Today was my one full day in Vancouver where I could walk around the city without lugging my backpack around, so I decided to go on basically an urban hike across a chunk of Vancouver herself. I walked and walked for about 24k steps, and my walk count ended very slightly ahead of the very first day of my trip when I walked through Calgary and then a little bit around Canmore, and also ahead of my Tunnel Mountain climb that only ended at 22.7k (although many of those were uphill or downhill which were both demanding in different ways). It finished second only to the day I hiked from the Three Sisters Parkway, which took 28,570 steps and a couple of days to finish up the blog for.

But we start off this blog with a picture of a fancy water machine. the one that I talked about at the end of yesterday’s blog post. How fancy was it? Exactly this fancy!

When I turn on the tap connected to this filter, the pH 9.5 button glows red for a few seconds and then stops glowing once I guess the water pH level turns more neutral. Then I put my water bottle beneath the spout and fill my bottle. Intriguing piece of technology. Or maybe everyone has one and I’m still living in the 90s.

It was basically lunchtime by the time I left the house, since I spent the morning catching up on my blogging. I bought another one day pass online after I left the house, but when I boarded the bus, the card reader on the bus beeped angrily at my card and rejected my existence in this world. The bus driver thankfully intervened and waved me on anyway though. I showed him my email receipt and then saw that it said that the purchase could take up to two hours to actually update on the card. How weird. I was worried that I would run into the same issue at the station itself, but thankfully by that time, about 15 minutes or so after that first bus incident, my card had updated and I passed that gate with no problem.

I went right back to the station that I spent yesterday evening at, Aberdeen, because there were other malls around the area that I wanted to check out as well. While I had gone east and then north yesterday, today I went south, ending up at a mall called Parker Place.

It was a decent place, I liked the shops that I saw, and the overall vibe of the place.

Then I reached the food court, which looked like this.

This food court was cramped and dirty in a way that definitely also evoked an Asian aesthetic, just not the most pleasing one. There were lots of people sitting around chatting loudly in Cantonese with their thumbs up their rear ends and nothing but half-empty drinks on their tables for hours, blithely occupying tables while other people like me circled the food court holding red food trays, desperately trying to find a free spot so they could sit down and eke out a meal before they could continue on with their days.

I did eventually find a spot at a shared table. My meal was somewhat randomly picked by me after browsing all the stores, and was called Cantonese-style Fried Chencun Noodles:

It was from a store called Curry Kitchen, but most of its dishes, including this one, had no curry whatsoever. Oh and they only accepted cash, which was annoying. And it honestly tasted like every other kway teow style dish ever made, with a side of what was probably supposed to be wintermelon soup but it was unclear because there were only two small chunks of melon inside the soup. Still left me pretty satisfied overall though.

Yesterday, I mentioned that I had seen a store called Murata that was selling my favourite workhorse reusable bag for cheap, and likely several different variant patterns of that bag as well, so I set that as a goal to visit today. To get there, I continued taking the same train line that linked both the station nearest my Airbnb (Richmond-Brighouse) to the one I was eating at (Aberdeen), dubbed Canada Line, further north to Broadway-City Hall Station. Then I took a nice, long stroll east from there along West Broadway Avenue, passing a bunch of streets named after provinces in Canada. When I reached Ontario Street, I found the store and entered it.

I learnt that the bags were cheap because there were actually two sizes for those bags, one a smaller size in a vertical-oriented bag that cost the $12 price point that I had seen, and one a larger horizontal-oriented bag that was the one I actually had, that cost $16. It was still cheaper than the other store from yesterday though, and they had a bunch of different patterns, so I actually ended up picking up one of each pattern that I didn’t have.

Too many reusable bags? I figured I’d give one to everyone in my family as a gift actually, and keep the leftover one for myself. They’re just that good to use and nicely patterned to boot.

After leaving that store, I continued walking east to Main Street and then turned north, taking a nice stroll under the cloudy skies and cool weather all the way past Union Street into Chinatown, only stopping off at some clothing stores and a used bookshop called Pulpfiction Books along the way.

This Chinatown was kinda run down, not so impressive, definitely not where I would send people looking for good Asian stores or food. Even the Aberdeen area has it beaten by miles, and that’s only from the scant few areas in Vancouver that I’ve visited. However, for certain types of products like gifts or squirreled away music or video products, an area like this probably works better. But even though it was fairly large compared to Edmonton’s Chinatown and I believe even Calgary’s one, it didn’t really feel vibrant or safe. Definitely not the sort of place kids or high school students would go to hang out. Not that Edmonton’s or Calgary’s Chinatowns were either.

As I walked west and north, I found the reason why though — a Potter’s Place Mission, a safe injection site, a couple marijuana stores.. all along East Hastings Street and nestled up against Chinatown, and filled with the homeless and drug-addled, like the woman screaming at random people as she walked along the streets, and so on. And just like in Edmonton, destroying Chinatown and other nearby neighbourhoods in the name of social services. We must have modeled our Chinatown to be just like theirs. I pity the unfortunate owners of the buildings and shops along that street, they were all boarded up, unable to really open and operate a decent business due to the homeless and blazed addicts everywhere. Someone’s still gotta be left holding the bag for the cost and the rental or property tax of those buildings though.

A couple streets north of that though, the vibe totally changed. I entered Gastown, apparently Vancouver’s oldest neighbourhood but one that felt very modern and European in vibe. It had a lot of neat looking shops (though none that piqued my interest at all, they were just nice to look at).

There was a cute little steam-powered clock that plenty of tourists were gawking at and taking photographs of.

Naturally I preferred taking pictures of the people taking pictures of the clock, than the clock itself.

I saw a man painting some really nice pictures near there, he’s apparently a local celebrity that’s been doing painting here for many years, and goes by the name Gastown Sam (local).

I inquired if he did custom portraits as well and he suggested I check out Stanley Park on the weekends, near the aquarium, so I might go do that tomorrow. He said he wasn’t allowed/licensed to do something like that here. Super nice guy. He said I had a nice face for drawing. I said I wasn’t looking to get myself drawn, I was looking to get Tigey drawn!

I also, for the first time, saw this street performance where there’s a guy coated in gold or silver paint and pretending to be a statue that activates when you donate money to him. It’s interesting how sometimes cities have their own brand or theme of street performing but it’s only in that city that you primarily see them, and nowhere else. Like acrobats in New Orleans… gaudily dressed showgirls and showguys in Las Vegas… trained monkeys in various Japanese cities… CD scammers in Santa Monica… and statue performance artists in Vancouver, apparently. I saw three of them all in all today, one of them right by the clock in Gastown:

The second one a girl in silver in the downtown area that I didn’t take a picture of, and the third one later on at the Shipyards Night Market all painted in gold. I wonder what material they use to look silver and gold.

Leaving Gastown, I continued onwards west and a little north and ended up in said downtown core. I went into the food court basement level of a small mall called Waterfront Centre to sit down a bit and recharge, and I likely briefly nodded off there too, before getting up and continuing on.

I also had a good laugh at this sign that I passed by along the way.

After a brief stop by the gift shop of the Vancouver Art Gallery, where I browsed but didn’t buy anything, I ended up at Robson Square before turning northwest from there and ending up at a store called Muji.

There was some cool stuff in there but nothing I could carry home or wanted to spend even more money on. Oddly, there’s no Muji store in Alberta that I know of or could find out about, but due to a spam site, Google Gemini hallucinates and thinks that there’s one in West Edmonton Mall when there isn’t.

There was a cafe inside the store and a robot at its counter named Jarvis that said hi to me.

After Muji, I went to the nearby waterfront area by the Vancouver Convention Centre for pictures.

And then to Canada Place, not far from there:

And then to Waterfront Station, where the entrance to the Seabus was located.

This Seabus was a passenger ferry that we must have taken before back when I was last here with my family in the 1990s. It runs every 10 minutes and connects Downtown Vancouver with North Vancouver. It was also free for me due to my transit day pass.

On the northen shore, immediately upon disembarking from the boat and leaving the short ramp leading to the toll gates, there was a walkway to the right leading to a boardwalk area with nice views and a bunch of locks people had put there over the years as symbols of love.

Visible from that quay was the actual Shipyards Night Market itself as well, on the next dock over. This was the reason I had come all the way here to North Vancouver, and was one of the highlights of my trip and the reason I was even in Vancouver when I was planning it. (The other reason was another night market which I hope to catch tomorrow.)

The entrance to the Shipyards market from the direction of the ferry had a large, open passage whose floors and walls were being drawn on by people with chalk, visible to everyone walking in from that direction. I took a montage of pictures both on the way in and, later on, on the way back to the ferry to get home.