Just one more reason to wish I was Canadian

One of the things I wanted to see in Vancouver was the Police Museum and so I had put that on the list for yesterday.  But Ron felt it was important that yesterday be the day we did our misguided walk to UBC, based on his assessment that the weather would be “pretty good” on Saturday and really rainy on Sunday.  So I relented and we trekked in the rain yesterday, which was bad enough, and then when I rechecked my plans for today, I was reminded that the Police Museum is closed on Sunday and the weather was going to be just fine.

Instead of the Police Museum we wandered the area around Chinatown, which was nearly as good, because the area is in dire need of police activity and it didn’t take long before we got to witnesss a little police intervention.  Then we wandered into a few Chinese grocery stores that reminded me of why it was so darn hard to eat when we were in China.   We also saw this fine-looking electrical box as we wandered and it’s just one more way that the Canadians outclass us.  They’ve got a good health insurance system, the streets are somehow teeming with Lamborghinis (truly), and Vancouver is unbelievably pretty.

I woke up excited for the big Sun Run race.  We decided to eat breakfast right at the corner by our hotel so we could see the runners while we had our omelettes and toast.  I was underwhelmed at first. Five wheelchair racers came by and then exactly 3 race walkers.  They were soon followed by about 300 elite-seeming runners. No big deal.  And then we got up to leave the restaurant and walk the 50 feet back to our hotel and we were stopped by 55,000 oncoming runners.  I have never seen so many runners in my life.  It’s like 25% of Tacoma ran in front of us. I wanted to get a really good picture, but we needed to get back to our room to take one from the balcony and there was no way to cross the street.  So I got this after the crowds had thinned.

I reconfigured our day and routed us to a couple of highlights I had spied earlier but didn’t get to investigate.  One of them was the Vancouver library.  Look at this place – they modeled it after a Roman forum.  It’s fantastic and open and packed, even on Sunday.  There’s restaurants in the lobby and lots of atrium seating.  There’s large sections of books in German print, Chinese, French etc.  There’s hundreds and hundreds of computers and people packed into the chairs.  Friendly staff.  Clean bathrooms…

We’re headed back to Tacoma in the morning.  For those of you who have never taken Amtrak up to Vancouver, give it a try.  The route is gorgeous.  It runs along the shoreline for hours.

I almost forgot – as part of my continuing legal education in all things traffic related…when we were lost on Friday and wandered into the Lamborghini dealer, I struck up a conversation with the salesman, just so he would know I was somewhat serious about my 450,000 dollar car shopping, in case my sensible Born loafers, polar fleece and Vera Bradley backpack did not convey enough financial clout.  He told me that, in British Columbia, if you are pulled over for doing 40km or more over the limit it is called “extreme speeding” and your car is impounded on the spot for 7 days on a first offense and you pay some enormous fines.  It seemed oddly illogical to me to sell those 12-cylinder monster/sci-fi fantasy cars in a province that’s so aggressive about speeding.  I hope, for the sake of our civic pride, that there is a correlation between the impound fees and their lovely health insurance, that library or at least those attractive electrical boxes.