Train in van
I went to Vancouver! Again! (Last time was 2001.) In aeroplanes! And flew with my friend Don WINOLJ in a little Cessna from Boundary Bay airport (south of Vancouver) to Victoria, near his house, which was absolutely fantastic. Possible video of the landing, and account of the flight, to follow. Saw griilions of floatplanes just outside my hotel!
Vancouver is a beautiful city. Yes, it rains, but no worse than in the UK. The blossom all over the place (maybe the Japanese influence) was particularly good. I've previously argued that Vancouver gets away with being an ordinary (i.e. ugly) North American city but still looks beautiful because it has the mountains as a backdrop: even a pug-ugly town would look good with those behind it. But this time my view shifted; I now think it's attractive anyway. This was cemented when I got a good view of it looking south, with the mountains behind me. And the UBC campus is astonishingly beautiful - though with its fair share of hideous buildings. (It's also astonishingly expensive to live within an hour's commute of, I'm assured, pouring cold water over any nascent emigration thoughts I might have otherwise been hatching.)
Douglas Coupland lied. In his City of Glass, he claims that Vancouver has ... a monorail! Called Skytrain. I can confirm that a mass transit system called Skytrain exists, and is elevated in concrete for much of its length outside downtown. However, it is not a monorail. At all. It's a perfectly ordinary driverless light rail system, rather like the DLR - including, to be fair, the exciting feature of offering passenger seats right at the front so you can pretend to be the driver. But it's not a monorail. This has made me re-evaluate my opinion of Douglas Coupland, and I'm even starting to suspect that not all the anecdotes in Microserfs and JPod actually happened somewhere in West Coast high-tech.
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/240358.html, where there are
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Vancouver is a beautiful city. Yes, it rains, but no worse than in the UK. The blossom all over the place (maybe the Japanese influence) was particularly good. I've previously argued that Vancouver gets away with being an ordinary (i.e. ugly) North American city but still looks beautiful because it has the mountains as a backdrop: even a pug-ugly town would look good with those behind it. But this time my view shifted; I now think it's attractive anyway. This was cemented when I got a good view of it looking south, with the mountains behind me. And the UBC campus is astonishingly beautiful - though with its fair share of hideous buildings. (It's also astonishingly expensive to live within an hour's commute of, I'm assured, pouring cold water over any nascent emigration thoughts I might have otherwise been hatching.)
Douglas Coupland lied. In his City of Glass, he claims that Vancouver has ... a monorail! Called Skytrain. I can confirm that a mass transit system called Skytrain exists, and is elevated in concrete for much of its length outside downtown. However, it is not a monorail. At all. It's a perfectly ordinary driverless light rail system, rather like the DLR - including, to be fair, the exciting feature of offering passenger seats right at the front so you can pretend to be the driver. But it's not a monorail. This has made me re-evaluate my opinion of Douglas Coupland, and I'm even starting to suspect that not all the anecdotes in Microserfs and JPod actually happened somewhere in West Coast high-tech.
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/240358.html, where there are
comment(s) not shown here.