Vancouver is full of weirdos and Seattle is full of dossers.

Vancouver is full of weirdos and Seattle is full of dossers.

Having said that some of Seattle’s dossers are pretty weird.

Perhaps I had better start from the beginning. Mat and I live eight time zones apart. So the obvious meeting place is for us both to fly eight time zones. Yep – me from China, Matt from London to meet in British Columbia.

So Vancouver it is. Matt has never been to Canada, I have never been to B.C. What are a few time zones between friends? I arrive Tuesday morning, Matt Tuesday evening. Naturally by the time Matt arrives I am suitably ensconced in a bar which, with a few instructions, Matt duly arrives at.  Nothing worth remarking on so far. Except that, due to a bit of time zone prevarications Matt had, allegedly left at 9 a.m., I had left at 2 p.m. on the same day but I had arrived in Vancouver 10 hours before Matt. Naturally, it didn’t stop us having a few pints.

So WTF were we doing in Vancouver? Obviously we were on the way to Whistler. For the non-cognescenti, Whistler is one of the world’s premier ski resorts and, as you can imagine, I am one of the world’s premier skiers.

But there would be a bit of jetlag, neither of us had been there so why not three days in Vancouver?

Well three days is certainly enough. It is a spectacularly uninteresting place. Yep, Stanley Park is good for a few hours bike ride if you are bored and like being told which direction to ride, there are a few beer shops/local breweries although the beer all tastes the same, everything is orderly – the cars stop at red lights and people wait for the walking sign at junctions – but is it exciting?

Well there is a clock driven by the steam from the thermal underground system that is quite interesting. We did find some decent seafood chowder but...

There are a lot of wierdos. They would come in all shapes and sizes, although being hirsute helped to get the job – foot long beards were a requirement. Some of the women had quite long hair to. These people were all dressed oddly or behaved oddly – lots of them talking to themselves, of course. Who could possibly employ them? A small example – we were walking by a construction site which was surrounded by corrugated iron sheeting when, suddenly the sheeting opened and out stepped a girl, who clearly did not work on a construction site, closely followed by the smell of marijuana. Our guess was that there was a very select party going on inside the corrugated iron.  We suspected that some of the wierdos rather enjoyed a spot of heroin.

Actually Matt quite liked it, thought he could live there.

For me - too quiet.

And.

I am sure it didn’t rain all the time it just felt like it.

 So to Whistler to meet Bill and Tina. They had only had a five hour flight across three time zones so no sweat. Except... Matt, Bill and I all have knee issues. Tina came out in sympathy on the second run of the first day by falling over and buggering her right knee. Matt is easily the best skier amongst us and often went off on his own. Bill and I poodled around. Until the penultimate day. Bill and I had done three excellent runs before a break. Then B, M & I went high in the thick swirling snowy mist. It was horrible. We decided to take a green run (the easiest grade) to escape. I fell off it. It is easy so you can’t fall far. I fell all of two metres. I couldn’t get up with skis on so I took my skis off.  My feet went into the snow over my knees. It took me more than ten minutes just to get back to the piste – a distance of about five metres.

Tina did come out for one run on the last day but it was horrible. Fortunately she had arranged bobsleighing in the afternoon.   Fantastic. Try doing 125 kph with your bum 5 cms off the ground at 3 or 4 g when the ground is also about 30 cms from your shoulder because you are effectively riding the “Wall of death”. Brilliant. I had the best seat just behind the driver. You slam from turn to turn incredibly fast. I would have my left shoulder about 30cms above the ice and what felt like half a second later my right shoulder would be 30cms above the ice.

Whistler is small by the standards of European ski resorts – only 37 lifts, although many are long. The Green runs are true French Greens – very long roads. These are not pleasant and distinctly unpleasant when you are skiing latterally across a steep slope. The blue runs are like French blues – steep in places but always wide enough. There are no red runs. The blacks are divided into single diamond and double diamond. They are all so horrible that not even Matt tried any of them. The other thing about Whistler is that it is west coast so we only had one day of sunshine – the others had rain, snow, wind or a combination of them. And we had a good week. The week before had been all rain and the week after we were there it was forecast to be too hot.

Seattle is a very rich city. Home of Boeing, Microsoft, Starfucks and Amazon.  I don’t think it has a million people. If you like dossers on every street corner and half way along each block on major roads it is the place for you. If you like over-priced crap bars full of loud mouth tossers come on in.

Yep, it is typical USA but worse. On the bus south from Canada as soon as we crossed the border it was trailer-trash. How can a country that is so rich be so mean? The worst health care in any half-civilized country, cops that shoot hundreds of people dead every year, 10,000 people a year are murdered and three times that killed on the roads. It is a dreadful country. I hope that I escape it alive after seeing my friends here.

In Seattle we went up the Space Needle which, despite being built in 1962 for the “Worlds Fair”, was surprisingly good. 

We also did a tour of “Underground Seattle” After a major fire the whole level of the city was raised so there are still some old shop fronts below ground. What it really was was a history of the city. The high point of the very funny commentary was the role of “seamstresses” in a city where the men outnumbered women ten to one. The city elders decided not to throw out the seamstresses – have an “entertainment” tax – a brilliant solution. One “madam” only employed well educated seamstresses so that the clothing of the richer men in the city would be well cared for. She had no heir when she died and left a fortune to the Public School system. This was the largest pre-Gates donation in the city but, because of her profession, no school is named after her. Our guide did not like this and thought that there should be one with a school icon of a thimble to encourage safe sewing.