Down to New Amsterdam

but there were no yellow haired girls. Crackheads, junkies and schizos aplenty mind you, but no yellow-haired girls.
I'm in Langley B.C. at the moment, and last night I had the pleasure of getting down to Vancouver.
I lived in the West End for quite a few years, and next to Saskatoon it's the one place in the world that I feel most at home.
My hope was to ditch some of my co-workers so that I could run around without having to consult anyone or adapt to anyone else's pace, but the guys were all new to Vancouver, and pretty content to let me do what I wanted, as fast as I wanted. It was great being with restaurant people. We all walk about 3 times faster than most people, and talk a lot more than most people too.

All I wanted to do was walk around the old neighbourhood a bit, see some of the old haunts and once I got that out of my system, we started to embrace whatever experience might present itself.
We came across a shisha bar on West Georgia, and on FOH Dan's reccomendation we stopped in and hit up the Hookah pipes for a little break.

Later we went down to Gastown to meet some friends at a pub, and Dan C was getting itchy for smoke of a different kind. I don't partake of that sort of thing anymore, but I know where to go to find it so I took him for a walk up to the New Amsterdam Cafe on Hastings and in moments he was lit up and daydreaming in the high stratosphere of his cerebral cortex. Back in the day, one used to be able to walk any of the streets just off of gastown and be approached by willing purveyors of virtually any narcotic known to man. Maybe it was a bad night, maybe I just look like too much of a cop these days, or maybe it really has changed, but we only encountered one dealer. Talking with some of the heads in the New Amsterdam, they confirmed that traffic really has gone underground, and that these days you have to look a little harder.

I took the guys to see Chinatown, and we stumbled upon a midnight market, all lit up with handpainted paper lanterns and the smell of roasting chicken and pork and garlic and ginger, and we bought a few knickknacks.
The most talked about part of our walkabout was the East Hastings venture.
E. Hastings is frequently referred to as Canada's poorest neighbourhood. Hard drugs are an epidemic, and the addicts are literally laying everywhere down there. One of our companions remarked that it's good for a pick me up to walk down East Hastings, because no matter how bad you feel about yourself, you'll feel better once you see the crowd down there.
The changes to downtown were amazing to me. All the streets are the same, the buildings are for the most part the same, but the names and facades of all the businesses seem to have changed.
William S. Gibson is a Vancouver author, often credited with the invention of cyberpunk. One of his stories involves nanotechnology...microscopic robots that gather and construct themselves into buildings. The technology is almost organic, with the effect that the buildings are essentially living and evolving things. I almost felt that this whole Vancouver downtown was the same sort of living and evolving organism. It was almost as though you could see the facades morphing and changing before your eyes, (and that had nothing to do with the Shisha or the New Amsterdam) btw.
That's all.
Today I'm off golfing. I have 8 hours of complete structure and no stimuli laid out before me today. To me golf is the opposite of fun. I'd rather spend the next 8 hours walking around downtown again. I could walk the same streets, but I guarantee you it would be a completely different experience again.