A couple of years ago I went to Vancouver to do a little thing on William Gibson. The William Gibson thing didnt come to pass but I hung out for three days had a very nice time. I got a deal on Orbitz and stayed at the Pan Pacific for 1 dollar a night and the view I had from my room was spectacular, looking down on flying boats landing in the bay. I had great breakfasts and fantastic fish meals in the evenings and I went to a donut factory for lunch. I took a kayak tour of the city and went running in the gorgeous Stanley Park. On my third and last day I took the bus out to UBC to see the campus and some locations for Battlestar Galactica (yes I know you dont even need to say it). I walked around UBC for a few hours and then I discovered a trail down to the sea. It was quite stormy and I found myself on this windswept place called Wreck Beach. The visibility was extraordinary. You could see all the way up to the mountains in the north, in the far west Vancouver Island and in the south almost down to Puget Sound. The sky was blue and it was cold and the beach was littered with big trees from the forests further up the Inland Passage. I stayed there alone watching the sun set over VI and the Pacific. It was extraordinary and peaceful and as close as I've ever gotten to any feeling of transcendence on this Earth....
I flew back to Denver and told the wife and said she had go to Vancouver and especially to Wreck Beach. She went in June, stayed at the Pan Pacific ate at the fish restaurants, ran in Stanley Park, took the kayak tour. I begged her to go out to UBC and down to Wreck Beach and as soon as she got there to call me and talk to me about it. I was so excited waiting for her call, because I wanted her to experience the same feeling of transcendence that I had had and to get a bit of it back myself. She went to UBC, then to Wreck Beach and then she called me. "Well, how was it?" I asked. "Fine," Leah said. "Fine? Fine?! What do you mean fine," I said. She hesitated. "What is it?" I asked. "It would have been great but for all the penises," Leah said.
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You see Wreck Beach is a nude beach and on that particular June day it was full of creepy swinger dudes with chest chair and medallions who had all walked over to Leah to say "hey baby" and stuff like that. Yikes. But it demonstrates what Thomas Wolfe rightly pointed out a long time ago "you can't go home again, asshole, you can't go home again."
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(I think the title of this blog post is a double entendre in French Canadian but if it doesnt work somebody please let me know.)
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And for those of you looking for my review of Garry Disher's latest you can finally read it here. (I'm chuffed about the Blade Runner ref that I snuck by the sub editors).
24 comments:
Sounds like a nice place. What were you going to say about Gibson? All I've read of his is Neuromancer, which I thought was cool. Then I saw the Matrix, which I also thought was cool, but I couldn't believe how badly it ripped off Neuromancer.
I think the real moral of the story is that you can't send anyone anywhere and expect them to have the same experience you had. It sounds like it was pretty nice without all the naked people on it, though.
I'll check out your review later.
I’ve been up to Vancouver many times, it’s only 3 hours away, but I wasn’t aware that there were swinging penises at Wreck Beach. I guess I went at the wrong time (or the right time, depending on how you look at it).
That line of Wolfe's rang true for my old man and his brothers when the government sold their family's ranch in North Vancouver during WWII. Kinda rough being a Japanese-Canadian back then...and being officers in the Canadian army didn't help much either.
Vancouver is a lovely city, though, and it's really grown up in the last 20 years. It was a small town back in the 80s. Chinatown is in pretty rough shape and the homeless problem is staggering. Terrible urban sprawl. But still a beautiful place to visit. Great food. Great public library. Expensive city, though. A few years ago I read an article which surveyed what sort of home $1 mil would buy in Canada. In Toronto, a very nice townhouse. In Winnipeg, a mansion. In Vancouver, a shack.
That donut place, maybe the one on Granville island? I remember there was a place there which made great donuts.
Adrian, you should write a travelogue. Actually, you could do 'a Bryson' and write about growing up in Carrifckfergus, working in NY and going to Melbourne as well as your various travels in between. I'd like to read that.
HB
I was supposed to be doing a "William Gibson's Vancouver" thing but for one reason or another it all fell apart. Not WG's fault.
I like his stuff. I really liked Pattern Recognition among his recent work.
Seana
Yeah or even try and experience the same thing again. Cant be done. Not really.
Holden
The right time.
Matt
Exactly Granville Island. I stuffed my face but the one I particularly remember was the "old fashioned" which was great.
The time to buy in Vancouver would have been the 1980's. Its impossible now.
Interesting about being Japanese Canadian. At least (I assume anyway) they didnt end up in internment camps. FDR's biggest mistake if you ask me. Well that and letting MacArthur recapture the Philippines.
Mike
I think Bryson's got that market cornered. I like this new thing the BBC do which is to take a comedian and for no reason just plonk him down in a foreign country and watch him sweat and make fun of the locals. Paul Merton in India/China etc. Stephen Fry in wherever. Highly original programming.
Adrian, it's like they saw Michael Palin trekking all over and thought, "Hey, this isn't a TV programme, this is a genre!"
I hear what you're saying about Bryson, but there's always room for another. :)
Adrian, Mike wants you to do a travelogue, I want you to be a travel writer and you want to do some version of the two. What is the hold up?
I have to say that I really don't agree with the idea that you can't go back to a place and be as happy there as you were before. It would seem to be a given, but isn't. I was afraid that would happen when I went to Paris for the second time, but it wasn't, in fact it was even better. London has actually been as good or better. New York has definitely been as good or better each time I've gone. I was going to say that maybe it's just cities, but actually, I've been back to visit my family in the Midwest and that hasn't deteriorated either. Great time on my cousin's farm last summer and I just got the pictures to prove it.
Maybe it's when you expect things to stay the same that you get in trouble. I don't know if it's possible not to hope for that, but when you just take what comes, its better.
Donuts for lunch. Now that's a concept.
Michael
Well at least its not another cooking show, eh?
Seana
Someday when I get my act together.
I've rarely experienced things being better than they were the first time. Except maybe Ben and Jerry's Chubby Hubby.
That donut place BTW is next to a microbrewery, a cooking school with samples for sale, a place where they load fresh fish and fry it up and a chocolateer.
Oh dear.
I'm actually curious to go back to Venice someday, because I had a negative impression which may or may not have had something to do with the city itself.
Adrian, yes Japanese-Canadians ended up in internment camps. So did German-Canadians.
I've been told that there's no double entendre in Canadian French in your title: The end of the world, or the edge of the world. If you had used the term Cul which means ass and also bottom, you might have gotten by.
Signed, Sheiler
Sheiler
Now I'm really confused. I just got an email saying that "bout" means what I thought it meant in slang.
John
Didnt know that. Did the Canadians also raise a regiment like the high decorated 442nd infantry I wonder.
Adrian, well I checked it out with the missus. But she's a theatre person. Which means that up can sometimes be down, or even yellow, or even to the third power. I guess I'd go with your other source. I should have known to check with her. We once had a disagreement over whether or not the Jews celebrate Easter. She, Jewish, said yes. I had to call my Catholic mother so that someone 'credible' would explain to her that no, Jews do not celebrate Easter even if the name is in Hebrew.
I could hear my mother wiping tears from her eyes, amid the coughing and laughing.
So is bout something worse than arse? Does it have something to do with all of the low hanging fruit at the beach?
Signed again, Sheila
Sheiler,
Supposedly the kids say it. But you cant trust those kids.
I liked the review, by the way, which I just got around to reading. I'd like to say that I caught the Bladerunner reference, but all I can say is that I noticed the phrase Voight-Kampff empathy test and had to look it up.
Seems like there is room for more than just Peter Temple in the Melbourne crime writing scene.
Seana
Its the little things that make us happy. No one else noticed or cared, but it tickled me.
What timing.
This aricle about a Tintin translation into Quebecois was in the paper here today.
Ah, Quebec, this endless political-language debates were never fun but in an odd way I miss them.
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