Someone I know sometimes posts pictures (on Facebook, so I can’t really link you to them) of her walks through the graveyard near her home, which makes me feel a little jealous that she has a graveyard. I still don’t know where the graveyards in this city are. But I have an ocean, so I shouldn’t complain too much.
There is something excellent about being able to walk to the beach and look at the giant ships (and the kayaks and sailboats and standing paddle-surfers) from your home. And while I’m sure the graveyard has fewer people, that just means there’d be so many fewer people out having interesting conversations like there were by the seawall tonight. Talking about the weirdest day they’d just had, or complaining loudly about their teeth or talking slow and braying about Luongo or Toronto.
These tulips placed in the bronze (or whatever) handbag of a statue aren’t always there. Over in the laughing people sculptures I saw more flowers placed in their hands. I kind of like that flower arrangements as a form of graffiti. I also like the benches in Stanley Park that have little memorial plaques to make me feel less jealous.
The Dubious Monk
chinese curses since twenty aught two
Tag Archives: stanley park
springing
While watching/listening to baseball on the internet is the part of my daily routine that’s changed the most with spring beginning, amazingly enough the out of doors are also getting seasonally appropriate.
I enjoy the sheer number of cherry blossoms when I’m out walking. At the SkyTrain station closest to my apartment it’s this huge fragrant canopy of white (and a bit of pink) with people happily gawking and taking pictures in it all. Very neat.
At our Easter dinner at the Little House from the Prairies yesterday we were talking about the absence of seasons here and how we might romanticize the cold back in Alberta and Manitoba (I do not romanticize such horrors, just to be clear). We were also talking about living in a place where tour buses come to visit, which is kind of weird. But the not exactly closest (but close enough to be the first one I think of) park to my house is Stanley Park, all huge and treed and full of totem poles and aquaria and such.
I like living near water and being able to go to the park and watch seaplanes and people messing about with boats. Now that it’s actually getting warm enough to sit outside and read, you’ll probably see more pictures from me that could be taken by a busload of tourists. But it’s where I am. I think I like it.
what passes for contemplative geography
One of my profs is in Toronto for the iConference this week (where people from the iSchools get together and do informationy kinds of things) so I didn’t have to go to my normal 8am class today, which I appreciated, but it’s making me feel like school is entirely an illusion. And since that means unlike every other library school student in the history of the world apparently, I have lots of free time (still being unemployed) I got a good pile of stuff done the last couple of days (most of it very boring, like catching up on my book reviews).
This afternoon though, I went walking up the seawall and looked at the cargo ships sitting out in the Burrard Inlet (or Salish Sea or possibly all the way out to the Strait of Georgia). I like being able to do that. It’s some sort of connection to the world in terms of physical objects that’ll be crossing the ocean and I get to see them as they leave. I guess a lot of them just have oil or some other planet-killing thing in them. Or they’re just going down to Seattle and not on a real voyage at all. But still.
Another thing I love here is how the mix of hills and water give you great views of the city. When I bike home from school I get to fly down the terrible hill I’ve fought my way up already once that day, and there’s this gap created by English Bay that lets me see all the lights of downtown, and up in North Vancouver and way out east. I don’t have to pedal and I can just look at the city as I speed down into it again (well, into Kits, but close enough). And then when I’m climbing up over the Burrard Bridge you feel right in and above all the lights. It’s these bits of perspective before getting swallowed up in the urban canyons that I love.
I don’t know if I’m staying in Vancouver past my degree’s end, but if I leave these are things I’ll miss.
My new place here is very different from living at Brenda and Marlis’. It feels more like what I think of Vancouver being like from the outside. I’ve got all that City of Glass stuff surrounding me now (that’d be the Douglas Coupland book, not the Paul Auster one, which is about New York).
This afternoon as I was wandering around getting acquainted with the neighbourhood (Coal Harbour) I walked down to the water and watched little seaplanes at the Harbour Airport. Across the water was North Vancouver with a mountain behind it. To my left, islands and Stanley Park all filled with trees. It was cool but not freezing and ships were passing by, far away. It felt very Pacific-Canadian, very much like how it should feel to be here.
I’m going to start taking more pictures, I think. I mean, I live here now. I want to start to get attached to the city, to make it feel like home. It’s harder to do that when you’re thinking of leaving again in a few months. But I think I’m going to try to stay when I’m done my degree. All I need to do that is to find work, right?
