Frances Bula header image 2

Oh no, another lovely day

January 15th, 2010 · 16 Comments

Damn. A gorgeous afternoon. Blue, blue sky flecked with puffy cream and gray clouds, the container loaders of the port vivid orange against the green mountains with their white tops. The float plane banks in to land and the seagulls are circling over Burrard Inlet.

And Vancouver the city seems beautiful in all its different ways. I had to trek around most of the city today, so I got to marvel again at how this doesn’t seem so much like one city as seventeen completely different ones. No wonder film crews love it here — there’s no sense of unity at all that makes any corner of the city instantly identifiable as Vancouver.

When you’re downtown these days on the grand avenue between the glossy new convention centre and the steel and glass towers of the Shaw Building and the Fairmont, it seems as though this hyper-modern, magazine-ready downtown can’t possibly be part of the same city as the utterly unambitious little stucco bungalows, circa World War Two, of Nanaimo and Grandview or the milling crowds in front of the heavy stone presence of the Carnegie Centre at Main and Hastings or even the 80s bathtub-tile look of the old Canada Place.

And a sunny, warm winter day makes every one of them look charming or spectacular  in their own way. Damn. All those tourists will be here soon, saying, “Hey, this seems like a cool and gorgeous place place. Maybe we should move here or buy a little pied-a-terre.” Just what we don’t need.

Categories: Uncategorized