Visited Canada ~ specifically Vancouver, B.C. ~ for the first time ever last October and loved it. This time around we’re going to Toronto due to it’s being a relatively painless 2-hour+ nonstop flight, after which the super-convenient UP Express train takes you from Toronto Pearson International Airport straight to Union Station, from whence our hotel is a short cab drive (based on a visual of Google maps) back towards downtown. [Actually, it turned out to be a brisk walk of one long city block to our hotel.] A Metrolinx card while we’re there will probably serve us well too, as did TransLink when we stayed in Vancouver.
A native Toronton (sp?), since expatriated to Asia, says “there’s not much to do in Toronto, but the food’s great!” which I hope to disprove (not the culinary part) with planned excursions to Kensington Market, Distillery District, Bloor-Yorkville, Art Gallery of Ontario and other places yet to be discovered. We will just miss the annual Toronto Jazz Festival June 22-July 1 (sniff) but we hope to claim new stomping grounds at some other locales for live jazz.
About Vancouver….
Let me say right off the bat: we loved Vancouver and look forward to going back. Surrounded by natural beauty and blessed with an efficient public transportation system in TransLink. I’ve always liked to avoid the touristy things and immerse myself as much as possible in the local culture. First impressions:
- There’s still (despite the unchecked immigration) a contagious courtesy, if you will, in huge contrast to the brusque rudeness of American life where everywhere, it seems, (especially Atlanta where I’m from) has turned into New York City. Riders say “Thank you” to the bus drivers as they exit. We also found said bus drivers very forgiving with foreigners like us as we tried to master the routes and payment system.
- Real estate: The picture below is the view from our hotel room near False Creek. Never have I seen such an orgy of new construction, the vast majority of it these steel-and-glass human silos going straight up 60-70 stories. Of course, the development frenzy has pushed up rents too. Our driver from the airport was complaining that his has gone up 40% in the least year. One Gastown denizen who curated a museum of sorts on Union Street said it has given way to a high rise financed by foreign money that will probably remain unoccupied when completed, since the billionaire just wants a place to park a ton of his (likely ill-gotten) money.
- Homelessness: this was the most disturbing feature of Canadian life for us. It was a daily constant in the sections we frequented (Gastown, Main Street, Commercial Drive, West Eng, Yaletown). The only upside was the Vancouver homeless are not aggressive like they are in America when begging for money. Some are quite practiced at getting and keeping your attention long enough to try to extract some pocket change.
- Drugs: depressingly similar to same stories you read and hear in the US ~ rampant and out of control ~ mostly affecting impressionable youth. Being a child of the Sixties, I thought we had long ago shaken off that early naivete about drugs and addiction and wised up, but it seems newer generations are learning the dangers firsthand. The first headline I read on arriving in Vancouver was in the Globe and Mail on the growing opioid epidemic. A local merchant told me there’s a serious shortage of qualified construction workers (ironic with all the new development going on). He says the reason is the cost-of-living and housing have gone so crazy they’ve driven formerly stable working people with a roof over their heads, into the homeless population, then into ~ in an almost natural progression ~ habitual drug abuse. He says many of these newly homeless will intentionally OD on the premises of a public building, as that will ensure the surviving family members get some kind of settlement with which to pay the burial costs. Hence the shortage he spoke of. May be exaggerated, but made a sort of sense.
- Politics: walking along Commercial Drive one day, a volunteer was handing out flyers for a Vancouver City Council candidate, Jean Swanson. Her platform: freeze rents, house the homeless, tax the rich, dispense drug rehab on demand. Sounded fairly socialist to me, but I can understand where the zeal comes from, given the cost of living. I apologized that I couldn’t vote for her in the upcoming election, further that I’m not even Canadian; he said that was ok, at least “I could wish I had a candidate like Jean where I live”.
- Ethnicity: even though Vancouver retained in its cultural expression (at least for us first-time visitors) the familiar historic image we have of Canadians (ramrod straight Mounties on horseback, Caucasians like us still united by a common tongue) Asians were the most conspicuous group among tourists and shoppers. People watching one afternoon in a Burnaby shopping mall, racial makeup (in descending numbers) was: Asian, Middle Eastern, white, black).
