there until it was finished so we might pay him for it (we did). The poverty's even more conspicuous when it's set against the consumption.
We ducked up to Chinatown after, up a block or two which were closed off for the Downtown Eastside street market, or so said the sign: all kinds of people with blankets or not, tarps or not, selling everything from secondhand clothes to old books to just random stuff. If Gastown is for tourists, and not necessarily the kind who've come from out of town? This was not. It was sort of a mass garage sale/barter/flea market put on by the residents' association, and while it didn't entirely feel like intruding to go through, I wasn't really inclined to bother anyone.
A couple people had mentioned the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Chinese garden on Pender as a place to definitely see, and so we cut up to there. It's kind of amazingly lovely: there's a courtyard in front with the Chinese zodiac laid out in mosaics, and then you go around a statute of the Buddha, through a gate, and it's all pond and lilies and wooden walkways, and willows leaning down, and sun. There were koi in the pond, huge ones, just sort of tooling around doing their thing. There was a whole stand of bamboo on the other side, and benches, and just a general quiet. It's the kind of place that begs for art students, or a good book.
It was probably 2pm at this point, so we broke for dim sum at a dim little restaurant that had an Alvin and the Chipmunks movie on the TV screen in the corner (when you watch it with the sound off, a lot of things about Alvin and the Chipmunks do not at all make sense) and then meandered back towards Granville. Which means I have only really nibbled the edges of the Downtown Eastside, but, y'know? It was enough to get it through my head that no, maybe that wasn't the best idea, and maybe not the most respectful one besides, no matter how much I have book to write.
After a quick nose through the Fluevog on Granville (safe, because I don't have room in my bag for fancy shoes) we split up: Danny's feet hurt a lot more than mine, and he was pretty much done for the day. I headed back to the hostel, parked myself in an armchair, and wrote and wrote and wrote. So the first scene of Indestructible is down in rawest, smelliest draft; I have my way in, and it feels right and good, which nothing has on this book since I started trying to write it, about, oh, two years ago?
And then the cute Dubliner came by, and said I should come down to the bar, and I ended up drinking with backpackers from Australia and Sweden and England and everywhere else until last call.
So yesterday was extremely satisfactory, really.
Slept in this morning (too many beers, but I'm on vacation) and missed breakfast, but I have a few leftovers from the Great Stanley Park Escapade in the fridge downstairs, and I'm sure I can just grab them on my way out. The new roommate headed out this morning early, so we haven't yet introduced ourselves -- the Portland undergrads left yesterday morning. I'm not yet sure where to go and what to do today, but I'm due over at the coffeeshop to meet up in probably 25 minutes, so I'm sure we'll figure it out.
Last full day in Vancouver, today. Tomorrow we hop a bus to Seattle. Stay tuned.
Woke up yesterday to beautiful sunshine, clear skies, the works. There's a free breakfast at the hostel before 10am and I wasn't meeting
subject_zero until noon, so I went down for that and ended up eating with the severely cute Dubliner and one of his roommates, a dude from Sweden who's backpacking six months in North America and then six months in New Zealand. Nothing fancy, just bagels and fruit, but it was warm and good.Met up at noon at the coffeeshop and decided that no, we were most definitely not doing as much walking as the day before, even though I was (and am!) surprised at how well my legs are holding up to it. I've got a recurring twinge down the side of the right one, but otherwise they're perfectly good to go. All that night rambling I've been doing this summer must have paid off more than I thought. 0.o
Danny suggested Gastown, since it has a steampunk clock, is fancy, and was on the way to Chinatown anyway. So we set off to see what we could see (and scope the Gastown Fluevog store).
Gastown's interesting: part of the problem I've been having so far is that we're very much in the downtown here, and the core downtown of any North American city resembles the core downtown of any other North American city to a ridiculous degree. Part of what I want to get a sense of (for words, and also as a filthy tourist) is character. At which point we turned the corner into cobbled streets and the architecture changed into these long brick rows of buildings, and, well, character.
Gastown's pretty. It's also really gentrified, which gets interesting: you have all these galleries and restaurants and trendy things in old, old buildings, but it's almost set like a layer over what you can get the feel of it being not all that long ago. There are a lot of people panhandling or whatnot. An older street artist dude came up to us, did a sketch on what used to be a cardboard box, and used every line of patter in the book to keep us there until it was finished so we might pay him for it (we did). The poverty's even more conspicuous when it's set against the consumption.
We ducked up to Chinatown after, up a block or two which were closed off for the Downtown Eastside street market, or so said the sign: all kinds of people with blankets or not, tarps or not, selling everything from secondhand clothes to old books to just random stuff. If Gastown is for tourists, and not necessarily the kind who've come from out of town? This was not. It was sort of a mass garage sale/barter/flea market put on by the residents' association, and while it didn't entirely feel like intruding to go through, I wasn't really inclined to bother anyone.
A couple people had mentioned the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Chinese garden on Pender as a place to definitely see, and so we cut up to there. It's kind of amazingly lovely: there's a courtyard in front with the Chinese zodiac laid out in mosaics, and then you go around a statute of the Buddha, through a gate, and it's all pond and lilies and wooden walkways, and willows leaning down, and sun. There were koi in the pond, huge ones, just sort of tooling around doing their thing. There was a whole stand of bamboo on the other side, and benches, and just a general quiet. It's the kind of place that begs for art students, or a good book.
It was probably 2pm at this point, so we broke for dim sum at a dim little restaurant that had an Alvin and the Chipmunks movie on the TV screen in the corner (when you watch it with the sound off, a lot of things about Alvin and the Chipmunks do not at all make sense) and then meandered back towards Granville. Which means I have only really nibbled the edges of the Downtown Eastside, but, y'know? It was enough to get it through my head that no, maybe that wasn't the best idea, and maybe not the most respectful one besides, no matter how much I have book to write.
After a quick nose through the Fluevog on Granville (safe, because I don't have room in my bag for fancy shoes) we split up: Danny's feet hurt a lot more than mine, and he was pretty much done for the day. I headed back to the hostel, parked myself in an armchair, and wrote and wrote and wrote. So the first scene of Indestructible is down in rawest, smelliest draft; I have my way in, and it feels right and good, which nothing has on this book since I started trying to write it, about, oh, two years ago?
And then the cute Dubliner came by, and said I should come down to the bar, and I ended up drinking with backpackers from Australia and Sweden and England and everywhere else until last call.
So yesterday was extremely satisfactory, really.
Slept in this morning (too many beers, but I'm on vacation) and missed breakfast, but I have a few leftovers from the Great Stanley Park Escapade in the fridge downstairs, and I'm sure I can just grab them on my way out. The new roommate headed out this morning early, so we haven't yet introduced ourselves -- the Portland undergrads left yesterday morning. I'm not yet sure where to go and what to do today, but I'm due over at the coffeeshop to meet up in probably 25 minutes, so I'm sure we'll figure it out.
Last full day in Vancouver, today. Tomorrow we hop a bus to Seattle. Stay tuned.
