Vancouver
May 28, May 29
The taxi came at 4AM. Our itinerary would get us to Vancouver at noon (PST), but, because of having to coordinate two separate frequent flier programs with their own restrictions, we’d have to route through Houston first. In a sense, over the course of the next two weeks, we’d travel from almost the very south of the country to the very north, albeit we’d see this southern point only as a sequence of glass hallways kept well cool by Texas-sized airconditioners, as opposed to the wind-swept Arctic ocean beach. Besides going to Texas, the flights were uneventful.
Passing through customs and immigration at the airport took a little longer than expected. There were many booths, all manned, and they were asking the usual cursory questions to US and Canadian citizens, but they couldn’t keep up with the planeloads of passengers being dumped into the airport at that hour. Interestingly, the officials had Kevlar vests but didn’t appear to be armed. The cruise line offered a way to bypass immigration: ship passengers would gather at various points in the airport, and the tour operators would lead them to buses that would be sealed by US immigration; they’d go to the pier directly and embark directly. This option was only available if you arrive the day the ship sails. We decided to come the day before the sailing, so as not to miss the cruise because of unexpected airline delays. And we wanted to explore Vancouver a little.
I expensively exchanged US$100 for around C$120 at the airport: not much cash, but I expected to use the credit card often — the bank will get a better exchange rate than I will. (In retrospect, it would have been cheaper to just use an ATM and pay the small surcharge to pull out cash.) Perhaps ironically, the first bit of Canadian cash was used to buy something at the airport Starbuck’s while we waited for the hotel shuttle to arrive. The shuttle took a while to weave through local streets — Vancouver’s airport isn’t serviced by highways that run through the city, which probably makes the city nicer to look at, but annoying to travel through.
We had redeemed years worth of frequent flier miles in support of the cruise. The flights to-and-from were free. The hotel rooms in Vancouver were free. We stayed at the downtown Hyatt, and there was a balcony for our room: pretty good for something paid for with vouchers. The bellhop suggested a few places to go to; we were actually interested in Vancouver’s Chinatown, as Cleveland’s is a sprinkling of restaurants and stores scattered amongst derelict factories and warehouses. It was a only fifteen minute walk away down Pender Street, and we hadn’t really eaten lunch yet. The bellhop noted, however, that this was a walk you wouldn’t want to make at night: the area gets dicey.
Between Downtown Vancouver and Chinatown is a stretch of blocks that have seen better days, though not as bad as Midtown Cleveland (though one tends to drive through Cleveland as opposed to walking). Chinatown itself isn’t particularly large, perhaps a bit bigger than Boston’s Chinatown. It’s a little surprising, since Vancouver considers itself a Pacific Rim city, with a large Asian population; perhaps the locals consider the area low rent and tend to set up shop elsewhere. The restaurants there aren’t high end, featuring lots of Formica, but the pork buns there were pretty good; the steamed rice noodles, not so much, but we were hungry. Some of the streets were crowded and overflowed with the usual Chinatown-type open-air groceries of all sorts of fish or all sorts of dried things, which was refreshing after not seeing this sort of thing for a long time. There was also something called the Sun Yat-Sen gardens there. There’s a pay section which we didn’t go into, but the free, public area was nice, a spot of green tucked between low-rise buildings off Pender Street.
We walked north from Chinatown to a district called Historical Gastown, which was apparently one of the first areas settled in Vancouver. It’s a dense area, filled with cafes, restaurants and tourist shops. (Interestingly, I saw two in-the-open drug sales as we were walking to the center of Gastown, in the seedier section just to the south. Times have changed in New York, as I don’t remember the last time I saw something this.) One of the landmarks of Gastown is a steam-powered clock. Perhaps for show, steam escapes from the top. The body of the clock is sheathed in glass, so you can see the gears turning.
Going through Gastown took us to an old railway station, now a mass-transit stop. Across the way is the Harbor Center observation deck. We didn’t go up it for pictures, because we were a little short of time and the light was bad. We did wander over to the waterside, though, and saw the cruiseship docks and the Vancouver convention center. Our ship hadn’t arrive yet — it was due in at 6AM the next morning — but the two ships departing that day were there. Amusingly, someone asked me to take a picture of him standing in front of the ship since he saw my digital SLR: he figured I’d know how to use his ancient Pentax. He perhaps was wrong on this, since I’m not sure how the exposure meter on the thing worked and I didn’t realize it was manual focus until afterwards. At least I know I didn’t have my thumb covering the lens.
Closer to the berthed ships, at the convention center, we saw a large number of high school kids in tuxes and ball gowns: it was prom night in Vancouver! They were having their pictures taken at the pier before heading in to the party.
Following that weird FoodTV junkie path, we had dinner that night at Lumiere: Rob Feenie had coincidentally appeared on Iron Chef America when we were planning our trip. My heart did sink a little when we saw that Lumiere advertised itself on the back of Vancouver buses — Babbo doesn’t do that! — but the food was very good. A little unusually, they allowed each of us to have separate tasting menus, with their “vegetarian” and “kitchen” menus having the same ridiculously large number of courses. Grace and I would eat half a plate and switch with each other. In this way, we sort of had a 18-course meal between us.
When we came back from Lumiere, the prom kids had jammed up our hotel’s lobby. Apparently, the harborside photos were just that, and the real event was happening a few floors below us in the hotel ballrooms.
Lumiere is actually a bit out of the way, and we took cabs to and from; we didn’t get around to seeing Downtown Vancouver until the next day, when we had some hours to kill in between checking out of the hotel and boarding the ship. Walking south down Burrard and west along Robson, we hit streets lined with little shops and restaurants, and crowded with people. It was kind of like a shinier, upscale version of St. Mark’s Place — there were a lot of Japanese restaurants and boutiques. I think our bellhop was right: we should have gone here instead of schlepping to Chinatown for Asian food. (There were a few closed storefronts, one of them advertising Robo-Sushi: watch your sushi order being made by a robot! I would have liked to have seen that.) Interestingly, this area of Vancouver has a Starbuck’s across the street from another Starbuck’s. Oh, the Breadgarden Cafe on Robson and Bute has free Internet access after purchase: there were fewer free hotspots than I expected, or they didn’t advertise this amenity very well. This was the closest place near the hotel that we found.
We eventually worked our way west to the park that lines that end of the penisula, but didn’t have time to do much but walk just outside before heading back to the hotel along the waterfront. Vancouver is a city we’d like to see more of, rather than incidentally, over scattered days around a bigger trip: there are bike rentals just outside Stanley Park, but that would have been days in itself.
Checking into the ship actually took longer than passing through customs at the airport. Since we were now entering US territory, we had to pass through US customs, which had booths set up on the pier. The lines were long. US Customs, however, was not the end of it, as Holland America had its own checkpoint, to make sure you fill out forms for charging incidental purchases, forms declaring that you don’t have a cold and therefore won’t be Patient Zero in a ship-wide epidemic, etc. I never thought vacations would involve so much paperwork.
This was basically our honeymoon, since we didn’t really have time to go away after the wedding — residency interviews, the Match, moving, etc., happened instead — so we splurged on our stateroom and got one with a balcony. Unexpectedly, we had a number of fringe benefits with that stateroom, such as the use of the Neptune Lounge and its vast supply of food and orange juice. This was fortunately (?) just across the hall from us. There was also concierge service for us, so we didn’t have to stand in the long lines at the regular service desks to, say, book additional shore excursions.
Before sailing, there was a mandatory lifeboat/lifevest drill. I flubbed it, tying on my vest haphazardly. The ship official who inspected my work had a disgusted look on his face as he tied the vest properly.
We sailed out of Vancouver harbor a little while later, passing by the waterside bikepaths of Stanley Park, up through the Georgia Strait, forested islands to our side.
The next entry is here.