Ah, the good old days when you could go on holiday and then bother people inviting them over to see a bucketful of your silly picture rolls.
Blog posts and albums on Facebook are nowhere near as annoying, they take a lot of effort from the already tired traveler in terms of uploading, tagging and stuff, while family and friends can get away with a simple “oooh” posted hastily on your profile.
Technology sucks.
So there, I’ll restrain myself and condense *my awesome trip to Vancouver* into the 10 things that struck me about it.
Plus, here’s the link to the first album on facebook. I’ll post the rest of the pictures when I’ll figure out why my camera is invisible to my mac.

1 – Vancouver is beautiful. It’s so beautiful that when I came back to London – my now second favourite city – it looked like a grim and miserable bunch of shacks littered with rubbish and full of pissed-off people. However, pubs in London are everywhere and a pint doesn’t cost a fifth of your wage. Which leads me to my second point.

2 – Vancouver is a magical city of fairies and rainbows, where, amongst other wonders, your money can disappear into thin air. No laws of thermodynamics in Vancouver, you withdraw money from an ATM, you put it into your wallet, walk around for half an hour and it’s gone.

3 – There are ravens everywhere. One would expect seagulls. There are ravens instead, thousands of them, lurking in the shadows, looking at you from the rooftops, obviously longing for the flesh of your eyes. That’s scary, believe me.

4 – Canadians live up to their cliche. Wave a map in Vancouver and people will queue up to give you some help.

5 – Food in Vancouver is awesome throughout. And there are more sushi places than Mac Donalds, which is good. Although I fear they are the place where that amazing feat of the city to have your money vanish is more likely to happen.

6 – Canada is pretty far away from the UK, which means you have to plan something interesting to do when you’ll find yourself wide awake at 3 o’clock in the morning, horribly jet-lagged.

7 – The Rocky Mountains with fog and rain from a Greyhound look pretty much like the Highlands with fog and rain from a car.

8 – In Vancouver it rains all the time apart from the day you’re leaving. That day the sun will shine high in the sky and the mountains will reflect their glorious bulk into the ocean, pods of whales jumping happily out of the foams. Mocking you.

9 – Vancouver is so nice that other cities in Canada buy their homeless a train ticket to get there. Because they know Vancouver rocks and they want everyone to enjoy it.
This is why there are so many people in the streets asking you for change. Which I would have been more than happy to spare if the city hadn’t sucked my wallet dry.

10 – There’s a space anomaly in Stanley Park, so that a centimeter on the map equals a billion kilometers walking.

2 Responses

1. Maffa says:

   October 1, 2010 at 11:04

   Marina said that despite all she said in the past about never going to canada due to freezing cold now she wants to try because you convinced her that the place is wonderful.

   i owe you one.

   Reply
   • Paolo Puggioni says:

     October 1, 2010 at 11:06

     It sounds like a threat!

     Weather in Vancouver is temperate anyway, it rains a lot from October to March and constantly sunny the rest of the time:)

     Reply