Prettiness, and sustenance

Look how pretty Vancouver is. You really can see the water and mountains from nearly anywhere downtown, which is very nearly an island. There are bridges all over the place.

It's also the first city I've been in with the American-style street grid system. All the streets running east-west are numbered, and each block contains certain building numbers (eg. 100 - 200), which is actually a fairly sensible way of doing things when you think about it. Having spent most the last year lost in London, the constant terror of losing my A-Z is almost completely gone.

More differences - Vancouver only really 'started' when the railway got here from the east 120 years ago, so that even the old churches here look new. And the skyscrapers, which are in various states of construction everywhere (further evidence of 'the boom').

So, I finally found a large supermarket downtown. They do exist here afterall. I found it at the end of Davies Street whilst scouting out internet cafes and stocking up on plastic crockery at the dollar shops. It might be worth mentioning that Davies Street is also lined with nice-looking restaurants and rainbow flags and is extremely cheerful even at 8.30pm on a Monday evening. At Safeway I made it my mission to hunt down North American groceries unavailable in the UK yet weirdly familliar to me through overexposure to American TV. Unfortunately the most exotic product I could find was Twinkies. These came in an industrial sized slab of 28 or so individually wrapped packets. I was fairly sure I didn't particularly want this many Twinkies, but as I'd been unsuccessful in finding any other items of any novelty, I bought them, along with some other necessities.

By the time I'd manhandled everything back to Gastown it was fairly late, but not late enough to avoid another rambling, inescapable conversation with the hostel supervisor. This time he inexplicably (and somewhat tactlessly I thought, considering the Twinkies) opened with "So, you're fairly big, aren't you?" The discussion went on to include something about his girlfriend of twenty four years ago, the burgeoning Vancouver vampire film industry and the superior specifications of his new false leg which he apparently ordered in the mail a few days ago. I got away when some more backpackers arrived.

The Twinkie monolith sits unopened beside my bed. According to the 'best before' date, I have until sometime next October to consume them. Judging by how appetising they look, it may take this long. My current theory is that the individual plastic wrappers are to keep the formaldehyde in.