Bandaged hands and a bloody phone

The phone was off the hook and there was blood splattered underneath. Nearby, outside a single-family home, seven or eight cop cars had their lights flashing. An ambulance was parked beside the phone booth and paramedics were walking around the area, not looking too urgent.

Police escorted a black woman out of the house. She wore a yellow t-shirt with a Superman logo emblazoned on the front in green and blue track shorts. There was a little blood on her t-shirt, just to the left of the logo and on her shorts as well. The woman’s forearms were in bandages and as the police gently led her away, they seemed to almost gently place her arms behind her back.

Several people stood near the phone watching. No one seemed to know what had happened. They were just curious.

The police led the woman to the ambulance and closed the doors after she entered. Later, they spoke to a tall man outside the house who also had bandages on his forearms. I left shortly thereafter.

A couple hours later I returned to use the phone. The blood had dried underneath and the receiver was back on the hook. As I pedalled past the house, the woman was in her front yard, speaking over a white picket fence with her neighbour. The police cars were gone.

Incentive to dodge

A two-zone transit pass in Vancouver costs $100. The fine for getting caught without a pass is $150. And yet I have yet to be checked on the Skytrain for a pass. Granted, for most of the past four months I’ve only been taking it two stops – the rest of my journey was via bus, where one usually has to flash a pass to the driver. But if I am not checked in the next two months, I’ll consider Vancouver’s transit fining authority out of wack.

Let’s consider your average commuter living off of the Skytrain. If you pay a $150 fine every two months you’ll come out ahead of those who buy two monthly passes. Even given an extra $30 for the worry caused by looking for cops and maybe a couple of bus passes once or twice, you’d still be better riding na gapa, as they say in Poland.

Of course, maybe they check passes more often out in Burnaby, where there are more two-zone riders. So we’ll see.

Andrew W.K. and Evaporator photos up (but not here)

As per my previous post on the Andrew W.K. and Evaporator concert Tuesday night, photos are now up here on uptownsound.ca.

Not a concert… not necessarily a celebration either

I feel fortunate to have escaped with my camera, my health and my dignity intact after taking photos of Tuesday’s Andrew W.K. concert at the Biltmore Cabaret for uptownsound.

The photos should be up soon, as should a review by my colleague, Quentin.

Some observations, though.

First, you can actually get into bars with a piece of identification from Guam. Makes you wonder why teenagers try to forge B.C. drivers licenses when they could make up Id’s for places like, say, Micronesia or Palau.

Second, getting people to stand up at a concert is easy. Getting them to sit down on a dance floor during a rock concert is infinitely harder, but that’s something Nardwuar, of Muchmusic fame, was able to accomplish with his band the Evaporators. Pretty cool. And makes for easy photos.

Andrew W.K. prefaced his show by saying “this isn’t a concert, It’s a celebration.” Well, it wasn’t much of a concert. Not much of a celebration either. More just a gongshow with half the audience ending up on stage and crashing around speakers, monitors and other seemingly valuable pieces of equipment. If you think it’s hard shooting a concert in your normal bar, where there is no convenient barrier between a slightly-elevated band and a raucous crowd, imagine the difficulty when the crowd joins the sole performer on stage. Fortunately, they all fell down in a heap. Again, go to uptownsound.ca.

Eventually, the concert ended with Andrew W.K. telling the crowd that sound equipment had been damaged and he couldn’t keep playing. Interesting to say the least.

Vancouver Vs. Warsaw: trains, planes and automobiles edition

It’s hard for me to imagine a city that is harder to get around than Vancouver. Partly this is because I haven’t lived in too many cities and partly it is because some 19th century dolt didn’t foresee the rise of the automobile and the growth of the city and decided to build the city’s core on a hard-to-reach peninsula. If Surrey were the core it would be much easier to get around. But then you’d have to go to Surrey.

Whatever the case, as a trip to Stanley Park yesterday showed, Vancouver traffic is hell. It’s bus system is decent but curbside parking means the buses are slower than a kid who’s been dropped on his head one time too many. They also don’t have the same variety of routes as, say, Warsaw, where nary a street is untouched by the city’s bus system.

Vancouver’s Skytrain system has more stations than Warsaw, but the trains are positively puny by comparison, indicative of a smaller number of users. Unfortunately, the aforementioned geography of Vancouver means that the most used stations are packed at the end of the lines. Ideally, of course, you would like the centre of the line to be the city centre, as in Warsaw.

Of course, Vancouver will soon complete its Canada Line, which will extend Skytrain service to Richmond and the airport. Contrast this with Warsaw, where commuter’s to the city’s Prague district on the other side of the Vistula river cannot take the metro. Drivers must instead navigate clogged bridges (like in Vancouver). Mass transit commuters can take (relatively fast) trams or buses.

To reach Warsaw’s outer limits from the city centre, one should expect to spend about 45 minutes in the metro and/or on the bus. To cross the city north-south would take (I’m really guessing) about 90 minutes. East-west I really have no idea but on a bus, I would guess about 100 minutes.

In Vancouver, to get anywhere from downtown will take you about an hour, if not more. From downtown to Port Coquitlam last week at about 3 p.m. it took about 80 minutes. It usually takes me about 40 minutes on metro and bus to get to my home in Central Vancouver.

An unlimited monthly transit pass in Warsaw costs about 75 zloty (about $30). In Vancouver, a one-zone, limited pass costs about $75 (about $75).

Verdict: Warsaw, but mostly due to Vancouver’s unfortunate (albeit, beautiful) geography.

A garbage can and a box

The bus was empty, so she had no problem hoisting a large, grey and round, three-foot deep, 80-gallon garbage can to the back row of seats. In the garbage can was a box wrapped in a black garbage bag.

After she sat down – in the left-most of the five back-row seats – she removed the box, put it on the ground in front of her, then sat the garbage can on top of the box.

“You never know when you’ll need a garbage can,” she said to the shaggy man in the middle of the back row.

She had on a grey tank top and wore jean shorts. Her legs were filthy but her speech coherent and her general aura that of confidence and, if not joy, then at least satisfaction. She rode the bus for a dozen or so stops, from West Hastings, up past the community centre, onto Main Street and towards Broadway. There, she maneuvered her box and garbage can – seperately – through the now-crowded bus to the back doors.

Vancouver versus Warsaw

I know what you’re thinking. Like millions around the world, you’re wondering whether you want to live in Vancouver or Warsaw. I know, it’s a difficult choice, but with some help, maybe you’ll get through.

Like I posted earlier, every person is liable to like, or dislike, a city based on their own preferences and hobbies. But I’ll take a stab at it.

First up, and because I don’t have much time to write right now, the sun and the sky:

The weather, from my own limited experience, is a draw. Warsaw can be warm in the summer, as can Vancouver. Given that I’ve never experienced a Warsaw summer, I don’t think I can compare the two sunny seasons. But I have seen both cities in the winter and neither one is particularly attractive. Both are rainy, grey and dreary. Warsaw gets a little more snow, which can be good or bad, but Vancouver gets a lot more rain, which is definitely bad. On the other hand, Warsaw is quite a bit further north, which means that even when you can see the sun, it dips before the flat horizon before 4 p.m. in winter.

I was going to give Vancouver the point because you can easily retreat into the interior of B.C. to soak up sun or snow. But then I realized that while Poland itself may not be as climatically diverse as B.C., the good transportation links that link Warsaw with, say, Milan, even the field once again.

So a draw it is.

A stroller

I have two computer screens at work and to write about them is to meta-bore myself to death so, despite the fact that they are staring me in the face, on to something else;

She has sandals that would not look out of place on a Pacific Island and a plain, slightly faded red shirt. Short and skinny, but of normal build for someone of Chinese descent, she is pushing a plain stroller with a happy looking two-year old plumped in its seat. The stroller kind of looks like a rollable version of the four-dollar camping chairs we bought recently at value village; chairs that are more like portable stumps, with three legs that spread outwards and a triangle seat that somehow is perfect for one’s derriere.

Which is to say the stroller is cheap looking, and she is plain-clothed, but they are clean and have life’s requirements. To say they are impoverished, then, would be drawing conclusions. But if you have money – if you have it laying around – you buy a fancy stroller that can be covered from the rain, hold a drink and perform other motherly duties like rocking your child to sleep.

She pushes the stroller back and forth gently. When the child begins to make noise, she taps him on the head and implores him to be quieter. Other mothers let their children scream like Freddy Krueger’s victims. This one is dissatisfied with above-a-whisper sound.

My nice city

It seems I now live in the most liveabile city in the world.

That’s nice. And although the Economist, which did the study, explains how it categorizes the cities, you have to wonder just how arbatrary such rankings are. After all, different cities are more liveable than others depending on what one is looking for. If you’re looking to get out of the city each weekend, Vancouver is close to mountains and such, but the traffic is killer. Calgary might be better, but there’s less around. Toronto…. Where ya gonna go?

But then, if liveability depends on how many concerts you can get to, well you’ll have a whole other list of cities.

Which isn’t to debunk any ratings of cities, but to kind of emphasize the fact that the appeal of any city can depend on the person doing the rating. Of course, the Economist rates general attributes most people consider universally positive so it is objective. But I’d like it to compare the big cities with smaller more regional cities as well (although that would obviously be too much work for a publication that looks at the whole world).

Richard Florida has a book called Who’s Your City. I’m not sure if he considers this (he’s an urban planner), but his title seems to relate.

Just a thought

Priorities, priorities priorities

I guess the Vancouver airport policy was tazer first, interpret second.

Karol Vrba told the Braidwood Inquiry into Dziekanski’s death, currently underway in Vancouver, that he was in the airport’s operation centre when a call came in about a man who only appeared to speak Russian, causing a disturbance.

Vrba, who speaks Russian, Czech, Slovak and Polish, testified on Monday that he offered to help but was told instead to check on airplanes parked at the board gates overnight, so the airport could collect fees from them.