Vancouver is very handsome and worryingly clean. This is problematic as I can’t be certain it’s a real place. Most of it seems not to have been lived in and I think it might actually be one giant film set kept pristine should an impromptu production break out—a theory backed by my happening to run into two film crews over the course of a few days.

WOMEN, ETC. All of the women in Vancouver are beautiful in the same way.¹ Women on Vancouver’s streets are excited to see whomever they meet and can often be witnessed dashing into the arms of others for hugs more joyous than life regularly allows. At the times they are not doing this thing, women will instead be seen walking all over with boys dressed far too dapper. Passerby are more profane and contain more cigarettes than anticipated. Most of the conversations you hear will be false.

EATING OUT If you go out to eat in Vancouver, you will eat either sausages or Asian food. I won’t hear a word to the contrary re: this subject.

There is coffee and bundles of it. Much of it is very good, but the majority is housed in chains that you sneakily may not always be able to tell are chains. There are the Starbucks of course and in Vancouver they are grandiose amphitheaters, glorious monuments to mediocrity. Not counting these and the Tim Hortonses, there are three, perhaps more, coffee franchises yet. Can you find them all? (For each that you find, use your crayons to draw yourself a star on the back of this placemat.)

People in the food service industry are unrealistically jovial. They call you “Man” all the time. If you are used to, as I am, some hellish life zone like New York City, you are likely to take this as an affront. You are likely to feel such language should be confined to the beach and to atop a surf board.

A bartender tried to small talk with me. He first asked if I was all right, Man, and I became instantly worried he thought I was too drunk or on some of those very bad drugs. But I soon surmised that this was just his method of inciting the small talk. Once figuring this out, I tried to be jovial in return, but it was more than obvious I was a faulty person come from a faulty place, so he soon occupied his attention with a group of four (4) ladies who showed up shortly after I did and were good at smiling.

For all their nicety, I did at times experience the sensation that the Vancouverian food service workers found me a bit thick and tiresome. In a café principally designed for doing some of those very regular drugs, I asked the man for a baked good from the menu. He informed me the kitchen was closed. I asked if a smoothie was available. He paused a moment and then, as though communicating to a child dullard, said, “Yeah, pretty much what’s here is what’s available.” “Here” was a glass case full of dry brioches. I ate one and had a bad time.

GOING OUT Bars seem to play a lot of music from the nineties because no one told them any better. In one place I heard “You’re No Son of Mine” from when Phil Collins hijacked Genesis and the very next night I saw a group of three (3) youth cracking up while singing “I Can’t Dance.” I deserve an explanation.

Despite their ever-deepening irrelevance, Sugar Ray is still played. I thought this was dutifully done in support of some of the only music ever made by the country, guessing Mark McGrath and his funky bunch to be Canadian, but apparently this is not so, meaning there is no excuse. (I wrote this part in the bar I mentioned earlier and one of the bartenders just gave me a free pretzel. Like a medium-sized, warm, free pretzel. This parenthetical is my documenting of this phenomenon.) Regardless, I never heard any Nickelback and I can certainly appreciate this demonstration of restraint.

Drunken nights in Vancouver are somewhat atypical. Having observed it in multiple countries, I’ve grown accustomed to the standard of a weeping girl sat on a street curb being comforted by another girl. Not seeing this familiar site in Vancouver, I became frightened as hell.

The absence of this necessary event, however, received sufficient substitutes in, one, a yelling match between a small lady w/ skateboard and a man wherein the man shouted “If you’re gonna keep acting like this I’m fuckin’ done with you!” Better still was a fight between a big-bro and a tough-gal who kept on cursing each other out and needed friends to pull them away from each other. As they parted ways, big-bro summed up to his one friend the situation as follows: “I’ll fuckin’ slap that bitch!” Once the event had truly ended and all parties had tottered off, coppers showed up to prowl the area. Anger in Vancouver is considered a crime.

This one time, I saw a small Hispanic man trying to hoist up a sizeable dreadlocked lady. The cops discovered this matter and handled it very level-headedly, asking the man if he was able to get the woman home. “You’re gonna stay with her the whole way, right?” they asked.

I saw a completely innocuous bus, driving around bumping the Harlem Shake. And so I grew fearful.

STREET COLOR Everyone on the streets of New York City looks, to varying degrees, to have been beaten down by it as they trudge, sweat, and grumble. The homeless, too, look sad and tired.² The ones on drugs are sad, tired, and on drugs.

In Vancouver, the homeless are performers. (Perhaps because everywhere it is a movie there.) I saw one guy for real walking along and playing the spoons. Some of the homeless I do not think are even actual homeless. Many appear to just be white kids who have found a spot they like on the street to hang out with their friends, do drugs, and play guitar. They have homeless signs but they are often very silly. Like a two-parter that on the top stated “HUG A COP” and on the bottom “FUCK POLICE.” I couldn’t understand. Did they even want money? Or just to vibe? A lengthy sign that two boys had set up shop with began, “My friend claims to be hungry…” I didn’t stop long enough to read the rest as I feared I then might have to acknowledge that I acknowledged it and I only like to do that for very serious homeless signs.

I have to admit that I actually found the Vancouverick homeless occasionally scarier than the homeless of New York. They were so much louder and so much more active. Like everyone else on the streets of New York, New York homeless are all downtrodden and keep rather to themselves. It is a terribly fearful thing to have to interact with anyone, let alone a homeless on those very bad drugs or a crazed homeless not on them fix-em-up drugs. One homeless stood bent with her hair draped down befront her, spastically sorting through it and periodically tearing from it the occasional violent strand. This is some Jacob’s Ladder shit, kids.

The headliner was without question an older woman in short-shorts who shouted, “Is my ass big!?”and then bent over and shook it (I believe to no one but the heavens, but happening to be in the way, I intercepted the shake). Continuing onward, her various cries continued to echo up and down the block. “Ka-ching! What’s for dinner tonight? A big fucking cheesecake!”

SHOPPING Vancouver loves you if you have money. New York hates you no matter what you do.

Vancouver can afford to have places that sell only expensive maple goods in vast quantities, a dessert restaurant, and a bakery for dogs. You can take a lil’ boat so adorable indeed you might puke to an island to wander an open market that your ma and pa will like with whole kiosks dedicated to a specific manner of salad bowl or peaches of the world or something like that.

POP OR SODA? They say “pop” here. Say “soda” anyway to impose your authority.

AH, WHAT A PLACE FOR ADVENTURE SEEKERS There are hostels in Vancouver and backpackers trundle about with loads of crapola on their backs. This seems weird because it is a place of highfalutin coffee and shops that specialize purely in chocolate ducks or whatever and not a place of filthy, sweaty mountains or bug-crawling noodles that give you the poops.

A BAKERY FOR DOGS Truly, Vancouver has earned its nickname “A Bakery for Dogs.”

CONCLUSION New York is filthy and awful and to that end so is the United States. I saw some graffiti in Vancouver, Canada which read “Smile.” Oh, come on.

It seems to me very important to live in fear of guns and then in fear that you won’t have the medical coverage necessary to sew up your hot gun wounds. It seems to me very important to have these things to fear because otherwise you have nothing else to do and then you have time to engage in small talk with strangers and homeless and to have pride in and keep clean your city. And where does that leave us? In Vancouver, Man.

Having spent a week in Vancouver, I do not believe in it. It is much too lovely there and if it exists no one should go.

If you found this guide helpful, check out the other books in our series, including China for Babies, Egypt and the Sand they Got, & Thailand’s Too Hot!

¹This is not true. All of the women in Vancouver that are beautiful if they are beautiful are beautiful in one of two ways.

²As well they should! Being homeless is no picnic!