Dec 23 2008
The Best Place on Earth?
British Columbia is the self-styled ‘Best Place on Earth’. This propaganda is beamed into Lower Mainland homes almost every day – apparently visitors ‘from around the world’ who come here in February 2010 to visit the Winter Olympics will find this out for themselves. My experience today (December 22nd) in Vancouver indicates why this claim is arrogant nonsense. Vancouver is no better, and no worse, than many other cities around the world - not that most Vancouverites would know this because few of them travel.
Around 10 inches of snow had fallen in the previous three days. The results have been quite drastic. Many flights have been cancelled at Vancouver International Airport because there aren’t enough snow ploughs and people to keep the runway open all the time. Entrances to some Skytrain stations resemble small swimming pools and escalators are clogged with slush. The trains have dirty, wet floors and are full to brimming with irritated and irritating people.
One exchange today between a pushy older woman and a younger male person with a French accent was hugely amusing and just shows how rude and short-tempered people are here when things don’t go their way. She had already pushed on to the train at Metrotown Station and loudly asked for a window to be opened so she could breathe some ‘oxygen’. Two stops later with the train resembling a sardine can, with dirty water replacing the tomato sauce, some more people shoved on to the train including a male who asked people to move down the train as he could see a spare 2 square centimeters of floor. “What kind of sardine can land do you come from?” she asked.
“Move down” he said.
“Don’t bring your lower level of life to Canada” she replied.
Another two stops later the young man pushed towards her demanding to know who had spoken to him like that and that whoever it was apologise.
There was then a frank exchange of views between the two during which she apologized to him and he called her a ‘beech’. To make matters even more amusing, another man suddenly turned around and gave her a verbal lambasting, saying how rude she was.
This provided a merry interlude between the train suddenly grinding to a halt and throwing the passengers around inside, like laundry in a washing machine. The Skytrain isn’t designed for running in the cold. The controllers claimed over the intercom that the weather conditions outside were extreme, which was bollocks as it was barely snowing at all. Vancouverites are really creative with their excuses.
Once outside the Skytrain station the streets in the downtown hadn’t been snow ploughed properly, the pavements were slushy, and at most of the crosswalk corners you had to leap across six-inch deep puddles of water. The drains couldn’t cope. Drivers speeding in their trucks and SUVs gleefully sprayed people with dirty water if the pedestrians got too close to the road. Some of the buses were running late and had trouble making it up some of the hills, though they got there eventually.
I hope that it doesn’t snow in Vancouver during the 2010 Olympics as throwing another 100,000 extra people into Vancouver, the Lower Mainland, and the airport on a day like this would have caused chaotic conditions on the roads, on the pavements, and on The Skytrain. Today, the ‘Best Place on Earth’ looked very shabby, tawdry, and dirty.
