A THING OF BEAUTY

Laid–back people in a lovely setting. Open your eyes — and dial down the attitudes — when you come here.

April 2004

VANCOUVER, BC, Canada — This is not a city. It’s a picture postcard on steroids, so much so that a part of you may fear it’s a mirage.

Your eyes are not deceiving you. It really is that beautiful.

Water is the element that dominates and defines Vancouver. Rivers, inlets and bays paint some part of the horizon a liquid blue in nearly every direction. Even the airport sits on an island.

Film and video crews spend so much time “on location” here that some hotels and restaurants boast of their popularity with the filmmaking caste. Even if you’ve never set foot in Vancouver, odds are you’ve already seen a lot of it.

Towering office and apartment high–rises fill the landscape, as if all of Vancouver insisted on having a scenic view — and got it. And who could blame them?

I mean, when was the last time you could peer out a window or over a balcony and look down on seagulls in flight?

Home for this trip was a neighborhood known as the West End. Here, youth can be your calendar age or your outlook on life. Gay can be an alternate lifestyle or a joyful attitude a la the word's original meaning. Turn down Denman Street or off Davie Street to English Bay and the smell of the sea engulfs you.

Mellow out

It’s a neighborhood rendered to a human scale. There are plenty of stores within an easy walk. Whole counties have been fatally “malled” in the States, but the corner grocery store is alive and doing business here.

Vancouver is the anti–New York. Folks here don’t rush, don’t push. Drivers are actually polite. Perfect strangers may actually speak to you on the street — without an ulterior motive. Shopkeepers strike up conversations with you just for the hell of it. Cyclists and drivers actually seem to respect each other here.

Rudeness marks you instantly as an out–of–towner.

Driving here may take a different mindset from what you’re used to. Vancouver takes pride in its lack of freeways. This is not the place to try to get somewhere at the last minute, unless it’s within walking distance.

At the outdoor cafe tables and on the giant logs that serve as beach benches on English Bay, the conversations run to art and music, philosophy and religion. You can go a whole week without hearing gangsta rap or the names Britney Spears, Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan.

That alone is reason enough to love Vancouver.