\

Wanderung 13

Any Which Way But Loose:

Meandering Many Miles in Multitudinous Mechanisms

September 2006

Friday, September 8th - Volksmarch in Vancouver, Canada.

After breakfast together we all split up for the day, with Bill staying at the hotel while Lois and Phyllis took the tour of Grouse Mountain north of Vancouver and Monika and I walked the downtown Vancouver Volksmarch.

We walked over to the starting point, a bakery cum cafe on Bute street, retrieved the directions for the walk and started off on a very irregular loop around the central part of the city. One of the first things we saw was the Blue Horizon Hotel where we had stayed prior to our trans-Canada train trip in 1997 or 98, and that brought back some nice memories. After that we walked through some very nice old residential neighborhoods with cute little houses, but what sticks in my mind was the fact that every park we ran across had floral settings of some kind in it, which seems very English somehow.

The Vancouver Art Museum had a fountain, sculpture, and floral gardens combined out in front in a riot of decorative motifs. In a sense it was a veritable brawl of architectural styles. Still, it hung together in some way and we thought it was pretty enough to take some pictures.

The Vancouver public library was an architecturally very striking building with a circular core surrounded by a huge curved building on one side. The open area between the two buildings was enclosed by a glass roof and formed a huge semi-circular atrium. It was on the scale of and faintly resembled the Roman Coliseum, which is so unique that it defies description.


 

We curled around at a war memorial to enter Vancouver's Chinatown, a neighborhood so large that in the western hemisphere it is second only to the San Francisco Chinatown in size. On the edge of Chinatown we visited the Sun Yat Sen garden. We felt that the quiet ponds reflecting the modest Chinese gazebos and carefully shaped trees was very relaxing, a real oasis of calm and serenity in an otherwise bustling city that still could be seen as reflections in the pond.


 

Chinatown proper was a busy mercantile center. The sights, sounds, and smells emphasized that Chinatown was really its own little world. Almost all the folks appeared to be Chinese and they were certainly speaking Chinese and playing Chinese music. Many of the food stores offered exotic non-western foods including what looked like dried octopus and some kind of seaweed, perhaps, but I couldn't really tell because all the signs were in Chinese only!

From Chinatown we came back along the waterfront to Gastown where we stopped to eat in a trolley car. The trolley car was, however, a part of the Old Spaghetti Factory restaurant and we had, what else, spaghetti for lunch. That gave us the energy to continue walking past the old steam-operated clock to the modern cruise ship terminal that we had visited on our first night in Vancouver. After completing our loop back up the hill to our hotel, Monika took a bath while I put my feet up to rest from our walk and used our laptop to answer our email.

We had our evening meal at Tim Horton's, where I was happy to find that the chili was as good as I remembered it being. Back at the hotel Monika and Lois had a nightcap and we downloaded Lois's trip pictures onto our computer for safekeeping before turning in for the night.

Copyright 2006 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog
Map
September 2006
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
Epilog

Return to the Wanderungs Homepage.
Sign the Guestbook or Read the Guestbook.
Comments about this site? Email the Webmaster.
Contact Bob and Monika at bob_monika@hotmail.com.