When planning this trip, I sometimes questioned my decision of allocating three full days to Vancouver when I scheduled four full days each in Portland and Seattle. After all, why spend more time in the places I’ve already been to, and less in the one place I’ve never seen? But now, at the end of my trip, I feel good about the time allocation: I can feel myself running out of places to see, and I’m leaving with the sensation of having explored Vancouver properly.
To that point, today we took a long Uber ride to the western end of Vancouver, to the University of British Columbia grounds, where two items from our itinerary sit next to each other: the Japanese garden and the Museum of Anthropology.
So let’s start with the garden, which is formally called the Nitobe Memorial Garden, built in memory of Inazo Nitobe, a Japanese diplomat from the 19th century who apparently did a lot of work to establish cultural bonds between Japan and Canada. As I walked the garden I kept thinking, what a nice legacy to have, people building a beautiful garden in your memory.
Like the one in Seattle, this garden is tiny, if not tinier still, so you have to take that into account (it is also cheaper at just $7 or €4.70 a ticket), but I am a Japanese garden enthusiast so I already knew going in that I wanted to visit anyway.
Also similar to the garden in Seattle, it features one main path structured as a loop around a central pond, of course with its beautiful bridge in the middle. It was a gray, cool morning, but every once in a while the sun shone through the clouds, illuminating the golden leaves of the trees.
Eventually we had to resign ourselves to the fact that we’d seen the entire garden, and leave, not without snapping a few more pictures first (once again, choosing which ones to show you is torture). Thankfully this time we didn’t have to walk very far, because our next stop, the Museum of Anthropology, is located just down the road.
The MOA is housed in a cleverly designed concrete building: from the street it looks like a single-floor construction, but in fact it is staggered in several downward levels, so it is deceptively large once you’re inside.
This was, finally, the true museum experience that we’d been missing for most of this trip, with the only exception perhaps being the Seattle Art Museum. The collection most notably boasts an impressive wealth of First Nations artefacts, including enormous totems and poles, but also everyday items. Seeing these reminded me of something our guide told us yesterday: that settlers assumed indigenous tribes did not make art because they don’t manufacture items whose only purpose is decorative, but the reality is that all of their practical objects, from sewing hooks to boxes to canoes to oars to baskets, have art on them drawn in a visual language that also tells a story.
I said the building is deceptive because when you walk in you’re greeted by this large, diaphanous hall with a view to the other side of the land, so it feels like that’s the bulk of the collection, but in fact there are multiple rooms hidden to the sides that took us the rest of the morning to peruse.
There was a labyrinthine section that looked like an archival library for things instead of books. A large part of the items on display belonged to the First Nations, but there were also exhibits from West Africa, Polynesia, East Asia, and even Europe, including a surprisingly well populated assortment of Swiss and German ceramics!
There was also a round room displaying Bill Reid’s wooden carving of the raven trickster god coaxing the first men out of their shell, the stone version of which we say yesterday at his own gallery.
My verdict on the Bill Reid Gallery is skip it, my verdict on the Vancouver Art Gallery is skip it (with the proviso that it will probably improve after all the renovations), but my verdict on the MOA is you absolutely have to go if you’re in Vancouver. It’s an excellent museum in its own right, but even more so if you consider that you can’t easily learn about First Nations cultures elsewhere.
It was like 1:30PM by the time we finished browsing the gift shop, and we still had another half-hour ride back to the city center, so today lunch was at a Spanish time! Our foodie destination today was Joe Forte’s, another Vancouverite institution recommended by Stanley Tucci in his book. I wanted to go here for lunch specifically because their lunch menu includes fish, which I like, while their dinner menu appears to be all seafood and shellfish, which I don’t.
I thought that by showing up at two thirty we would have beaten the crowds, but it was in fact completely full -they were barely able to squeeze us into a narrow two-person high table in a corner. Worked for us!
Since I was looking forward to the fish, I considered ordering the blackened ling cod, remembering that I had blackened fish in New Orleans and it was delicious; but then I googled what a ling cod is and found out it is not cod at all but rather a monster from the deep… so instead I went for the halibut! It was made just the way I like it: just baked in the oven to perfection, with the sides (potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans, and sauce) all made separately so as not to obscure the taste of the fish. Delicious!
The place is cute, too, all tiled floors and wood panels, and they even had live piano music -not that we could hear much of it over the deafening noise of the full room.
I had initially thought of maybe going to the Dr Sun Yat-sen garden in the afternoon, but it closes at 4PM, so instead we took another long bus ride down to Granville Island, a seaside attraction with a big market, shops, and restaurants.
If you consult any Vancouver guidebook (and I have two) Granville Island will feature at the top of things you absolutely have to see in the city, but I had left it for last on purpose because I was apprehensive: I could tell from the descriptions that it was probably like Pike Place Market in Seattle, a prime tourist trap mainly aimed at the throngs of tourists unloaded from cruise ships every other day.
Sure enough, once we finally got there, the place was full of visitors -we lost our self-imposed title of Only Europeans in the PNW on our very last day- and while the shops weren’t quite bottom-of-the-barrel cheap knockoff level, they still were too touristy for us, so we just took a cursory look and called it a day. One cool thing about this inlet is that there are ferries going back and forth (they look like square barges with a cover which could capsize and sink any second) so maybe you could come by bus but leave by ferry, but unfortunately that didn’t quite work for our location.
That’s it for our last day in Vancouver! Our last full day, anyway, because tomorrow our flight doesn’t leave until 6PM so we’ll still need to find something to do with our morning. But anything we get to do tomorrow will be a bonus!
This Is A Lake 