Had a pretty good weekend in Vancouver, typified by the relaxing with the girlfriend and shopping at Emily Carr and Ikea. Still feel intimidated by that city. It makes Victoria feel cozy, small, elderly and plain, like some backward, hick, Lynchian-type town where people stare at outsiders with their mouths open a bit. The cars in Van, for one, always seem more wealthy, new and clean. And the city just sprawls and people know areas by the dominant streets, like Commercial Drive, Broadway; or by slang geography, like Kits. The roads are the same width as Victoria, but with an extra lane squeezed in on each side. Traffic has a rhythm here with its own unspoken and speedy cadence and does anyone know or care what the speed limit is? I shouldn’t feel embarrassed in a little red 1980s Mazda 323 hatchback, but I do. If you’re public transiting it, getting around will commonly involve three modes (accordion bus, rail in the sky and boat in the sea) and even more transfers. I really never have any idea where the hell I am, yet everything is vaguely familiar. And what gets me is the people who've lived in Van only a few months can give you multi-page directions to their fav. Sushi joint in the West End while they live in like South Central North Van.

I’ve been to trendy and/or congested metropolises where I felt a lot more out place: see the European stylin’ of Amsterdam, where everyone is a Scandinavian-like model (men and women) and dresses same; or see Athens or Cairo, where traffic is truly a sentient, mad and malevolent entity of its own. But in Van, I feel sort of behind the times, like I need to toughen and cool-up, i.e. get moved over there, rather than just feeling like “what crazy mess, I’m so happy with home.”

But this feeling also comes from having driven over half of Van this weekend. Got off the big boat from Vic on Friday and girlfriend and I immediately headed to Granville Island, a place I pretty sure I know three things about. 1) It’s semi-historic for Vancouver in some commercially viable or young-hang-out way (the Moms probably mentioned it a few times). 2) Emily Carr School of Etc Etc. is there. 3) I’ve drank beer named after it, which reminds me of actually 4) it’s totally not an island at all.

So we walked around in the very damp cold to find the Art School, which didn’t take long, and it quickly both inspired me by its modern cool - architecturally and student body-wise - and sobered/disheartened me by said building and students, who looked artsier than I will ever be. The two major structures, silver-tinned sloping roofs and light blue siding, looked like giant irregular barns with Gov’t of Canada style signage and big glass entrances. The place is situated right next to some sort of really big concrete refinery of looming and gloomy grey silos and smoke stacks as well as the one-story plazas of mini-malls full of art and craft boutiques that seems to make up the entire final third of the “island”. It all seemed very conducive to pangs of modern remorse, apathy, agitation, confinement, and detachment that I assume make it a great place for 20-somethings to pay thousands and thousands for an art degree.

The school me thinks is not a place I would immediately fit in to, may never fit into, though we only briefly looked at the gallery inside the front doors and stepped about three feet into the loungy-looking, Students-Only-Past-This-Point area. Most kids we saw were dressed in tight black jeans with 1980-sloganized t-shirts, studded, black leather armbands and styled Robert Smith, also of course black, hair. The woman at the front desk (and ya, there is really like The Front Desk, looking rather hotel-like) was really helpful though, and the next Friday I’m over I will attempt to sign up for the weekly noon tour and see if the Graphic Design students in particular are as intimidating as what I guess were the vis art ones.

And the girlfriend and I made marinated chicken breast in her mini George Foreman grill that night, and the next drove up and down Commercial Drive literally six times before settling in to a nice Indonesian restaurant a couple blocks from the Sky Train Station.

And oh man, I should just make another entry for Ikea alone, which we made a complete outing of on Saturday. Went to the one on Lougheed Highway. It’s the really huge one, size of a large village, a huge blue box with its own parking, lettered in sections from A-to-at-least-M, which is where we parked. There are posters inside that say “Have it All” because “at these prices you can afford to buy the whole set for your living room and still have money left over for living.” And the top floor, which you’re herded into, is just this directional show room. You follow the hardwood path, labelled at every major intersection with Ikea-blue arrows with their own overhead halogen spotlights, and from each theme junction you move laterally and explore the mock rooms and open drawers and sit in chairs and dream. The detail and design that goes into these life-size dioramas is more impressive than the furniture they articulate. The whole process allows for mid-stream pondering yet keeps us hundreds-strong shoppers in a sort of coherent flow, which I actually like.

Most of us appear to be middle-class, dual-income, no-kids couples. Really, a lot of them looked our age but with a slightly pale complexion and muted glint in the eye of couples who live together since high school and drive Mazda Protégés and watch extra-cable-package channels together and have seen Fight Club and thought it was cool and are but still gonna show themselves and their friends who they are buy buying a new computer desk and a bunch of plastic cubes for storing their sports equipment and DVDs in. A lot of people have kids, too though, and I saw one very trendy-looking mid-forties pushing their three kids on a big steel dolly that looked provided for that very purpose but not originally designed for it.

The flow is really quite wonderful because its arranged by theme, from kitchen to bathroom to living room to bedroom to office to kids room of sleek, quasi-euro styled, really affordable, particle board furniture. You dare not go off the path to far and miss something you didn’t know you needed. There are posters every couple of feet picturing the actual designer of the pieces you’re looking at, of which are all given “names” that sound like Anglicized Swedish like Groland (wheelable kitchen island), Nabben (floor cushion) and Fragg (CD rack). We (girlfriend and I) pick the computer table we’d buy “if…” and explain why. Mine’s gotta be big so I can spread three magazines, tea pot, plants and Oxford English around my monitor, have a keyboard and mouse tray but not the type inside a closeable drawer, and have drawers and shelves built in. (As you read I’m working on an old door placed horizontally and held via gravity across two homemade wooden filing cabinets, the whole thing lathered in some sort of sticky, white, oil-based varnish that collects dust and the ink from printed pages like silly putty). Hers, she likes the cabinet style, where you can close the drawers on the whole unit, i.e. no more work for today the computer station is closed. I loved the compartmentalized feel but that would never work me ‘cause I can’t imagine closing off the computer when I want to do something else. What else is there?

There’s even an Ikea Cafeteria (neat, that name sounded cool, but they didn’t call it a cafeteria) that some teenage staff member goes on the store-wide PA to remind us about every five mins. And the girlfriend gets the kids meal: fries with five meatballs, but passes on the gravy, for $1.99 and we share it looking out over the Trans-Can and the three flagpoles (BC, Canada and something else, (Ikea flag?)) in the parking lot. There’s even unlimited soft drink included. Thus, two hours or so and half way through our day we descend into the accessory land of the first floor aisles of stainless steel cutlery, bins of cheese graders with their own Tupperware shaving bins, and plastic sacks of 100 bulk tea candles. I manage to get out of there buying only 50 tea candles. The g-friend gets a plastic measuring cup for making shakes in with her recently purchased Braun hand-held mixer waiting at home, the other half of the 100 tea-candle sack, three glass, saucer-shaped tea-candle holders, and two woven, palm-leaf placemats. We were very proud of our self restraint, but half kidded about coming back one day with exactly $1000 dollars saved specifically for spending there.