Vancouver City-Centre

I recently took a trip to Vancouver to take part in an art history conference. It was my first time in British Columbia. I'm not sure I have anything substantial to say about the province or the city or anything, but here are some takeaways from this trip.

1. Rain City is the most apt nickname for a city ever. It was already pissing rain when I got here and it has only stopped intermittently.

2. Adidas are "in". I've seen a ton of people wearing chunky Superstars. Lots of other people in Adidas too. Vancouver loves Adidas. Since coming back, I've noticed a bunch of people wearing them too. Did this happen overnight?

3. Cariboo lager is fucking tight.

4. I knew to expect some radically different views when I came to British Columbia, but I was still blown away by the landscape. The first night in the city was spent mostly in the east end, so I only saw cityscape. As I made my way to the first morning of the conference, I walked through a rose garden and then came out into a clearing and suddenly had a clear view of the entire bay and several mountains shrouded in mist. I had never seen anything like that before in my life and was awed.

5. Almost every building had a neat little rack for umbrellas in its entrance. I've never seen these anywhere before, but it makes sense that these would be needed in Vancouver where it rains constantly and people carry around umbrellas for that reason. What are you going to do? Just carry around your umbrella with you in every establishment? It's the little differences like this that remind you that you aren't home while you travel and that's pretty cool, I think.

6. Vancouver, and I would assume the entire west coast, has a much larger Asian population than Ontario. It makes sense, when you think about it, but I guess I didn't expect it. I wish I had tried a sushi spot while I was there, as I'm sure it would have been wonderful.

7. Hey, front desk at the Best Western Sands:

8. On this trip I got to meet the art historian who is the top name in my narrow field of historiography/art biography. I use her a lot in my research and she had really great stuff to say about my thesis. That was REALLY COOL.

9. There was a big time wiener/jerk presenting at the conference who wouldn't shut up about how many books he had read and how smart he was. He made every conversation he had with every person at the conference about himself and was a major league narcissist who has obviously been sucking on a silver spoon his whole goddamn life. I feel like there will probably be one of him at every conference I go to. Everyone else was really nice though!