Vancouver

Eight weeks ago, not long after my last post on this blog, I spent a week visiting a few major Canadian cities for grad school interviews. The trip included just over 32 hours in Vancouver, a city I'd never visited but always felt familiar with after spending my formative years in the Pacific Northwest. It shared so many characteristics with Seattle and Portland that I constantly felt like I was just walking through a different neighbourhood in one of those cities.

I got a thrill seeing mountains again, first through the window of the plane and then again riding the (exceptionally convenient and pleasant) light rail downtown:


My hotel room gave me a view of the opposite, much taller hotel. But if I pressed my face to the window and peered right, I could see a blunt peak of the Coast Mountains, forested, dark in the rain-shadow, and hooked towards me like a half-bent finger. No beckoning needed: if I had ended up moving there, I'm sure I'd be headed for the mountains on my first free weekend.

The cherry trees were already blooming, while snow remained on the ground in Ottawa. I was overdressed and sweating from the time I arrived at the airport and stripped off my blazer as soon as I finished my interview.



I received many dinner recommendations but ended up going with a hole-in-the-wall Japanese restaurant where the servers barely spoke English and I recognized almost nothing on the menu (as well as a good deal of what was on my plate). It was a wise choice, and I happily strolled around for a while afterwards in the spitting rain to kill time before my red-eye back home.



Clever cups at the coffee shops I stopped at:



In the end, I won't be moving there, but I enjoyed my day and a bit on the strange and familiar west coast.