Why “Vancouver” Makes Us Laugh

With the opening ceremonies of the Olympics in Vancouver tonight, and Vancouver all over the television, I’ve had the city on my mind for the past couple of days. Scott and I were in Vancouver a few years ago, as we left on our honeymoon in Alaska. We had quite an adventure while in the city, though we were there for less than 24 hours.

We came into Vancouver from Salt Lake City. As soon as we stepped into the airport from the tarmac, we were extremely confused and increasingly concerned. I won’t lie – we thought we were in the wrong place. Everything we saw was in Chinese. Everything. The signs to the gates, the restaurant signs, the bathroom signs, maps….everything was in Chinese first, and English second. Every person we saw was clearly of Asian descent. Everyone.

It was extremely strange, to put it mildly. How we managed to get out of the airport without a single picture…I will never know.

As we stood outside the airport waiting for the shuttle to our hotel, our concerns were alleviated and we were sure we were, in fact, in Vancouver, as we were supposed to be. At that point, though, we became the spectacle. Since it was August, and we are from Georgia, we were dressed for warm weather. Well…warm weather was not what we found. It was cold. Our wait at the bus stop was longer than we had thought it would be, so as we stood on the side of the road I dug into my suitcase for some of the clothes I had packed for Alaska. Imagine me standing in pants (long ones, thankfully), a T-shirt, and a scarf. The wind was blowing the scarf and Scott and I, deliriously tired and coming down off the high off the wedding, were laughing hysterically. People were staring. It was funny.

Once we got to the hotel, we found that we were going to have a problem. We hadn’t exchanged any of our money for Canadian currency since we were only going to be there for one night; our travel agent had told us that it wouldn’t be a problem. It was pretty late and the hotel restaurant was already closed, and the vending machines only accepted Canadian dollars…which the hotel couldn’t give us. Half-starved (the last thing we had eaten was a humongous cinnamon roll in Salt Lake City), we set out to find something to eat.

As we walked, we discovered that our hotel was right in the middle of what we could only assume was Chinatown. Everything was in Chinese again. We found something that looked akin to an Atlanta Bread Company, but they wouldn’t take an ATM card or American dollars, so that was a big, fat failure. Desperate, we walked on. We spotted an Asian supermarket – the only thing that was still open at that point. We rushed in, despite the fact that they were locking up, and wandered around to find something we recognized that we could eat for supper.

Bingo. We found something claiming to be barbecue potato chips and Golden Oreos. We grabbed them up (the supermarket wasn’t picky about how we paid) and went back to the hotel for our gourmet newlywed dinner.

It was a weird evening.

The next day, before setting sail, we had lunch at the hotel restaurant. That was another interesting meal. Everything looked like it was supposed to….but nothing tasted right. The burger was off, the ketchup wasn’t right, the coleslaw was funky. We felt like we were on another planet.

We did find out the reason for the large Asian population. Apparently when Hong Kong was returned to China from England, residents of Hong Kong were considered citizens in British Columbia and went there instead of being Chinese citizens. (I might be telling that wrong. Please tell me if I am.)

Lovely city, and great story. We love Vancouver, and I’m excited about seeing it on TV over the next couple of weeks.