O Canada!

"Why don't you just move to Canada?" When directed at me, this isn't usually a casual question, but a sneering dismissal of my political opinions. "Why don't you go live in Siberia and see how you'd like that?" is the general thrust.

I've just returned from a weekend in Vancouver, visiting Pascal and his girlfriend Ali. (Pascal will be remembered as the friend who studied for a term in Melbourne, and now attends the University of British Columbia.) What a fantastic city! Vancouver is only a 2 ½ hour drive from Seattle. It seems ridiculous that I travel there so seldom.

As soon as I arrived, we headed downtown to see a matinée performance of Spamalot, the musical, Tony-winning spin-off from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It was "performed," if that's the right word, by a North American touring company of the Broadway show in the beautiful Center for the Performing Arts. The show is as impossible to describe as was the much different film itself. Does "zany" do it justice? Probably not. If you like that sort of thing, which I confess I do, it was very, very funny. If you're a Monty Python "purist" -- a concept that's a bit hard for me to put my mind around -- you might be disappointed. I wasn't.

Saturday evening, we walked out into a park overlooking English Bay, ran into some of Pascal's friends, and watched a massive fireworks display coordinated with recorded music broadcast over a local station. Vancouver annually puts on this "Celebration of Light," with different countries sponsoring displays on different nights. Saturday's show was sponsored by the United States, and began with the Star Spangled Banner. Other nights, this year, are being sponsored by Canada and China. The park was crammed with crowds who gathered on blankets, hours before the show, eating picnics, playing games -- we had our own game of hearts going, plus a serious competition to see how many rocks could be piled one on top of another to make a tower -- and generally relaxing and socializing.

Vancouver is one of the great Meccas for bicyclists, and Sunday we spent most of the day biking. False Creek is a river-like inlet from the Strait of Georgia, lined along its entire shore, north and south, with well designed promenades and bike trails. We visited a farmer's market on Granville Island on the south shore that, I have to admit, dwarfs our much more famous Pike's Place Market in Seattle, both in size and in the variety of produce, fish and meats. Both shores of the inlet are built up with rather upscale cafés, restaurants, bars, shops, museums, exhibition halls, playgrounds and parks. No matter where you are, there is always something interesting to see and do. All these attractions are connected not only by bike trails and the promenade, but also by a system of tiny pedestrian ferries that continually dart in and out of stations along both shores.

After we completed our circle of False Creek, including an hour or so touring the tiny Granville Island Brewery -- where we devoted far more time to sampling their various microbrews than to actually touring the facilities -- we biked on to Stanley Park. The park is one of the great urban green spaces in the world, one thousand acres of virgin forest on a peninsula that juts out from the downtown. We did the 5.5 mile bicycle loop around the circumference of the park, with forest on our left and fantastic water views on our right throughout the entire ride. As we circled the park, our views varied from the downtown skyscrapers to the east; to the mountains and buildings of North Vancouver across Burrard Inlet to the north; to the apparently limitless Strait of Georgia on the west (Vancouver Island lying out of sight beyond the horizon). The day was warm and sunny. The views spectacular.

Why don't I move to Canada? Don't tempt me! It's not Siberia.

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Illustrations, from top to bottom: 1. Provincial flag of British Columbia. 2. Spamalot poster. 3. Celebration of Light fireworks. 4. False Creek mini-ferry. 5. Bottle of Granville Brewery Hefeweissen beer against Granville Island Market street scene. 5. Biking around Stanley Park, with Strait of Georgia in background. 6. Aerial view of downtown Vancouver, facing southeast (a bit of Stanley Park in lower left corner, and False Creek near right edge).