26 March 2014

We intended to make our last full day in Vancouver a rather lazy day, with a couple of leisurely strolls through relatively nearby neighborhoods and a bit of casual souvenir shopping. And that’s pretty much how it started, with a morning walk through Yaletown, which feels very much like Portland’s Pearl District, where I teach at PNCA. In fact, Yaletown has almost exactly the same history as the Pearl: a former industrial warehouse district upcycled to a trendy (and fairly spendy) commercial and arts district. But the restaurants and boutiques in Yaletown are at least 50% more expensive (slash-pretentious) than Portland’s Pearl — at one home décor shop, we found a lovely little silk-shaded chandelier that was on sale for $4,000! — so we didn’t end up buying anything in Yaletown.

We did stop at Goorin Bros. Hat Shop, which was excellent and actually one of the few shops in the right price range — the hats were all on the expensive side, but they’re excellently made and worth the price. I nearly bought a cowboy hat (people who know me, don’t scoff — my Papa always wore a fine, low-crown “gambler” style cowboy hat, a style that actually looks okay on me, and I figure it would make for a good camping hat), but the fit was a half-size too small and the crown a half-inch too tall. I had fun trying on all the other hats, but I have a limited range, really: I can’t pull off newsboys, fisherman’s hats, flat caps, military “scout” caps, berets, or, I discovered today, bowlers. All the rest of the hats that might look decent on me, I already own in a variety of colors and patterns and fabrics. So, no dice on the hats, which was a shame, but the shopping experience was still fun — Jennifer had a ball trying on cloches and pillboxes and slouch hats, and the sound system was playing old Motown and Stax soul the whole time, including a run of Sam and Dave.

With shopping a bust in Yaletown, we moved on to Granville Island. We’ve been walking practically everywhere in Vancouver because it’s an exceptionally walkable city, and looking at the map, we figured we’d simply walk along Granville over False Creek to the island. It looks easy enough on paper. But the map is deceptive: actually, the Granville Bridge extends up and over the entire island, depositing cars and pedestrians on the south side, so we got gorgeous views of the city and False Creek and even Granville Island itself as we passed above it, but we also had a l-o-n-g hike that basically doubled our travel time. (Pro-tip: take the ferry. At ten bucks a ticket, they’re rather spendy for such a short hop across a narrow channel of water, which is why we stupidly skipped them and walked it, but the ticket is good for the whole day and the convenience is worth it. Our feet are pretty pissed off at us right now.)

When you consider what Granville Island is — arts and crafts shops and public markets — you’d be forgiven for assuming it would be just some flea market-cum-tourist trap full of overpriced craft souvenirs and wannabe artists with a weekend gig selling their hobbies. But it’s not that way at all. For one thing, you’re not even allowed to set up shop on the island unless you’re a working artist or craftsperson, and by working, I mean that most of the storefronts we saw were at the front end of — or even inside of — the artists’ functioning workshops or studios. We saw several artists painting and had a lovely chat with a woodworker carving beautiful wooden birds, and in a quirky kiddie décor shop, the saleswoman entertained us by telling us details about every artist of every piece in the store. So when you walk into a place, you know these people aren’t mere hobbyists; these are working artists. For another thing, the work is good, no matter how silly it can sometimes get (we saw plenty of silliness, including a fun little postcard shop of locally printed sketches and engravings and a huge kids market with toys and games and puppets galore). For another thing, you actually get to talk with the people making the work, and that makes a big difference. In fact, one of the most interesting places on the island, which we hadn’t even known to look for, was the Emily Carr University, an art and design college on the island where students also have gallery space. (We stopped at the library, of course, where I was pleased to find the writing center right up front, tutors on duty right there in the main lobby.) In short, Granville Island is the real deal.

Best of all, the “crafts” on the island include wineries, craft breweries, and even a local British Columbia sake maker. That latter was our midday respite, with a three-round tasting flight of sake made right there on the island by a Japanese sake maker, using rice he grows in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley — allegedly the northernmost rice paddies in the world. I’ve had sake in Japanese restaurants before, both warm and cold, but I’m not at all versed in sake tasting, so getting a flight at the sake-maker’s own place was a treat. We even bought a bottle to bring home (it will make for great summer sipping!).

We had lunch inside the huge Granville Island Public Market, a covered market space with as many fruit stands and corner cafés as craft shops. We were tempted by the huge pot pies at a pie shop, but the lines were long and our stomachs small, so we went for burgers — Jennifer loved her teriyaki burger; my Cajun veggie burger was good, but it’s hard to sell me on veggie burgers anymore after yesterday’s fabulous meal at Naam.

We wound up our island trip with a bit more shopping and a three-round craft beer tasting in the Granville Island Taproom (the Island Lager was my favorite; Jennifer preferred the Honey Lager), and then we braced ourselves for the l-o-n-g walk back over the bridge. Bracing ourselves didn’t help: it was fairly torturous despite the beautiful views, and by the time we made it into downtown, we opted to just head back to the apartment, where we ate take-away pizza from a corner dive in the ground floor of our building ($5.50 for two slices and a soda, and the pizza was actually really good). Then we played a few more hands of gin, planned our early morning trip to the train station, and it was off to bed for (literally) a handful of hours of sleep before our train leaves in the morning.

Tomorrow: final thoughts, photos, and some comments on the delightful train ride aboard Amtrak!

25 March 2014

I’ve written about this before, but my paternal grandfather was a merchant ship captain — technically still is, since he remains a master mariner, though he’s in his 90s and has been retired for decades now. His father was also a master mariner, as was his father before him. And so on, for generations.

So, whenever I have the excuse to do so, I like to hit maritime museums, and Vancouver has one, out in the Kitsilano area. The museum sits across False Creek from downtown and faces English Bay; we saw its distinctive A-frame building from the English Bay Beach yesterday.

I was eager to visit it regardless, because it’s a maritime museum and because, in our limited experience, Canada seems to do its history museums right — we were impressed by all the ones we visited in Prince Edward Island years ago, and the Vancouver Maritime Museum today was no different. But I was especially excited because that A-frame building also houses the RCMP vessel St. Roch. I don’t mean a model of the ship (though the museum holds dozens of gorgeous model ships); I don’t mean a replica of the ship. I mean that the actual artic sea vessel, bow to stern, keel to crow’s nest, sits inside the building.

And I love boarding historic ships.

I love standing at the helm, hand on old-fashioned wheel, and I love exploring below decks, poking my head into the sleeping quarters and the mess. But I didn’t realize going in just exactly what made this ship so special. Turns out, this is the ship that finally made it across the fabled Northwest Passage. Actually, another ship had made the arduous and often fatal voyage before, so the St. Roch was the second to sail east to west through the artic, but it was the first to make the journey coming the other direction, west to east. So, standing aboard that humble but sturdy and well-preserved vessel, you are literally standing aboard history.

The rest of the museum is equally amazing (there is an exceptional exhibit on the immigration of Punjabi Sikhs to Canada, including a starkly honest appraisal of Canada’s racist past — and present — in language that American pride and politics would rarely allow, and it was both astounding and refreshing to behold; the museum’s sections on the Inuit peoples was equally honest and applause-worthy), and while we arrived concurrent with a field trip of what looked like kindergarteners, the museum staff and the school’s chaperons did an excellent job of maintaining order, and we thoroughly enjoyed the whole visit.

Afterward, we headed down to trendy 4th St. to window-shop and find some food. (The Kitsilano neighborhood came highly recommended, not only by our guidebook but also by our chiropractor, whose husband is Canadian.) The shops were fun but not tempting enough to part us from our cash, but then we found lunch at a little restaurant called Naam, and just like that, I fell in love.

Naam has been around since the 70s, when Kitsilano was Vancouver’s hippie-central and 4th St. was called Rainbow Road, and the vibe of the place remains true to that heritage, complete with old wooden tables and mismatched chairs, the brick accent walls and the dark wood trim, a little wood-burning stove for heat and a carved-wood banquette for teas and coffee, prayer flags and paintings of trees and photos of buddhas. The overhead lamps had shades of handmade paper. The sound system played the first CAKE album in its entirety. Even the people seemed part of the décor: from the street, I saw pairs of middle-aged white women eating sandwiches and pairs of young Asian women eating ramen; as we entered, I spotted an elderly Sikh man waiting for his bill and a young hipster in a punk tshirt under his long lotus-bead mala and black linen jacket talking politics with a friend; we were greeted by a kid who looked like a young Matthew Broderick, a self-declared nerd who asked about the buttons on my bag (the Autobot symbol, the Thundercats logo, a cartoon Superman, a Bayou magazine button, a Reading Frenzy button, and a button that reads “writer”); we were served water by a girl in a hand-knit TMNT sweater; one of the waitresses wore a black smiley-face tshirt and kept her long dreds under a backward ball cap; our waiter wore an argyle-print shirt under a plain, unbuttoned dress shirt. In short, this was the kind of local place where literally everyone feels welcome and at ease, a kind of neighborhood living room. It was the sort of relaxed, hip atmosphere we were expecting at the Melriches coffeehouse yesterday — Naam got that vibe right, and then some.

Also, it boasts a hell of a menu: Mexican, Asian-fusion, burgers and dogs, chili and soups, and it’s all vegetarian — no meat allowed — and it included loads of vegan and gluten-free options as well. Jennifer had the chili with a giant salad, hearty home-baked bread, and a local honey brown lager; I had a Sam’s Five-Star Burger (that’s actually the name of the burger patty, handmade at Naam, and it’s hands-down the best veggie burger I’ve ever had, anywhere, ever) with sesame fries (actually thick potato wedges with sesame seeds clinging to them, served with a miso gravy instead of ketchup), a giant salad, and a local IPA.

I’m carrying on like this about a lunch because it was simply that fantastic. The whole experience. It was easily the highlight of my day — I even bought a tshirt advertising the place! If you’re ever in Vancouver, this is where you want to have lunch and/or dinner. Hell, if you’re not in Vancouver, come visit this town just so you can have a meal at Naam. Seriously. It’s that good.

Eventually, though, we had to move on, so we kept strolling down 4th St. and window-shopping. Despite how full we were from lunch, we even stopped in at Sophie’s Cosmic Café for one of their famous milkshakes (strawberry, and it was delicious) while taking in the kitschy diner décor and enjoying the classic Johnny Cash playing over the sound system. Finally, though, we caught a bus back downtown to the Vancouver Art Museum, which opens up Tuesday evenings for “by donation” entries, which is cheaper than regular admission.

As excellent as Canada’s history museums have proven to be, the country apparently needs to work on its art museums. The Vancouver Art Museum is touted as one of the best and largest art museums in the country, and it’s a fine museum and a beautiful building, but if this is one of the largest, the rest must be pitifully small. Also, the whole first floor is currently devoted to Lawren Harris in part because he is recognized (in this museum, anyway) as one of the most important figures in defining and supporting Canadian art, but the glowing and insistent language the exhibit uses implies that Canada hasn’t actually had a strong history of support for the arts, or at least for visual arts.

(Actually, where the Vancouver Maritime Museum today and the Stanley Park totem poles yesterday did an excellent job promoting the value and importance of First Nations art and culture in Canada, the Vancouver Art Museum seems to have an almost exclusively white, European/North American bias in its collection and presentation, which I thought odd. It might be true that Harris promoted and preserved the Canadian art scene, but only because no one was — or is, in this museum — including Native arts in that scene. Apparently, they’re still “other.”)

While I’m not generally a fan of the kind of modernist abstract art that Harris eventually settled on in his later career, I found his early transitional work quite exciting, especially his bold use of texture and stylized line in his expressionist landscapes. And it made for an excellent companion to the third-floor exhibit of Edward Burtynsky photographs, a powerful, moving artistic statement about our place in the natural world and our role in the planet’s transformation (one might say destruction).

I only wish we hadn’t had to pass through the oddly out-of-place exhibit of Myfawny MacLeod’s ultra-modern art, which consists mostly of found objects and middle-fingers (sometimes literally) to establishment attitudes. If the exhibit had been a student show, displaying pieces in which a young artist is exploring her artistic world and figuring out how she wants to express herself, I would have found the art interesting, some of it even exciting. But given MacLeod’s existing career and alleged standing in the local Vancouver art community, the whole thing came off as weirdly unrealized, immature even. Even then, it might not have seemed so disappointing had it not served as an out-of-place buffer between the Harris and the Burtynsky, which made such great companion exhibits I wish they’d been presented back-to-back, without the intervention of MacLeod.

Anyway, by the time we’d finished with the museum, we were ready for some dinner, so we headed to La Bodega, a little tapas place downtown that Jennifer found. The décor here might seem corny at first — plastered walls with wrought-iron gates and amber lamps, inexpensive poster-prints of lesser Picassos, the Gypsy Kings playing over the stereo — but it’s actually so over the top “Spanish” that it’s kind of charming. I figure if a place is going to go faux-authentic, they might as well go all in, and La Bodego freaking commits. Also, the food is good (fairly excellent, considering how relatively inexpensive it is), and the half-pitcher of fresh-made sangria, full of orange slices and apple wedges, that Jennifer and I shared was the perfect refreshing end-of-day complement to our meal.

In fact, it was a perfect way to end our day overall, as Jennifer and I sipped sangria and discussed art and food and history and culture. It was the kind of evening that makes me love travelling with my wife — these long, reflective discussions we have, they feel like a kind of recurring fifteenth date, where we’re perfectly comfortable with each other but we’re still discovering things about each other, still surprising each other, still finding new things to say. I don’t know if travelling simply provides us with new topics to discuss or if it’s something subtler, like the journey changes the context of our usual conversations and we find new ways to say old things. But I always delight in these moments, even after seventeen years together. And despite my gushing about lunch earlier, if Jennifer asks, this is actually my favorite thing today, and most days.

24 March 2014

We woke early this morning because the weather was supposed to be wonderful again and we wanted to beat the crowds to Stanley Park. We needn’t have worried — the weather was wonderful but still a bit cool and overcast, and it’s a Monday, so the park wasn’t crowded at all. Still, it was nice to give ourselves the extra time to explore, because Stanley Park is enormous, not quite as large and nowhere near as lose-yourself secluded as Portland’s Forest Park but huge and impressive nonetheless. We spent most of our time strolling along the lengthy walk around the seawall, enjoying gorgeous vistas of the downtown city skyline and the snow-dusted mountains beyond North Vancouver (and dodging cyclists who insisted on riding in the walking lanes). Near Brockton Point, we took a detour to see the totem poles, recent replicas of older replicas of much older originals, preserved here to honor the native First Nations peoples who used to live in what is now the park. The totem poles were fascinating and beautiful and very informatively presented — we learned a lot in our short visit here!

After a tempting turn through the gift shop, we returned to the seawall to find the Brockton Point lighthouse (we have a thing for lighthouses, developed on our trips to Prince Edward Island, but this one was fairly unimpressive) and the various quirky statues along the walk. Once we’d rounded the point, we made our way back into the park to find the miniature train (a disappointment, actually) and then to the Warren G. (the G stands for Gamaliel!) Harding memorial, which was a bizarre but ultimately pleasant (or at least informative) surprise. It was erected not only to honor Harding’s visit to Canada in 1923, the first by a sitting US President (it took that long!?!?) but also in memory of Harding, who died in San Francisco a week after his visit to Vancouver. Plus — I feel the need to repeat this — Harding’s middle name was Gamaliel! As Jennifer said, who knew we’d have to come to Canada to learn so much about a US President?

Frankly, Brockton Point is just a tiny thumb in the whole great fist that is Stanley Park, and I would love to revisit it someday for some serious hiking, but we had a lot of walking yet to do today, so we took the bus back out to West End, where we had excellent miso and ramen at Motomachi Shokudo, followed by a long walk through the West End — stately homes nestled among mid-century apartment complexes and towering, Soviet-looking concrete apartment towers. Eventually we found ourselves at the quaint little Barclay Heritage Square and the Roedde House Museum; the latter was closed, but it was nice to see nonetheless, and Jennifer in particular enjoyed the whole area. Then it was northwest through the gay community along Davie St., where we were looking for a guidebook-recommended coffeehouse called Melriches (“This is the kind of place where Morrisey would hang out on a wet Monday afternoon to check his emails”). It was fine, but crowded and hot and with a bored/rude barista, so not really what we were hoping for. Oh well.

We ended up at English Bay Beach, which was perfect for relaxing in the emerging sunshine and the cool sand while leaning against huge logs to watch a flotilla of cargo ships collected in the bay.

Nearby, we discovered a bizarre collection of bronze statues, huge grinning behemoths making exaggerated gestures of laughter and glee. The sculptures, by Chinese artist Yue Minjun, were erected to “inspire laughter, playfulness and joy in all who experience it,” and sure enough, we both found ourselves cracking up as we imitated the statues for photos, and for me, it turned out to be the highlight of the day!

Still smiling, we headed back across West End along Denman to take the bus down Georgia into downtown, where we indulged in a little window-shopping along Granville before walking back toward home. Along the way, we stopped for dinner at Japadog, a weird but hugely popular little dive (they also have food carts scattered everywhere in the city) where they serve hotdogs prepared with Japanese toppings and seasonings — I had a veggie dog with seaweed, fried onions, Japanese mayo, and teriyaki sauce, and it was delicious; Jennifer’s, a pork brat with grated radish and cabbage, was also good but a bit much in flavor. We also had fries cooked in butter that were amazing.

Tired (and overwhelmed by the Japadog flavors), we retreated to the apartment for a bit of gin rummy before venturing out for coffee and donuts (and free wifi) at Tim Horton’s, then it was back to the apartment for a stint in the sauna and hot tub. Another round of gin rummy (Jennifer won both games) and we were more than ready for bed. Fortunately, tomorrow is a bit less dependent on time, so we’ll get to sleep in a bit, something I’m very much looking forward to!