BC

I'm back from Vancouver. Nothing better than a couple of days away from the daily stresses. Well... I guess it'd be better if it was more than a few days, but I'll take what I can get.

I like the occasional visit up north. Vancouver is so much more populous than Seattle, with a more cosmopolitan feel to it. There's the downside to that, I guess, with the traffic and such, and the impersonal nature of the people in a city so huge, but in general, Canadians are a friendly lot.

We spent most of our time in the Richmond area, south of Vancouver proper. Richmond is one of big suburb outgrowths where English is a second or third language, after Cantonese and Mandarin. There's a few areas in Richmond (like in and around No. 3 Rd and Alderbridge) where there's just a multitude of little one-story lookalike strip malls full of various Chinese hole-in-the-wall restaurants and bakeries and bookstores and travel agencies. It makes navigating the city a bit difficult because everything looks so similar. Add to that the poor city planning and traffic systems, AND a bunch of Chinese drivers, and you have a recipe for some harrowing encounters on every city block.

Canadian money is neat, in my opinion. The paper bills are very colorful and seem well planned. The $50 bills are a deep red tone, the $20s are greenish, the $10s are pinkish, and the $5s are blueish. They're all very high-tech, of course, in the ongoing effort to foil the counterfeiters. But it also seems like each denomination is embossed in the upper right corner with a different pattern, perhaps in braille? It always takes me a while to get used to the $1 coin (called "loonies" for the Loon waterfowl on the coin) and the $2 coin (called "dub-loons") and when I receive change from a cash transaction, I always feel like I've been short-changed because I'm always expecting some $1 bills. Instead, I have to study the handful of large coins dumped in my hand.

The exchange rate is terrible these days. $1US=$1.24CDN for most of the time up there. Geez, I remember the days when it was closer to $1US=$1.45CDN. I made the mistake of exchanging money just across the border crossing north of I-5. The foreign currency exchange office there always seems to provide the worst rates. It was $1US=$1.18CDN, plus a $2.75 surcharge. I was better off using a no-fee ATM later in the trip, letting my bank deal with the exchange rate.

More to follow.