| Submitted by: Evelyn C. Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 14 February 2005 |
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A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o'-love,
the lady that's known as Lou.
--Robert Service, 'The Shooting of Dan McGrew'
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July 24: Vancouver: Gastown, Chinatown, SkyTrain/SeaBus tour
July 25: Vancouver: English Bay, Museum of Anthropology
July 26: Vancouver: Stanley Park, Dawn Princess embarkation
July 27: sailing
July 28: Ketchikan
July 29: Juneau
July 30: Skagway
July 31: Glacier Bay
August 1: College Fjord
August 2: dock at Seward, Anchorage
August 3: Anchorage
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This is a family trip and celebration, so let me introduce the players. There's Mark and I, celebrating our 25th anniversary August 27. There Mark's parents, celebrating their 55th anniversary September 7. There's Mark's sister and brother-in-law, Sherry and David. There's Mark's brother and sister-in-law, David and Susan, celebrating their 25th anniversary sometime next January. And there are David and Susan's children, Sara (age 11) and Jack (age 9). Yes, there are two Davids and they both go by David, so I'll use David G and David L.
Preparation for this trip-that is, reading up-was much less than on most of our trips. I kept my eye on Usenet's rec.travel.cruises and collected about 25,000 words on Vancouver and cruising the Inside Passage area of Alaska. Since this was our first cruise, most of my reading was about what cruises were like. We did check out the Fodor's and AAA books on the area, and brought along some appropriate reading: James Michener's Alaska (not highly thought of as Alaska reading by people on Usenet), Jack London's The Call of the Wild, Robert Service's The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses, and A Reader's Companion to Alaska, I also brought some Russian literature: Tolstoy's Resurrection and What Is Art? And Other Essays, and a book of Russian short stories. And finally, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, which has nothing to do with Alaska, but seemed like a fine book to reread while lounging on the ship. Boy, was I am optimist! I never got to the Michener or any of the Russian literature at all.
July 24: 5 AM pick-ups are no fun, but they beat driving ourselves, particularly in the rain.
The flight to Detroit was on time, but in spite of being 6:50 EDT to 8:35 CDT, no breakfast was served, just juice and coffee. Airlines are getting cheap-or is it just Northwest? (I will spare you the details of our airline ticket purchase, but suffice it to say we are now the proud(?) possessors of two vouchers worth $186.11 each on Northwest Airlines that expire in eight months. Apparently Northwest no longer refunds the difference if you have a ticket written when the price drops.)
We did get breakfast on the flight to Vancouver and arrived more or less on time. Immigration and customs were quick; 'changing money' consisted of going to an ATM and making a withdrawal-much faster than the old way. The exchange rate is about US$1 to C$1.38, or C$1 to US$0.72. (Readers from other countries are on their own.) A quick rule-of-thumb, then, is to take three-quarters of the price in Canadian dollars to get the price in US dollars.
The Vancouver Airport is very new and modern, with a lot of Pacific Northwest design touches; because we're not flying out of there, we won't have to pay the stiff airport tax to pay for it.
We decided to spring for the C$9 each for the airport express bus rather than have to go to the other terminal and then change buses twice for the local C$1.50 bus. Somehow my backpack feels a lot heavier than usual; I didn't think I brought that many books. (This was a wise decision; when we went out later the buses were packed. Often there wasn't enough room at a stop for people to get on, let alone people with luggage.)
We were dropped off a block or so from our hotel, the Sylvia Hotel. This was recommended on the Net and is indeed a very nice old hotel right on the beach (well, there is a wide strip of park between the street and the beach, but that hardly counts). At the point where the park starts were about a dozen flags flying, equally divided among Canadian flags, British Columbia flags, and rainbow flags. As it turns out, this area of Vancouver seems to be the Greenwich Village of Vancouver-and this includes the widest variety of restaurants close together I've seen in a long time. So after we checked in, we had a choice of Chinese, Japanese, Mediterranean, Mexican, Italian, Korean, Thai, Indian, or Vietnamese food for lunch. We opted for the last and had a hot and sour clam soup and a combo platter of steamed crepes and spring rolls at the Vina Restaurant, for a total of C$17. Mark also took a picture of a wall mural entitled 'At the Movies' painted by Waclawik, so we can have everyone guessing who all the caricatures are.
After lunch we used the day passes we had bought for the buses (C$4.50 for unlimited use versus $C1.50 per ride) and took a bus to Gastown. (We got the transit map of downtown Vancouver off the Web.)
Gastown is the oldest area of Vancouver and was very run-down until someone decided in the 1970s to spruce it up. This seems to consist of filling it with tourist shops and restaurants; I suppose I have more sympathy with the latter. There were some shops with more expensive items of Inuit and Pacific Northwest art, but on the whole it was basically a large outdoor mall.
We did see the world's only steam-powered clock which 'chimes' (actually whistles) every quarter-hour.
Walking south on Carrall Street down to Chinatown, we discovered where the 'Skid Row' had moved to-the section of Carrall Street between Gastown and Chinatown. However, it didn't seem as dangerous as it would have in a United States city (though maybe that's just knowing I'm in Canada).
At the corner of Carroll and Pender is the Sam Kee Building, the narrowest commercial building in the world (at 1.5 meters, or a little under five feet). It came about when the city appropriated all but a five-foot strip of land from an existing plot. The neighbor thought he would get the five feet for basically nothing, but the owner decided to build to spite him. It has been renovated and is now occupied by the Jack Chow Insurance Agency.
Vancouver's Chinatown is the second-largest Chinatown in North America (San Francisco has the largest), but to my mind it's not anywhere as vibrant as that of New York. (But then what is?) I suppose it's quintessentially Canadian in that regard.
We walked through the Sun Yat-Sen Park at the Chinese Cultural Center, with its lotus pond with carp, and its Chinese-style gazebo. This, of course, is where Vancouver is perhaps better than New York, in that there are more little peaceful enclaves.
While I tend to compare cities to New York, visually Vancouver is more like San Francisco or Hong Kong because of the hills in the background. And culturally it seems much more like San Francisco also.
In any case, while there were some interesting stores, Chinatown in Vancouver seems a lot like the rest of Vancouver, since there is a large Chinese (and other Asian) population throughout the city. All along the road from the airport were businesses with signs in both English and Chinese, and this was not in Chinatown.
From Chinatown we took a bus to the Main Street Station of the SkyTrain, Vancouver's rapid transit system. SkyTrain trains run every five minutes between Waterfront Station and the eastern suburban area. Since it is elevated, it offers views of Vancouver and the surrounding area. Since it is included on the day pass, we decided it was worth doing-even though the outbound train we got on was very crowded. This, at least, we understood-it was rush hour. But it did empty out, and riding back we were able to get window seats since we got on at the very beginning of that run; in fact, never got off.
The round-trip took about an hour and a half, and we got off at the Stadium stop to try to find the Hotel Mark's parents were staying in. Unfortunately, we couldn't find it. (They said it was at 'Pender and Hamby'; the closest we could come on the map was Pender and Cambie, but it wasn't there. It turned out to be at Pender and Hornby.) We had seen it from the airport bus, so we knew it was somewhere nearby, but that didn't help much. So we got back on the SkyTrain to Waterfront Station, where we caught the SeaBus across Burrard Inlet to Lonsdale Quay in North Vancouver. Not that there was anything in North Vancouver (that we knew of), but just to see the view from the water. We walked around the Quay for a bit and took some pictures of the Vancouver skyline, then took the next SeaBus back. (They run every thirty minutes.)
By now it was late and we were hungry, so we took the bus back to our hotel area and ate at the Ma Dang Cool Korean restaurant. It has a much smaller menu than the Korean restaurant back home used to, but the operative phrase here is 'used to'; it's gone out of business and I haven't had Korean food in months. Mark had Bulgoki and I had Soon Doo Boo Ji Gae; the total was C$24.
When we got back to the hotel, there was a message waiting from Mark's parents. We had talked about getting together Friday but they weren't interested in what we had planned, and vice versa. So we decided we would see enough of each other on the boat and would do separate things tomorrow.
We had now been up for about twenty hours, so we went to sleep.
July 25: We woke up early (no surprise!), so at 6 AM we went out for a walk along English Bay. It was very peaceful and empty at that hour, with a few joggers, walkers, and cyclists; later on it was much more crowded. (Despite being called 'Rain City,' Vancouver had beautiful weather while we were there.) We saw one woman standing facing the bay and reading, looking almost as if it were a religious exercise. There were lots of benches along the walkway for sitting and relaxing, and each had a little plaque written by the donor. Most were in memory of someone, making reading them a rather downbeat experience, but some were commemorating anniversaries and such.
We walked for about ninety minutes, then went back to the room. Around 8:30 AM we went to breakfast at the Bread Garden. I had a pan du chocolate and a latte; Mark had a shrimp wrap and an orange juice. Someone there saw Mark's palmtop and we talked to him for a while about palmtops and about Vancouver.
At 9:30 AM we got on the bus for the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. It's a ways out and we had to change buses, so we didn't get to UBC until 10:30 AM, and walking to the museum took another twenty minutes or so.
After we paid our C$6 each admission, we only had to wait a couple of minutes for the free gallery tour. The tour guide was okay, but seemed a bit confused by some of the questions.
The museum was designed by Arthur Ericson (sp?), who also designed the Canadian embassy in Washington DC. It is quite striking, with a large glassed-walled gallery for most of the totem poles, and a skylighted rotunda for the major Arthur Reid sculpture (more on that later). But the 'Masterpiece Gallery' (where the smaller items were kept) did not seem very well lit. |
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