DUTCH GIRL




Party like a rock star.

2004-07-29 - 2:39 p.m.

Vancouver.

What a strange city. I forgot that it has 3 times the population of my home city until I was walking down Robson at 2:00pm on a Tuesday afternoon and it was JAM PACKED with people. What were they all doing? Doesn't anyone have a job there?

It's strange because there are so many different sides to it. Very disperate. There's the "hippy" culture, very evident when you walk down Commercial. There's the drugy/homeless side. There's all this money. Lots of really wealthy Canadians living in huge big homes, people with yachts and the like. Lots of Asian culture and money, and all those glass high-rise condos that make it look like Tokyo. And there's the blue-collar, slightly red-necky influence of much of the rest of the province. Very evident if you're in Surrey. All those different elements should make it an interesting place, but somehow it feels like they can't ever put it all together.

Here's a city where they have to lock the dumpsters because they don't want to have the homeless junkies sleeping in them, but they're planning to spend a fortune on having artists paint the man-hole covers before the Olympics. Maybe they should be spending a little of that money on places for those people to sleep that aren't dumpsters.

Anyhow - a great vacation was had, none the less. I didn't realize how badly I needed it until I had a few days away from home and work, to just "be". It was grand!

T arrived late on Monday because he missed the 12:30 ferry from the island, so Es and I just hung out at her house and I taught her how to knit, which I've been promising to do forever. T arrived around 5:00 and we hustled over to Cooper's house for dinner with him and his wife. He's directing the first show of the season for me, so we had both a social visit and a business meeting. Very cool, as I can now write off the whole trip. It all went very well, except for one moment where I stuck my foot so far down my throat I'm amazed i didn't choke to death.

We left his place about 9:00pm and headed into the West End, to check in to our hotel. It was very nice. We were on the 28th floor, just a couple of blocks from the water, so we hd a spectacular view. And just 2 blocks from B's apartment. Checking in was a blast. We pulled up out front and T started unloading his huge arsenal of guitars from the van, as he didn't want to leave them in the parkade, just begging to be stolen. Right away there was a bell-hop there, in uniform, loading the instruments onto a cart and asking us all kinds of questions about what we were doing in town, where T was playing, etc. We felt like rock stars. Add to that the fact that T had bought this membership to the Coast hotel chain, so we got "prefered customer" check in.

After dumping our stuff and showering, we met up with B at a little pub across from his place for a couple of pints of beer. When the pub closed we decided we should all go back to our hotel and avail ourselves of the mini-bar. We decided that it was a night to "party like a rock star". Up to the room, pop open the mini-bar and let the very expensive drinks flow. Smoke a couple of joints. I ran around the hotel in my bare feet at 1:00 in the morning looking for the ice machine and chatting with the bell boys. Back to the room. Flip on the TV, surf the porn, play some drunken Nintendo. End the evening with a ice cube spitting contest off the balcony. Much fun.

The next morning, slight hang-over in tow, T and I grabbed breakfast at the hotel restaurant and headed off or some shopping down Robson. I think we went in to about a dozen shoe stores, and oddly, I didn't buy a single pair of shoes. I didn't see anything interesting. Pink shoes are really in right now and I have 2 pairs of pink shoes already and I'm so over pink shoes. I did stop in the fancy-ass MAC store and avail myself of some new make-up. And T bought me a lovely necklace and himself an beautiful caramel coloured ultra-seude coat.

We walked back to the hotel, had a nap and then headed out for a really amazing BBQ dinner at this place called Memphis Blues. The real shit, I tell you. We ordered this platter to share, which featured everything from the menu. Ribs, brisket, pulled pork, cornish game hen, beans, cornbread, slaw, potato salad. It was enough foot to feed an army and I think we got through about half of it. It was a total meat festival. After that we couldn't do anything but go back to the hotel and lie around digesting while watching a movie.

Wednesday we slept late, T went off to the Yale to load in his gear for the evening, and then we met B for the world's finest hamburgers for lunch. Followed by a trip to the Vancouver Art Gallery to see the Andy Warhol exibit. It was fabulous, and I did a little more shopping in the gift shop. A little gift for Shanny, a ring for myself and a reprint of a Warhol drawing from his early career, a drawing of a beautiful ladies shoe from the 50's, with the caption "See a shoe and pick it up, and all day long you'll have good luck". It just cried out my name.

After another nap and a light dinner, T headed off to the club for a sound check, B came over, we had a beer and then headed out. There was a huge fireworks show in English Bay, just a couple of blocks from the hotel, and they had all the streets blocked off and about 500,000 people were flooding in to the West End to watch the proceedings. Sadly, I didn't know in advance about the fireworks, or I might have planned to stay in the room and watch from the balcony, since we had the perfect view. But we'd already planned to go see the band, so B and I walked around in the crowd (it was pretty amazing), took some photos and then walked up to the Yale, where we met up with Esther and ran into another friend, a playwright from Vancouver who I haven't seen in ages. Howard was also supposed to meet us, but he couldn't get there because of the fireworks and the street closures. There wasn't a great crowd, but the gig went well. The band sounded really great. Es kept laughing because her baby was rolling around in her belly like it was dancing up a storm.

I didn't get to sleep until about 3, so I was a little groggy for having to be at the airport by 9:30am, but it was a short flight and now I'm home. T has 3 more days on the coast before he comes home, so I have a nice long weekend to chill and hang-out with some friends. I think I'll even do something ambitious like sort through the books and DVDs and figure out what we should get rid of.

So, there are my adventures while on vacation. Now it's time to unpack and do some laundry. Oh yeah, the bill this morning, for 3 days in this lavish hotel, with mini-bar and Nitendo and movies, was $1000. We might have been pretending we were rock stars, but sadly we don't make that kind of money. But we sure had a good time. And what are Visa cards for, really?

Vorig - Daarna

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