First, a PROLONGED ‘PETER’S-PROCESSING’ PROLOGUE (Patent Pending)
Wrapping My Head Around Vancouver 🤯
Vancouver is kind of a perplexing place because it mashes together a lot of puzzle pieces that don’t really seem like they should fit. Or at least, they didn’t to me. When I first arrived, I was having a sort of dissociative experience trying to piece it all together and make sense of things.
First off, there’s the location. Looking northward, Vancouver is built into a landscape that seems entirely impractical for a major city. It’s hard to believe just how close the northerly Cascade mountains are to the city. The northern suburbs of Vancouver literally slope upwards as far as physics will allow before you’re headed towards snow caps. 🏔
Next, there’s the weather. Every time I’d visited the Pacific Northwest prior to this trip, it had been absolutely gorgeous. I found myself remarking that I could really see myself living in this region at some point, but inevitably somebody with more local insight would rain on my parade, saying something to the effect of “No, you haven’t seen it here in the winter. It gets GRIM up here.” Well as fate would have it, May of 2022 was unseasonably cold, gray, and rainy. To somebody familiar with the region, this is par for the course. But for me, this was new and it clashed with the warm sunny memories I had of this place. The weather really was quite imposing. There are some stops in the article below that were done in the pouring rain. It took me some time to adjust to it.
Then, there’s the city itself. It is sprawled over a really large area; so large in fact that the Vancouver metro area actually encompasses multiple other satellite cities, such as Richmond, Burnaby, Surrey, and Coquitlam. It’s sort of like driving across Los Angeles: it seems like an astronomical amount of development for a single city until you realize that it’s actually multiple cities pressed up against one another (i.e. Burbank, Santa Monica, Glendale, Long Beach, etc.) The first few times I had to traverse Vancouver’s impressive sprawl, it mostly felt pretty nondescript—I couldn’t tell where one area ended and the next began. There was definitely some extreme wealth, and some extreme poverty… but the vast majority of it felt decidedly middle class. I pride myself on being able to show up in new places and begin piecing together a basic understanding of them relatively quickly, so this was a disorientingly transient experience for me. It took me a long time to feel like I had even the faintest idea of what this place was all about. Eventually, I came to know and love small pieces of Vancouver, but there’s a lot left for the next visit that is still quite foreign to me.
Finally, there’s the demographic make-up of the city. As an uninformed outsider, you could be forgiven if you expected Canada and the Pacific Northwest, in general, to be very white. In fact, Vancouver is one of the LEAST white cities in the U.S. and Canada. When I arrived in Vancouver, I was that uninformed outsider, and this really caught me off guard. I’ll start at the top of the ethnic pie chart and work my way down.
Most notably, Vancouver has been called “the most ‘Asian’ city outside of Asia.” In fact, more than 1 in 4 Vancouver residents are of Chinese descent. And once you fold in other Asian racial groups into the demographic mix (i.e. Korean, Filipino, Vietnamese, etc.), Vancouver is about 50% Asian overall. However, that proportion is far higher in some of the aforementioned “satellite cities,” most notably Richmond. But the diversity of Vancouver doesn’t stop there. In addition to a prominent South-Asian population, this city also seems to have made a strong effort to elevate its First Nations (indigenous) elements. While Canada’s historical treatment of its Native populations is just as terrible as America’s, British Columbia and Vancouver seem to be making an effort—at least at the surface level—to represent their original inhabitants. Making up less than 50% of the overall demographic mix, white people (i.e. “European Canadians”) are a clear minority in the grand scheme of things. Honestly, it’s all very cool and makes this place a lot more interesting than you’d expect.
SO, with all that preamble out of the way, let me show you some more pieces of the puzzle that is Vancouver. Cool stuff awaits!
Let’s start with Granville Island. I don’t think it’s an actual island, but based on the map above… close enough.
Granville Island is tucked away under the overpass that connects neighborhood Vancouver to downtown Vancouver. It’d be easy to miss if you’re not looking for it, but it seems like a LOT of people in Vancouver are out looking for it because the first time we attempted to come here, we had to abort mission due to not being able to find literally anywhere to park. It was the Sunday of a Canadian holiday weekend though, so I supposed we shouldn’t have been surprised.
Granville Island is a small cluster of warehouses that have all been converted to art studios and art galleries, all of which are free to enter, and are mostly open more or less during standard business hours. If you want to get a taste of the visual arts scene in Vancouver, this should be on your list. The gallery below will give you a glimpse of this place, as well as a large family of geese that calls it home.
You don’t have to actually enter any of these art galleries to see some of Granville Island’s art. There’s actually some very cool street art tucked in nooks and crannies around the island. Vancouver didn’t quite rise to the level of meriting a dedicated street art post, so I’ve included a gallery below.
It’s not all murals and art galleries. The more northerly end of the island has some touristy trinket shops and an awesome indoor public market. It’s open 9am - 6pm PST daily and it’s got some great options. I never get tired of these markets. If a city has one, you better believe I’m going to be all up in there with my camera! Outside this market there’s a nice outdoor seating area looking across the water toward the glassy high-rises of downtown Vancouver. One cool quirk of this area is that many of the overpasses that traverse this stretch have massive outdoor chandeliers hanging from them. I had never seen that before. I don’t have any pictures of them here, so you’ll have to come to Vancouver yourself to see them. Or just look them up on Google. One of the two.
Nitobe Memorial Garden @UBC
For our next 2 items, we’re going to drive out to the University of British Columbia (UBC) campus. It’s got some places that are really worth seeing for visitors, but honestly, the campus itself is cool to see on its own. It’s like a city unto itself out the end of this peninsula, covered in ivy and towering trees. It would be a great place to be a student.
This first little batch of pictures, believe it or not, was actually not even taken inside of the Japanese Garden. It was actually just taken in the area around UBC’s Department of Asian Studies. Can you imagine walking to class past this stuff everyday? Would not hate it.
In the past 8 months, I visited both San Francisco’s and Seattle’s Japanese Gardens. And by the time this article was written, I had visited Portland’s as well (spoiler alert!) So I’ve got a decent sample size here, and I think this was my favorite of all of them. Portland’s was much bigger, but Vancouver’s had something really special about it. If this doesn’t sound too hippy-dippy, I could really feel a change in the aura/energy when I walked through the gates. I think it’s because—unlike the rest of the aforementioned Japanese Gardens—the Nitobe Memorial Garden is completely surrounded and enclosed by ancient, towering trees. They make you feel very protected. And instead of grass lawns, it’s almost all moss. These two elements combined soften much of the noise from the surrounding areas, so when you walk in, you suddenly are walking in near-silence. The safety and quiet really help focus you on your surroundings.
The garden itself was probably the smallest of all of them I have visited, but I think that is also part of its charm. It’s like a bonsai tree. Sometimes good things come in small packages. I believe it’s $7 (CAD) to enter, which would have been well worthwhile on its own—but to sweeten the pot, it’s also about 3 minutes away from the next item in this article.
Museum of Anthropology @UBC
Up next, ALSO ON THE UBC CAMPUS, you’ll find Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology (MOA). I’m gonna give it to ya straight: this is one of the coolest museums I have ever visited in my life. Its contents are predominantly focused on the historical First Nations inhabitants of the region, but there are other cultures represented as well.
I’ll start with their first nations exhibits. As I said, you’ll see a lot of First Nations art around Vancouver and BC, but if you want to take a deep dive, this is the place you’ll want to visit. They have all sorts of incredible artifacts from First Nations peoples, including the Kwakwaka’wakw, Gitxsan, Haida, ‘Namgis, and Musqueam nations. You can Google those names to learn more about them because I am certainly no expert. But after visiting this museum, I am definitely an appreciator. This place is extremely dense with information. When you enter, there are a number of carved wooden statues from various nations. The Raven statue below, for example, is from the Haida people, who come from the northerly island of Haida Gwaii. I want you to take a quick pause on reading this article and paste “Haida Gwaii” into your browser to see where this place is. We actually met somebody from this island early on in this trip, and it continued to come up in conversation for the rest of our time in BC. Who the hell lives up there?? What must it have been like to grow up there? So many questions. These places are relatively easy to get to once you’re in BC. And I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t very interested in visiting after this.
Past these wooden statues is a permanent exhibit housing dozens—if not hundreds—of stylized tribal masks and props. This, to me, was the coolest part of the museum. Just look at them! Can you imagine being an early explorer in the forests of British Columbia and running into a bunch of people wearing these masks? That would have been TERRIFYING. I am increasingly fascinated with native cultures in the Americas because we know so little about them in a historical context. When Columbus and his goons first began their conquests, one little-known fact is that they unwittingly unleashed germ Armageddon on the Americas. Over the course of mere decades, old world diseases swept across the “new world” far faster than the Europeans themselves could move and killed approximately 90% of the native population. It was the biggest depopulation event in human history, and somehow I only just recently learned about it in any degree of detail. A couple of hundred years later when Europeans finally got all the way out here, they were likely encountering some of the first generations that were rebuilding their societies in the wake of what—at the time—must have felt like the apocalypse. The crazy thing is that we really have no idea how many people died. The estimates vary, but I think 50 million is a middle-of-the-road ballpark. That is just such an overwhelming number of lives. It makes me so sad to think of what these cultures have endured.
This exhibit continues onward to showcase similar artifacts from other cultures around the world, including Inuit peoples from the Arctic, tribes from Papua New Guinea, and other artifacts from across Southeast Asia and Oceania. This is just a completely different aesthetic sensibility. It makes you think—what if the roles had been reversed and these cultures had been the colonizers? What would fashion look like today?
Out back, behind the museum, there are massive Musqueam carvings and a replica of a 19th-century Haida village, fashioned by First Nations artists. So if you’re wondering what life looked like on Haida Gwaii in the 1800s… probably something like this. These artifacts sit near a cliff overlooking the Straight of Georgia. Looking northward from here you can see the epic snowy peaks of the Cascades.
Museum of Vancouver
I’ve talked about how Vancouver was, initially, perplexing to me. There are a lot of layers to this place, so when I found out there was actually a museum devoted to the history and identity of Vancouver, I had to go. And it did help contextualize this place for me!
Among its various exhibits were explorations into the cultural lineages of the First Nations people that originally inhabited this area, along with a substantial amount of real estate devoted to forestry and sustainability. It’s incredible how relevant these things felt during our time in British Columbia. This is sad to say, but in terms of environmental policy and effort put towards sustainability, BC was far and away the most engaged place I have ever been. There are even laws against idling in your car, so in the forthcoming articles, when we are waiting in a line of cars to board a ferry, we will do so with our engine off. And it’s hard to spend much time exploring BC without starting to have an interest in forestry as well. All of this is coming soon in upcoming articles!
Anyway, this museum also had an incredible walk-through of the history of Vancouver and British Columbia at large, as well as a very cool exhibit of salvaged neon signs from Vancouver’s luminous past. Apparently, Vancouver went so crazy for neon signs at one point that they became an eyesore and were eventually regulated.
Yes, there was a lot of great information in this museum, but I think the most fascinating exhibit was one on the history of Chinese and Asian immigrants to British Columbia. As an outsider, this element of the city requires some explanation. In fact, I would so far as to say that this stretch of the museum was the single most helpful input to my understanding of this place. In some ways the Pacific Northwest feels very remote; these were the last places to be reached by European settlers, so the “dawn of time” for Western civilization out here is not as long ago as you might think. When I think of diversity in North America, I think of places that have long histories of interconnectedness with the world or with particular regions/cultural groups, i.e. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc. But up here… the math of how a place like Vancouver ends up being so incredibly diverse feels much more unlikely to somebody like me, who was born and raised on EST.
It turns out that the story of Chinese immigration to Vancouver is similar to the rest of the American West coast, but it starts a bit farther back in time than you might expect. Apparently, the first ever recorded visit by Chinese people to the continent of North America was to British Columbia in 1788. However, Chinese immigration to this area did not begin in earnest until the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush of 1858. Then, in the 1880s, the Canadian Pacific Railway was constructed, mainly thanks to contracts with Chinese laborers. There were additional ebbs and flows of Chinese immigration throughout the 20th century, with large influxes happening as recently as the 1980s, but I think the headline here is that Chinese people have been in BC for a LONG time. Many of these family trees have been in North America longer than mine! I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that Vancouver would not be the place it is today without Chinese immigrants. They literally built half of this place. In fact, they’ve been here so long that I think our knee-jerk reaction to look at them as the “immigrants” is getting into some prejudiced territory—and that statement applies to myself as well. After all, white people didn’t originate here either. In reality, unless you’re First Nations, we’re ALL immigrants. That’s why they’re called FIRST Nations. Even in Canada, this is an important fact to keep front of mind, because even Canadians can be racist. The history of race relations in Vancouver and BC is just as bad as anywhere, and the dynamics are all too familiar.
To really drive this all home, the museum includes hand-written cards detailing the experiences of visitors. I was really moved reading these. Talking about this stuff in a historical context, it’s easy to overlook the present.
Kitsilano Beach
I’m going to end this article the same way I ended my time in Vancouver IRL: with a walk down Kitsilano Beach.
Kitsilano is a leafy neighborhood just west of downtown Vancouver; this stretch of beach looks north across the water to downtown, Stanley Park, and beyond to West Vancouver and the southern peaks of the Cascades towering over the city. It’s a great place to take in the view and the vibes. I don’t think I was sure that I liked Vancouver until my first time in Kitsilano. It was a cold, rainy morning in early June, and as I looked around at all the people walking to work or stopping into cozy, local coffee shops, I thought to myself, “yeah… I can see myself here.”
This trip took place RIGHT after Canada opened its borders, so we needed to test negative for COVID in order to be allowed to re-enter the U.S. I believe this requirement has now been dropped, but if you ever experience any travel vaccination needs in Vancouver, I would highly recommend TravelSafe Immunization Clinic at 420-2184 West Broadway, Vancouver BC V6K 2E1. They were amazing. Doctors’ offices don’t tend to be particularly enjoyable places, but really enjoyed the 30 minutes I spent with them.
Up next, we’ll start getting out of the city! In the next few articles, we’ll be visiting a small fishing town, going up into the famous Cascadian ski town, Whistler, and finally hopping a ferry out to Vancouver Island. And that is where the REAL adventure will begin.
But first, let me share one of my current favorite tracks from an Asian artist. This song is actually chill AF.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter was born & raised in Columbus, Ohio, and started this blog when he moved from Boston to Hanoi (Vietnam) in 2014. After years based in Nashville working on his band, The Great Palumbo, he now resides in London, UK.
