Vancouver! British Columbia! Canada!

[beige_alert]

I went to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, for the American Society for Mass Spectrometry conference. This was, naturally, business-related travel. I know that people who travel for work all the time mostly hate it, but I very rarely get sent on business trips, so it really does remain a fun adventure for me. Mostly, actually, I go to someplace in the Chicago area, the next big city over, which isn't so exciting because I grew up there and travel there for fun frequently, but it also isn't very hard to do, just two hours of driving, or 90 minutes on a train to go to the actual city center. Trips far away are much rarer and, as I say, are a fun adventure even if the actual travel is something of a nuisance.



Vancouver is a fun and interesting and beautiful place that I'd really like to someday spend some time in on a proper vacation. I had a little time in the mornings and some time in the evenings to explore, but I was basically working, so I really only walked around the area in the downtown in the general vicinity of the convention center. Now, my idea of a reasonable walk extends out to maybe 10km total, so that's some area, but still very limited.

Vancouver is one of those cities that I almost can't understand, in the sense that I grew up in Illinois, which is basically a big old flat area where you could just slap down a city any old place-and if you drive through central Illinois you'd guess that's pretty much what happened. Chicago is by the big lake, so you can't sprawl randomly very far that way (part of the city is actually built on fill where the water used to be) but all other directions are fair game to build anything anywhere restricted only by the human laws and not geography. Milwaukee is also built where a river enters the lake, but the rivers are small enough that there are many bridges, and even as a pedestrian, even if one bridge is closed for construction work, it's just not much of a barrier. The city sprawls out randomly away from the lake. Lake Michigan is so big that while Muskeogon, Michigan is over on the other side, it is so very far away that it is in no sense part of our city.

Vancouver has all these islands and peninsulas and bays and rivers and inlets and mountains and hills and all sorts of things that I'm not even really sure the proper terms for. I was never clear on which way was north. To me it's just an alien thing, a city broken up into oddly-shaped bits that you need to take a ferry to get to, or you could drive to over the bridge but no way no how are you going to walk there from here, and mountains rising up into the sky.

I'm used to water. I hang out by Lake Michigan all the time. I swim in it sometimes. Looking out east from here, across the lake the narrow way, it's roughly 150km to the other side, which is far beyond the horizon. Visually, you might as well be looking out on the Atlantic toward Europe. Water, waves, sky meets the water at the horizon in the distance. But the lake is fresh water, it's where the water from my taps comes from, and it's where the water that goes down my drains goes to. We're not really worried about running out of fresh water. It's really odd for me to look out on a big body of water and remember that it's salty and not usable as drinking water. And the tides! The first day or two I didn't notice (I was, after all, indoors most of the day) but eventually I realized that the water level changed by meters in just half a day! Lake Michigan's level does change a bit on a seasonal basis and also wanders up and down semi-randomly on a decadal timescale, but if the level dropped a few meters in an afternoon that would be a cataclysm not seen since the end of the last ice.

The ASMS conference was interesting. It is a huge event! I know mass spectrometry is a big field with lots of work being done, but this is a big event!

I took the bioinformatics short course over the weekend, which, on the one hand, is in fact work (and my employer paid a non-trivial fee), but, on the other, I have an interesting job and it was an interesting class. In the main conference I saw only a fraction of the posters (presentations of research work in poster format), but I've never seen so many posters! I can't imagine that there are many Bruker 15-Tesla Solarix FT-ICR instruments out there (they are extremely expensive) but I guess everyone who used one got a poster out of it! I saw some work that might be relevant to our work, and a lot of random interesting stuff that isn't directly relevant to anything I do. Someone was claiming to have the first "non-Thermo" look at raw Orbitrap data, having opened up the very expensive machine and attached their own digitizer to the actual trap. Also some examples of the well-known fact that nearly everything can be improved by attaching a laser. I attended some oral presentation sessions more-or-less relevant to the work I do, and learned some useful things.

List of random Vancouver/Canada/travel thoughts:

• Short lines and no particular problems with security or with customs. The airports themselves have a lot of signage that usually is clear but sometimes, with so many signs with so many arrows pointing in so many directions, you end up with situations where you assume the arrow is pointing you toward the thing you can see when in fact it's pointing to something behind that which you can't even see, but mostly pretty clear. I wished the security screening points had a bit more signage listing all the things you need to do (take off your belt, have your boarding pass ready, and so on and so on) and it wouldn't hurt if the maze of steps to fill out forms and get through customs was a bit clearer. These are the people who could detain me if they feel like it, so being confused bothers me a great deal more than the risk of getting lost on the way from gate F90 to the bagel shop and back does.
  
  
• SkyTrain! I only rode it from the airport to the city center and back again, but for someone from outside the select parts of a few special cities in the US this sort of thing is amazing. Where I'm from the best routes are the buses that travel in more-or-less direct routes at speeds nearly as high as a bicycle as often an once every twenty minutes during the on-peak times. I got confused looking at Google Maps (showing stations but not depicting lines) because while I was vaguely aware that there is more than one SkyTrain line being a non-New Yorker American I wasn't really thinking about the possibility of more than one line.
  
  
• I got up at 6:30 to head off to a training course and the city was dead. Tim Horton's was closed! It was, come to think of it, a Saturday morning. Sunday early morning wasn't any livelier, and Monday was a Canadian holiday. I was actually only out on one proper weekday morning, and the city looked a lot less aggressively laid-back then.
  
  
• I figured out which direction you walk to see more homeless people and which direction more joggers and tourists! (Toward the container port and toward the marinas full of yachts, respectively.)
  
  
• I just brought a tiny camera and not my array of SLR gear, but I saw a heck of a lot of people with piles of photographic equipment. If I go back as a proper tourist I'll fit right in.
  
  
• I saw the Vancouver Harbor Control Tower while I was eating dinner Tuesday evening but until I started googling now I didn't realize it was an air traffic control tower for the seaplane and helicopter traffic in the harbor. There is an amazing amount of floatplane traffic.
  
  
• The Port of Milwaukee gets ships from overseas that came through the Saint Lawrence Seaway, and also some of the bigger ships that won't fit through the seaway and are trapped in the Great Lakes, but it's not a very busy port and it's also not in a spot that's very visible from many places you'd commonly find yourself. Vancouver is a busy place, and the container port is in a highly visible spot. There is constant cruise ship traffic right by the convention center. It's interesting to see the cruise ships up close, and watch the process of loading food and fuel onboard. It's also a reminder of how weird the cruise ship thing seems to people like me. I watched a ship leave with a movie playing on a giant outdoor movie screen up on the top deck. I'm just not entirely clear on why I might want to go to sea to watch a movie. Also, on a bonus ship-watching note, thank you to the woman who was lying ventral-side down in bed in her cabin down low in the ship, watching the action below and above through the window while not wearing any clothing. We enjoyed the view as much as you presumably enjoyed being the view.
  
  
• Speaking of the port, sulfur is a garishly odd bright yellow color, especially when an immense pile is stored outdoors in the open.
  
  
• I just my air travel arrangements randomly through a travel agency contracted by my employer, but the flights were fine. The CRJs I've been on before a bunch of times. The A320 is a very common aircraft but I think this was my first trip on one. Our flight from Vancouver to Toronto, though it was just a short 2200 miles, was on a 777-200LR, a big aircraft with extreme long range, and my first time on one. That plane started its day in Sydney, Australia, and flew across the Pacific before stopping in Vancouver and, for some reason that makes sense in airline scheduling terms, continuing on for a short flight across part of North America. It's a nice airplane.
  
  
• Also, the first time I rode in an airliner on a (perfectly routine) go-around, at Milwaukee due to runway obstruction by the preceding plane. Another trip around with a chance to look down on the city. (How about a takeoff aborted prior to V1? Been on one of those once, long ago. They decided the engine was fine after all and we flew across the Atlantic uneventfully.)
  
  
• Another thing I learned: The official Canadian euphemism for that room you really need to go to from time to time is apparently "washroom," which is also a term used in the US but not as often.
  
  
• For an American the one and two dollar coins are a new thing. We do, technically, have one dollar coins in the USA, and a two dollar bill, but you won't see either out in the wild very often. Buying a non-trivial item using a few coins is a new experience. Also, not being used to actually using coins instead of just getting them as metallic shrapnel thrown off by cash transactions that I then just store in jars, I haven't figured out how to keep coins organized and end up with bunches of them in random pockets and I tended to end up dropping them on the floor.
  
  
• Where I come from the people responsible for electricity do not call themselves "Hydro." Yes, I know, it makes perfect sense, but, still...
  
  
  

Comments

[hsifyppah.livejournal.com]

North is towards the mountains! Granted there are mountains in all directions if you look far enough, but the big close ones are north of Vancouver proper. As a result, I cannot find North in any city except Vancouver, so ingrained is Mountains=North in my mind. Cities with no mountains make me feel nervous, while Portland, whose mountains are about equal in size in three directions, makes my inner compass just spin around and around and around.

I love the sulfur piles! One day I will manage to take a picture where the colour actually comes out looking like they really do in their horrible eye-martyring ZAPness. So far no dice. Once a guy got arrested for snowboarding on the piles! He had respirator equipment but it still seems a bit foolish.

Vancouver has one of the few natural deep water ports on this coast, so we get looooots of container traffic. There's that big orange sucker (don't the cranes look like big orange giraffes?) downtown, plus a coal port further south, plus some smaller ports dealing with the small fry, you know, stuff that didn't just puff up from Japan or China.

Downtown is rather peppier during the week, but even then, Toronto makes fun of us for being such slow-mo hippies. The number of cafés is either to compensate or an elaborate joke. I cannot reveal to an outsider which is true. *grin*

We mostly have coin purses in addition to wallets, or men just have saggy pants because their pockets are full of change. Twonies and loonies are big enough to just fish out of the sea of useless change that you later dump in a jar. My change purse is made worse due to frequent US travel - you can spend US change here, but the reverse is not generally true - and so I keep a strong magnet in my change purse. Canadian coins stick, US coins don't.

Let me know if you're ever coming back! I am always up for an odd stroll with an absurd number of stops to photograph strange things. :)

[dan-ad-nauseam.livejournal.com]

And to make matters worse, just north of Portland is another Vancouver. :-)

[callibr8]

If, when you are in the greater Portland metro area, you can see Mt Hood - it's almost due east. Also, the Willamette runs northwest until it joins the Columbia just upriver from Portland. Hope that helps a bit with the orienteering. :-)

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

I'll have to remember the magnet tip!

It would be awesome to go on an odd stroll with you, I'll be sure to let you know if I get the chance. Joyce would love to visit, too. It's just really far from Wisconsin and even farther from Louisiana, but maybe someday we'll get the chance.

[ladysanjou.livejournal.com]

Really sounds like you had some fun in Vancouver, even though you were there for business. I am one of those who tends to hate business travel because I always regret not being able to do some sightseeing. At least, one gets some inspiration for potential vacation trips. I just have been in Sweden for the first time and it was very nice there. I'll keep this in mind for one of the next vacations, I think. ;)