Fascinating and Frustrating Facts about Vancouver

I went for a post-modern urban bus tour of the city a few weeks back and it was interesting to see the city through the eyes of a Geography Lecturer from UBC (University of British Columbia). The campus I am staying in sits on prime property. I should put up photos of some of the houses in my neighbourhood – more like mansions. There's a lot of development taking place on campus itself. People actually buy property here and live on campus. And because the land sits on University Endowment Lands (leasehold), land owners do not pay provincial tax. However that also means they do not qualify for Vancouver City facilities like free public library membership - and that includes me! People here are very proud of their parks and gardens and every year pass laws to allocate more land for parks and gardens! There are laws to ensure that house owners maintain a relatively neat garden in certain neighbourhoods. Walkways for pedestrians are very important so if your bush is growing into the walkway you will have to trim it so that it does not obstruct the pedestrians. In some ways, due to the British and French influence, one don't really feel that this place has a very American culture.

The roads here are very well-planned and laid out like a grid. The numbers are in order like the streets that run from north to south in consecutive numbers, like 4^th Avenue, 5^th Avenue, etc. and the perpendicular roads are given names. So you will usually mention the intersection like 4^th and Oak. Ontario divides the city between East and West . Thus if you are travelling along 2^nd Ave West, it becomes 2^ndAve East after you pass Ontario Street. Same goes for the parallel streets. Likewise house numbers gets smaller as they approach Ontario on both sides (east and west) and they are divided by the block between the streets. For example houses between 4 ^th and 5^th Avenue may be from 1400 -1500, and houses on the next block from 5^th to 6^th could be from 1500 -1600. It’s quite cool really cause these are noted on the street signs and also on the maps. This is how most parts of the city are planned! So if you have the address, you’ll roughly know whereabouts you’re heading for. But must be mindful tha the number of the houses here do not always run in running series of alternate numbers like they do in KL. While they are in ascending or descending order, they are not in definite series and can be anywhere between 5 to 12 numbers apart on the same street! On the streets where the the houses are larger, the numbers tend to be further apart, as far as 20 numbers apart. In this way, every other house can end with a 'nice' number and say, avoid those that end with 4s. You see this more prominently in the expensive housing areas – to attract Asian buyers.

The bus system is not difficult to figure out – generally no. 4 goes along the route of 4^th Ave, no. 25 on 25th Ave. Yeah, doesn’t take a genius to figure it out. The part I’m not so impressed with is, you must choose the right bus stop to board the bus because there are different bus stops along the same street for different buses (I suspect they are for different bus companies). So while I have a couple of options I can take to my destination, I have to choose which bus I want to wait for because the bus stops are not located near enough to each other for me to change my mind or if I want to take the first bus available. Have they heard of consolidation? The skytrain here is very much like our LRT system which connects to the larger area of Vancouver into the suburbs, but generally not as well connected as ours, especially in the city. The nearest one to me is about half an hour away on the bus. The seabus is what they call the ferry that takes you across to North Shore. By the way, gas (gasoline) here has been rising quite steadily, something like 10 - 30% in the time I've been here. It's about CAN$1.30+ per litre.

Here the banks charge for every single transaction, including ATM services, request for statement, debit card transactions, etc, except making a deposit! This is the practice for most banks. So what you have to do is sign up for a banking plan, which gives you certain number of transactions for free, depending on the type of plan – similar to a mobile phone plan. Quite shocked initially, then I thought of how I used to complaint that Maybank charges for more than 4 ATM transactions a month. When registering for a new handphone number, with some companies you can select 'Asian friendly numbers' and will be given options of numbers that end with 3s, or 8s, and not 4s. Here they charge for making and receiving calls on the cell but you can buy a plan to send text messages, like CAN$3 to send 50 messages a month! Just to give you an idea, a basic plan costs about CAN$20 (excluding tax and other 'fees' for voice mail, call display and text messages) and gives you about 200 minutes - you get charged for incoming and outgoing calls. Others can give you more minutes, say off-peak like evenings and weekends. They will reduce it to about 100 minutes of outgoing calls during peak hour. Any extra minute above that, you are charged CAN$0.25 per minute which is crazy because a local call from the public phone costs CAN$0.25 per call! Yes, it is cell and text message here. They don't understand what is sms! Some prefer to use a land line which is only CAN$25 per month for unlimited local calls.

Postage is pretty expensive. Standard local mail costs CAN$0.50 plus tax and to Malaysia, it's CAN$1.45 plus tax. I've mentioned before that tax is not reflected on price tags. In Vancouver, you pay PST (Provincial Sales Tax) and GST (Goods and Service Tax), which is a whooping 7% each. Tax is levied based on the kind of goods, so for example, there's no tax for essentials and here, that is bread and milk - sorry, not rice! So you kind of hold your breath when you go shopping, not knowing how much more you need to pay for tax.