Vancouver is Manhattan with mountains. It’s a liquid city, a tomorrow city, equal parts India, China, England, France and the Pacific Northwest. It’s the cool North American sibling. If only, and this holds true for the rest of Canada, it didn’t feel the need to blush.
– Tim Egan, New York Times (Feb 17, 2010)
It’s always nice to hear people say nice things about Canada, but isn’t it time to stop making references to supposed national traits that are just cliches? The whole bit about “please and thank-you” in the poetry section of the opening ceremonies was cringe inducing, and all this blather that we are too modest to publicly express love of country – I guess that message never got through to the hundreds of thousands revelling in the streets. While perhaps not “the best place on earth” its pretty clear to anyone who cares to look, that Canadians actually feel pretty damn good about their country, warts and all, and are not the least shy in expressing it. Now if some of the Central Canadian media, who seem to be dipping into the same pickle jar that git from the Guardian has been (and to think Lloyd Cole and the Commotions was one of my favourite bands back in the day) could just lighten up, accept themselves for what they are, and join in the fun. They will feel so much better.
Before the Olympics I was worried that Vancouver would be outed as the coolest city on the planet. Kinda like that quote. I mean, even the protests play to that inherent cool.
But thanks to the British media, we need not fear another massive influx of people to push real estate further into the stratosphere.
Well, a nice news story from the international media about Vancouver after some of the more ridiculous screeds about how some of these hickups “are all our fault” (thank you British press) is… err, for lack of a better word, nice.
And Vancouver is many things.
But I wouldn’t say this is a cool city, at least not for young people. It’ll be cool when I’m 45 and don’t care about night life, live music, am making if not more than 6-figures (in today’s dollars of course) damn well close to it and am generally obsessed with only family and work. At 25 though I’d rather be somewhere else for opportunity and culture such as New York, London, Hong Kong or Tokyo, or if not money, than at least culture and that joie de vivre in places like Berlin, Melbourne or Montreal that we in Vancouver just can’t seem to build.
“At 25 though I’d rather be somewhere else for opportunity and culture such as New York, London, Hong Kong or Tokyo, or if not money, than at least culture and that joie de vivre in places like Berlin, Melbourne or Montreal that we in Vancouver just can’t seem to build.”
The grass isn’t always that green on the other side. We focus on all the stereotypically wonderful things about these other cities but ignore the downsides, which, when taken in the aggregrate, make the grass look a little… brown.
To add,
You can’t go to another city and experience -just- the culture or -just- the joie de vivre. When you live in New York, for example, you experience a lot of culture, but you also experience a lot of poverty—that is, if you want to live in Manhattan. The same goes for all the supposedly wonderful career opportunities. Those can be had, but at a price: Even young new professionals in Manhattan live in tiny cockroach-infested apartments for longer than they’d care to admit. Nothing exists in isolation, except dreams.
I don’t expect Vancouver to be able to compete with places like that in the medium term (though Montreal and Berlin aren’t too, too much larger than we are). After all this is a city of 2.1 million with a certain history of self-repression. Think Protestant Ethic sans the Work part of the Protestant Work Ethic. And I know full well how expensive the first four are if you want to live in the central city or central neighbourhoods. But there IS a reason so many people are moving there. One doesn’t need to live in Manhattan to enjoy New York, for example. Vancouver’s nice, physically beautiful, has good food, is pretty safe and outside of the very high real estate and rental prices it’s not particularly expensive on a global scale. But nice doesn’t equal cool. Vancouver definitely isn’t the coolest city in North America, I don’t even think it’s the coolest city in Canada (I’d say Montreal is). This may be blasphemous as a Vancouverite to say, but I don’t even know if it’s the coolest city in English Canada (I’d argue there’s more “going on” in Toronto – and more job opportunities too). I’m a born and raised Vancouverite so it’s hard to break away completely despite my love hate relationship with this city, but I’m not blinded by its faults or closed to the idea of going somewhere else.
Maybe he was referring to Canada though? Who knows, the terminology was a bit interchangeable.