I’m flying back from our three days in Vancouver, happy and full. It was a great trip.
Last time I was out here I thought the place was a complete dump, and I’m glad to say my perspective has improved. Visiting in the depths of winter, for many people, doesn’t give you the full picture.
The pros: it is in a beautiful area. The combination of the mountains, forest, and ocean integrated together is quite special, and certainly rare. By North American standards, architecturally it’s quite nice; more homogenous and static than Chicago (my favourite) but far nicer than the monotonous (insert pretty much any city here). However, it’s certainly not Budapest, Paris, or even Berlin (which I think is an underrated architectural gem).
So what? I’m not a highly observant person, so these things aren’t deal breakers.
The weather: there is a lot of Britain in British Columbia. Some of that is positive, it is very green, but it comes at a cost of highly variable weather. On any given day we had glorious sunshine, chilly winds, rain, and low hanging fog, sometimes all before midday. It’s a place where dressing in layers seems sensible. Coming from Denver where it have been 28/80+ degrees and sunny for the past four months, it was a rude reminder that not everyone is fortunate enough to ignore the weather report.
The food: we didn’t visit many places on our trip, but we did have sushi for lunch. I always doubt the seafood inland, so I really hoed into that. Plus the chicken we got from the butcher was elite. Vancouver has a well earned reputation for its dining scene, whereas Denver is the culinary equivalent to a regional airport.
Cons
The urban blight in Vancouver is dreadful. Hastings street is the epicentre, and it is something that needs to be seen to be believed. Thousands of people, zombified, shooting heroin and smoking meth. There is no hope, no light. Only darkness. A two kilometre strip of decay and despair, littered with used needles and cracked meth pipes. People passed out in the gutter; whether they’re alive or not isn’t clear. It’s dire, and a very, very hard problem to solve.
The city is expensive as well. Not necessarily for us; when you’re on USD everything is 30% off. But for those who are living there, things looked really tough. The butter was $10, a whole chicken was $40, petrol is $1.80 a litre etc. This is in a city where the median salary is under $70k. It looked like it would be really rough, and reminded me of the fortune we have to live in the world’s biggest economy and paid in the world’s reserve currency.
Conclusion: our friends live a great life. They have a beautiful home overlooking the city, and on a summer day where the sun is shining, you see the appeal. Whistler isn’t my favourite mountain, but it’s world famous for a reason, and is on your doorstep. Winter is wet, but it isn’t brutally cold like living in Toronto or Edmonton. There’s clearly an appeal.
Visiting was great, and I am looking forward to coming back. But I’d never live there, and I don’t envy those who do.