It's So Beautiful...

English Bay, Downtown Vancouver.
Yeah that's right this is downtown!
Yes, those are Palm trees growing outside, in Canada, these are across the street from the beach pictured above. In the park adjacent to the beach is a great public art installation by the famous Chinese Artist Yue Minjue called Amazing Laughter. It was fascinating to walk around these sculptures and to watch how people interacted with them, almost everyone I saw, no make that everyone I saw, who was getting their picture taken with them posed like the statue they were next to, it was kind of funny. The other thing to notice in the first two pictures is the apartment building in the background with the huge tree growing on the terrace of the penthouse.


The view from the ferry dock at Granville Island Market, waiting to go back to my hotel. A round trip ticket is $5 . Under the bridge in the back you can see another beach that is the stop down the hill from my hotel, so it's not far at all.

This photo essay about sums up Vancouver. Every time you turn around there is another amazing vista of water, beach, mountain, high rise cityscape or some combination of them. That the public art in English Bay is by a famous Chinese artist makes perfect sense, Vancouver has a huge Asia population and in many ways has more in common with Hong Kong than Portland. It certainly doesn't have the hipster, uber cool, locavore obsessed food and coffee culture like Portland does. Mostly it strikes me, this time around, that Vancouverites are happy to grab a Tim Horton's doughnut and a Starbucks coffee on their way to hiking, skiing, climbing, biking and so on, yeah it's nice to have local organic and what ever, but dude I gotta run or I'm going to miss the best waves!