Canada Place Cruise Terminal in Vancouver must be run by PHD Candidate Graduate Assistants conducting psychological tests.  We are the rats in the maze.  You go from one end to the other and back again, and on the return is the added step of clearing US customs for our return to the States.  We were told to bring our passports, but we didn’t need them.  They scanned our face with an iPad, it matched the photo in their passport records and we were waved through.  This is the new “Face to Face” interview.

In Vancouver we didn’t go to China Town, Gas Town, Jericho Beach or Stanley Park.  We’ve done all that before, but we had a long coffee with a friend from Serbia, Pedja (or more properly Peđa) ran an internet news service in Serbia when we worked there and has since immigrated, with his wife, to Vancouver.  He currently consults with IREX, the NGO that sent us to most of the interesting places we have worked.

We walked about a mile along the waterfront (according to my iPhone), under overcast skies, to an outdoor cafe, and I nursed my macchiato over a wide-ranging conversation, from Serbian Film Directors, to Roma music, to the political situation in Serbia (terrible) to the media situation in Serbia (terrible) to news of old friends (mixed). We talked about Canada’s new law that requires companies like Meta and Google to pay into a news fund or not be allowed to share news stories on those platforms in Canada. Google agreed and Meta did not so you can’t share news stories on Meta (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram) in Canada.  Google is contributing $100,000 a year, indexed to inflation, to the Canadian News Collective to distribute to Canadian journalism outlets.  Pedja likes that journalists are getting funding but is not happy with the mechanism or the potential for partiality by the collective.

 Our conversation was occasionally interrupted by a seaplane taking off, a trash compactor doing takeaway, several idling trucks and a refrigerator truck making a delivery, motor running to keep whatever was inside cool.

In Victoria the day before Alex, our bus driver to the Abkhazi Garden, told me that there was a new bylaw that required him to shut off his engine when parked.  No idling.  Apparently, that bylaw does not apply to trucks in Vancouver, or at least is not enforced (well, it shouldn’t be for the reefer).  It is a rule our tourism taskforce incorporated into Sitka’s Tourism Best Management Practices Plan.  More on that in a later post.

Alex told me that the exception was if the bus was used as a muster station.  Apparently in Victoria buses are assigned to park in designated areas in case of a natural disaster, earthquake, tsunami, or a radical climate event like a heatwave or freeze.  They would provide shelter, transport (presumably to high ground), heat, or air conditioning. 

Sitting with a good conversationalist nursing a short coffee for a long time, was a better way to spend my time in Vancouver than any other I could imagine. By the walk back the skies were clearing.   All aboard was an early 3PM to allow us to make the tide at Seymour Narrows between Vancouver Island and the mainland.

The sailout was beautiful.  On the way out I saw a guy in a wetsuit look like he was changing lightbulbs on a buoy.  At the end he did a graceful dive into the water.