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stuff I've learned in vancouver
Dec. 3rd, 2007 09:12 pmI suppose it's kind of boring, but I keep seeing little things and wanting to mention them to someone, and Willa said "blog it." So.
Canada is really dark in December. (Noon solar altitude is 18 degrees today; sunrise 7:50 AM, sunset 4:15.)
Looking out the window of a jet while flying through a snow flurry bears a striking resemblance to watching TV tuned to a dead channel.
The hotel shower has two shower heads, one right above the other. I love my two shower heads at home, but never saw that feature in a hotel before, which makes me wonder if it's commonplace here. If so, clearly These Are My People.
Also, the bar that the shower curtain hangs on is bowed way out in a big curve, which makes the shower feel vastly bigger than it is. It amazes me I've never seen anyone build a shower that way before.
Gas stations have signs with their prices, but the prices make no sense. What does it mean that gas is 103.9? 103.9 whats per what? I was going to look it up but I decided I prefer the mystery.
I passed a Christmas tree lot and I caught myself thinking, "Huh, Canadians apparently spray that artificial snow-flocking stuff onto all their Christmas trees! No, hang on... right, that's snow."
(Alas, it poured last night and has continued raining off and on all day today, so all the snow is melted and washed away now.)
Stanley Park is gorgeous, but I knew that from the last time I was here in 1991.
That time, we were six years into a drought in California, and I remembering being dumbstruck and -founded by a drinking fountain along the footpath we were on, that ran all the time--and I mean, not because it was broken; there was just plain no valve on it. This place was different.
So today, on another part of that same footpath, I came across a big steel cage, with several lights and a siren on top, and inside of it was a nineteenth-century cannon, rigged up with an electronic igniter where the fuse would have gone in years past. The signs make it clear that this is the "Nine O'Clock Gun", and the warning lights and sirens go off shortly before 9 PM each night to give people a chance to get away or cover their ears before it makes an Earth-shattering kaboom.
Cum On Feel The Noize
And so but here's the thing. If it's so dangerous that it has to be surrounded by a big steel cage to keep anyone from so much as touching it, and if it's so loud that it'll make your ears bleed if you're standing too close when it goes off, I kinda feel like if this were the US, maybe they just, you know, wouldn't have it go off? Or at any rate, not... automatically. This place is different.
Canada is really dark in December. (Noon solar altitude is 18 degrees today; sunrise 7:50 AM, sunset 4:15.)
Looking out the window of a jet while flying through a snow flurry bears a striking resemblance to watching TV tuned to a dead channel.
The hotel shower has two shower heads, one right above the other. I love my two shower heads at home, but never saw that feature in a hotel before, which makes me wonder if it's commonplace here. If so, clearly These Are My People.
Also, the bar that the shower curtain hangs on is bowed way out in a big curve, which makes the shower feel vastly bigger than it is. It amazes me I've never seen anyone build a shower that way before.
Gas stations have signs with their prices, but the prices make no sense. What does it mean that gas is 103.9? 103.9 whats per what? I was going to look it up but I decided I prefer the mystery.
I passed a Christmas tree lot and I caught myself thinking, "Huh, Canadians apparently spray that artificial snow-flocking stuff onto all their Christmas trees! No, hang on... right, that's snow."
(Alas, it poured last night and has continued raining off and on all day today, so all the snow is melted and washed away now.)
Stanley Park is gorgeous, but I knew that from the last time I was here in 1991.
That time, we were six years into a drought in California, and I remembering being dumbstruck and -founded by a drinking fountain along the footpath we were on, that ran all the time--and I mean, not because it was broken; there was just plain no valve on it. This place was different.
So today, on another part of that same footpath, I came across a big steel cage, with several lights and a siren on top, and inside of it was a nineteenth-century cannon, rigged up with an electronic igniter where the fuse would have gone in years past. The signs make it clear that this is the "Nine O'Clock Gun", and the warning lights and sirens go off shortly before 9 PM each night to give people a chance to get away or cover their ears before it makes an Earth-shattering kaboom.
Cum On Feel The Noize
And so but here's the thing. If it's so dangerous that it has to be surrounded by a big steel cage to keep anyone from so much as touching it, and if it's so loud that it'll make your ears bleed if you're standing too close when it goes off, I kinda feel like if this were the US, maybe they just, you know, wouldn't have it go off? Or at any rate, not... automatically. This place is different.
