NWP 4. Two soups

15 & 16-Aug-24 Vancouver

Alarm call at 0700hrs for the 0830hrs train to Vancouver. Surprisingly no USA immigration checking passports just some young lad making sure you have a passport and giving a pink piece of card with a handwritten ‘V’ marked on it. For Vancouver.

Boarding soon after to discover the dirtiest train I think I’ve ever been on. Carpets heavily stained and worn. Seats equally worn and stained. To the extent that some look like someone’s died there. Very grubby. Very surprising. America doesn’t do trains. That’s a European thing.

Off we chug following the coastline to our left. Stunning views across the water to the islands I’d driven through a couple of days ago. Approaching the border, all are instructed to return to seats and remain there until a secondary passport check is complete. Mother of Chinese family in front has disappeared with passports in handbag. Inspector is not happy. Barks at them that they’re holding the train up. Don’t think so mate. We’re trundling along just fine.

Arriving Vancouver, the carriages are released one by one to avoid overcrowding on the platform and a scrum for Canadian immigration. Takes another hour from arriving at station to faff about.

Taxi driver tells me it’s $17 to the hotel and switches the meter off. Oh, OK then.

I’ve been to Vancouver a number of times over the years but its startling to see how many homeless are lying about in drug induced states of torpor. Quite staggering. It’s every street in Downtown we drive along. Not out of the way streets. Main tourist streets. Unbelievable.

There’s only one place to stay in Vancouver if you want a stunning view from your bed. The Pan Pacific Hotel (https://www.panpacific.com/en/hotels-and-resorts/pp-vancouver.html). With the possible exception of the Grand Hyatt Hong Kong (also looking over a harbour) this has to be one of the best views from a room (see photo below). It is stunning. Let me know if you have a better view.

Walking to dinner at an excellent Nepalese I pass yet more drugged up homeless. Might be dead for all I know but I’m not the caring sort to go and find out. DIY in these situations.

Don’t. Involve. Yourself

There was a glitch in the matrix last night as my NWP 3 blog post told me it had been published but no one had received it. So a further attempt tonight. Receipt is quickly confirmed by a very old friend. I have to qualify that she’s a very old friend as in longevity. Still young! Ish…

Very old friend (as in longevity) starts my day by sending a photo of two Belgian Buns, she’s just bought from Sainsbury’s. As a reminder of us both working in Loughborough on a construction project there in the early 1990s.

It’s where my international career began…

May 1995.

A Friday morning.

The young trainee Quantity Surveyor, Touring Taurean, is sitting in a site hut in Loughborough. His boss’s phone rings. Boss is on holiday so he picks it up. His boss’s boss is reading this laughing.

It’s Dave from the head office in Nottingham. He’s just got back from a business trip to Hong Kong working on a brewery project in China.

The young Touring Taurean, making polite conversation, asks how Hong Kong was. It was brilliant, says Dave.

Touring Taurean unwittingly replies, “Ah, I’d love to go there.”

Dave replies, “Would you?”

Oh yes, say I. I’d go tomorrow.

“Can you go Monday?”, says Dave.

WHAT?!?!?

“Can you go Monday? Well actually, you’ve got to fly to Vancouver first, to spend a couple of weeks with the mechanical engineers and then fly from Vancouver to Hong Kong to assist with the materials procurement. It’ll be Business Class flights and five star hotels. Is that alright?”

WHAT?!?!?!

I’m 25 years old.

What an opportunity.

And so began my international career.

In Vancouver.

Hence a sentimental attachment to Vancouver.

Never looked back. And had a very nice life out of it. Thank you very much.

The boss whose phone I answered back then very sadly died just before I departed for this trip. RIP Oz. Thank you for everything.

Having been following a blogger rowing the North West Passage (www.berkeleysquarebarbarian.com/tag/northwest-passage-expedition) with three others on a small boat called Hermione, I was reminded that it’s mosquito season when I saw a video he’d posted of a cloud of mosquitoes whining about. Decide a mosquito face net would be a wise decision. Makes me look handsome. Already have lethal amounts of DEET in my bag for prevention but nothing for cure. Pharmacist directs me to buy some hydrocortisone cream. But the pharmacy also sells Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut. And spicy Pringles. $50 later…

I don’t have breakfast usually but as it’s included in the room…

Overdosing on crispy bacon, eggs, mushrooms, toast, butter and pastries at breakfast I am still full at lunch so decide on a small bowl of soup to keep me going.

It’s a bakery sort of place with seats. Order the roast garlic and tomato soup. Then see a nice looking pretzel. And I’ll need a Coke too.

It’s a busy lunchtime crowd. Seating demand far outweighs supply.

I’m expecting soup a la Pret a Manger. In a plastic beaker. Which is easy to drink out of.

But no.

It’s soup in a large bowl. On a plate. With a large piece of toasted sourdough. And the smallest spoon known to man.

Like a Crackerjack contestant, left hand has plate loaded with a pretzel. Because no one mentioned the soup came with sourdough toast. Left hand also has a can of Coke. Shirt pocket is rammed with napkins. Wooden knife. Straw. Wooden spoon. Because no one mentioned the soup came with a tiny teaspoon.

Right hand has a large brimfull bowl of soup on a tracing paper type sheet on a plate. Tracing paper sheet acts as Teflon. On same plate is a large piece of toasted sourdough cut in half. And a pot of butter.

I am fully loaded and balancing plates left, right and centre. Making sure soup does not spill. Making sure pretzel does not slide off. Making sure Coke does not slip out of fingers simultaneously holding pretzel plate.

Searching for a vacant seat. So I can sodding eat.

Ah ha. There’s one.

Ask the girl adjacent if table is free. She confirms it is. Despite some detritus still on it. So. Hands full. I try and sit down on a cramped bench.

It’s at this point things start to slip and slide.

Bench is lower than expected. Sit down with a jolt.

And I see a bowl of tomato soup starting to slide towards my clean blue shirt.

With the corrective action of my right arm to stop soup spilling, my left arm counteracts.

Newton’s First Law kicks in.

Pretzel now starts sliding in the opposite direction to me. Which is fortunately caught in the nick of time.

Plates placed on table.

Phew.

That was close.

And then.

Some young woman arrives at the table. It’s her table. Not mine. The detritus is actually her half eaten lunch. She’d just gone to get a napkin.

Oh FFS.

I have to vacate.

Very carefully, I load up plates, Coke and cutlery.

And find another seat at a counter type table.

Soup finished.

Time for a drink.

Can is opened.

In all my decades of having a can of Coke with a straw it has been completely passive.

So you’ll imagine my surprise when putting straw in can, the contents squirt out through the straw like some ejaculation all over the sodding place. Thinking that was it there’s a further eruption through the ring pull opening. Frothing Coke everywhere even more. Unbelievable.

Sometimes whilst travelling you feel like a ‘picky tea’ as Jane McDonald (BBC Radio 2 presenter for our international readers) would say. In need of some wine, fresh baguette, cheese, salami, olives and such like, head to Granville Island market.

For some reason today, I must have had about six strangers turn to me in the street and say, “You’re so tall!”. Admittedly the first was the five foot housekeeping maid who I nearly ran into in the hotel corridor this morning and gave such a fright to as she came out of a bedroom as I was walking down the corridor. She looked genuinely scared and frightened at my height. Which with my walking boots on and a spring in the step I’m approaching 6’8”.

Queuing at the cheese counter in the market some woman turns to me and says, “You’re so tall!”

Hot and bothered. I snap.

“Would you go up to a disabled person and tell them they’re disabled?!”, growls the irritated Taurean.

She shrinks back and realises the error of her ways.

Back at the hotel I get in lift at street level. Reception is another level up. Doors open. Three old folk with suitcases. One is on a motorised mobility scooter. Think Madge Harvey in the TV series Benidorm. It’s that.

Two get in lift and thinking she’ll follow them straight in. But no. She dilly dallies. Trying to position her scooter so she can drive in to lift. Lift doors start to close because she’s mucking about. I stick arm out to stop doors closing. They do.

Briefly.

She’s now half in.

Doors start closing. I’m wafting my arm trying to alert the sensors there’s an object in door. My arm. On every occasion in a lift. This works.

But. For some inexplicable reason this time it doesn’t.

Doors are closing with my arm about to be crushed. I like to think I’m a reasonably strong bloke but am quite surprised how forceful the doors are. And with my arm still in the door trying to set a sensor off and physically trying to stop door closing, I am now swept sideways.

Which wouldn’t be too much of a problem if I had a spot to place foot to steady myself.

But said spot is taken up with a mobility scooter.

I have all on to stop myself being swept across and collapsing on to Madge.

You couldn’t make this stuff up.

So you’ll realise how nice it is to sit in my room with some excellent Affinois cheese, red wine and peppercorn saucisson, fresh baguette, olives etc and a bottle of Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon watching the sunset over Vancouver harbour and Grouse Mountain. Watching all the float planes coming home to roost. And Celebrity Summit departing for the Alaskan Inside Passage.

I could sit here all day watching the comings and goings.

When I retire…