Neither of us slept in as late as we had imagined we might, so we headed over to Granville Island for coffee around 0900. Mandy, perhaps unsurprisingly, has picked up a bit of a head cold (we're back at the boat and she is napping now) so we didn't push ourselves trying to do or see too much. Instead, we walked around Granville Island, saw the hourly Chinese New Year celebration (hourly? The dragon was only two kids long, so I guess they had to do it frequently to make up for the shortage. No firecrackers either, in a place so security conscious right now), and then headed across the bridge into downtown, which had looked pretty intriguing last night.
We found both the LiveCity venues over there but there were crazy long lines to get in. I hadn't realized they would be cordoned off, since they are, I believe, free to the public. But there are big blue fences around them both and metal detectors to pass through to get in. I suppose there is no way around that these days, although the whole city is basically a spill-over party from the games... I'm not sure that scanning one crowd of people inside the fence is going to do anything to prevent bad things happening in the as-large or larger crowd of people just outside it. Anyway, we didn't feel like doing a line today, so we skipped it (although the dance thing we could see up on the big screen inside the perimeter looked kinda interesting).
We had a great lunch at the Cafe Vancouver, which is just a little place across the street from the will-call office that I noticed yesterday. Free wifi, good food, big soft chairs. I am surprised that in a city obviously bustling with people, no place we have been yet has felt particularly crowded. We've always been able to find places to sit and eat or drink. Maybe everyone else is inside the LiveCity stalag.
This seems particularly true for Starbucks. If there is anyplace on the planet that rivals Seattle for Starbucks location density, this has got to be it. It's starting to surprise me to not see them anywhere. They are handing out free mini-maps of the city, which are pretty handy themselves, but which of course feature the location of every Starbucks store in town. Usually you look at such a thing and think to yourself, "Oh, interesting, I didn't know there was one just around the corner here." It's to help you find stores you didn't know about, but in this case, it has backfired: I look at it and think, "Jeez, I could have swore there were three of them on that street when we were there last night, the place is practically a coffee desert."
Of course it's not really possible in the Pacific Northwest to have such a thing as a coffee desert; we are blessed with deluges of both rain and coffee, and there are two or three other chains that are sure to be anywhere that Starbucks is not. Benz, Tim Horton's, and another outfit I don't recall. It's amazing there is any room left for cheap teriyaki joints and creperies, but there must be as we've seen plenty of those as well.
I suppose the density of the city feeds those small shops in ways that we don't really see in Seattle. Here there are block after block of small mom and pop shops and restaurants beneath tower after tower of condos. Downtown Seattle, despite recent efforts, is mostly office towers, whereas a large chunk of Vancouver is condo or apartment towers. I don't know what the density is exactly, but I have to imagine it fuels those sort of small service businesses in ways that an office district, de-populated after 1800, cannot.
I should have some pictures to upload tomorrow. It's supposed to rain, so that will give me something to do. Of course, I don't know how much to trust the weather report now, either. But tonight is probably dedicated to catching up on Olympic coverage and maybe watching some cheesy romantic comedy that Mandy likes... it is, after all, Valentines Day.
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