On the streets of Vancouver

What’s a street? Just a stripe of asphalt for the people, good to walk without getting muddy, and indispensable to drive? No, it's much more for a newcomer or a tourist: streets are the id card of a city.

The shops you see, the shape of the buildings, the attitude of the pedestrians, even the sounds you hear and the smells the wind brings to you; everything around you contributes to make up the look of a city and can tell much more than a tourist guide book.

Streets help you understand how a city is like, what people do and how they behave, and I believe Vancouver ones are a perfect mirror of the city and its inhabitants.

Vancouverites have a reputation of being a bit cold and introverted, so don't be surprised if in dowtown you'll mainly hear just the noise of the traffic. People don’t talk loud, don’t shout, don’t swear. You find maximum 3-4 people at a time talking each other. No horns, no car alarms, no alarms at all to be honest, no ambulance police or fire brigades sirens; only the flow of cars and buses coming and going.

The alarms were my worst enemies in Dublin (the only other big city I lived in), going off all the day and night long and, together with the sirens, creating a context of permanent emergency. Here there’s a sort of “busy calm”: busy because everybody is busy with their own business, calm because everything has to follow an order, a procedure.

Dubliners and Italians are probably affected by a kind of selective colour blindness: they think green and red on the traffic lights are a polite advise to be ignored.

Here pedestrians wait for the traffic light to get white (instead of green) to cross the roads, and wait patiently in a queue for the bus: in their mind there’s no space for the joyous anarchy of Ireland and Italy.

It’s impossible not to notice white people are probably a minority in Vancouver.

The all Canadian concept of visible minority makes really no sense in a city where the number of Asian people is countless. Hongkouver eh?

What’s a minority? I would be a minority, as it happened to me to be the only passenger with European features on board a bus crowded with almond-eyed passengers.

In Italy you would maybe regarded with suspicion, here it’s normality: there’s not minority but just normality in the westernmost big Canadian city, so western that becomes eastern in this our round world, with sushi bars and Chinese signs at every street corner.

Asia lays down the law not only on two feet, but also on four wheels: no trace of Ford, GM or Chrysler as you would expect from North America, never mind European cars: the streets are a stronghold for Nissan, Toyota and Hyundai.

The weather, so often drizzly, does not allow you to fully enjoy the smells but can’t hide the weed burning in the joints: it’s not a mystery that hemp and its derivatives are widely accepted in Vancouver. Vamsterdam eh?

Police have probably better things to do than bullying ganja lovers: what the hell, this is Canada, the land of freedom, not Italy.

If this kind of smoke is not a mystery and somehow expected (as mentioned in many websites), to me it’s still unknown the source of another smoke, I saw more times coming out from the streets.

Any comment to explain it would be welcome.

The downtown looks clean (ok, east side is different, we know that, right?) but I just can’t figure out where people place the rubbish, as garbage bins are pretty rare. Do they keep it in their pockets?

They also like big size (we’re in North America after all), so you feel once more a tiny thing: lost in the second biggest country in the world, surrounded by skyscrapers reflexing their images each other, and two lanes boulevards. And if you get into a shop or fast food don’t think to have found a familiar place: everything is connected in the underground, so you get to a bank and go down to a mall at an underground floor, you ask for info in a jewellery and the shopkeeper let you pass through the backdoor of a skyscraper hall.

Have you ever walked in an Italian city? Do it, and you’ll quickly understand what means to have the second lowest birthrate in the world. You’ll find out kids have become as rare as the pandas.

Dublin? It’s just the opposite. Dozens of kids everywhere, couples in their early 20s with 1-2 kids already.

Vancouver is different. I noticed not many kids around, and above all very few elderly people. Looking around you should really think everybody is between 20-55, no idea where the others are.

Maybe they just stay at home because not obsessed with hair and teeth. You must know there is an incredible amount of barber shops and hair spa centres here, but most of all the citizens are obsessed with teeth. Wherever you look at, you’ll spot a dentist, a doctor specialized in endodontics, periodontics and whatever-odontics to take care of your smile.

As bizarre as it can be, among job posts online I have even ferreted out dental marketing agencies (I already imagine their ad: "We smile better than competitors")!

Recalling the fact Canada has the world highest proportion of fruit juice drinkers, the only logical conclusion is cavities here must be a matter of national security.