Feeling no pain….

You know, I could get used to this…

Back in the hotel room after a late dinner at the Yaletown Brewing Company here in Yaletown (highly recommended, the Red Brick Bitter is wonderful, the food quite tasty). We’ve had a long walk, a nice rest, some good food, some wonderful alcohol, and topped it off with coffee and processed sugars — I think I’m ready to solve world hunger or something….

We’re staying in the Opus Hotel, an upscale mini hotel (97 rooms) that opened a little over a year ago in the Yaletown region of Vancouver. We’d originally explored this part of town (to the south and east of Granville down to false creek) back in 1999 when we came up here for the Grey Cup, and it was just starting to seriously gentrify. We’d heard it’d really taken steps forward, and we wanted to see what they’d done for the area.

Yaletown is an old industrial/warehousing district in Vancouver, with a lot of older buildings. Vancouver’s done a wonderful job of maintaining the flavor fo the area as it rebuilds, with a lot of buildings being turned into lofts or mixed use loft/retail. The emphasis on lofts gives it a real urban edge. Opus reflects that with a modern and contemporary design motif (if I say Designer Guys Urban Loft, you’ll either know what I’m saying or be totally confused….).

Some interesting design issues here in Yaletown stuck in my mind — the key one is that on Mainland, the main drag in the middle of Yaletown, the historic buildings were all warehouses, with attached raised loading docks and one-lane one-way roads. Where most towns would have pulled down those docks and widened the streets, Vancouver chose to protect them, turning them into wide walkways and patio areas, leaving the streets narrow and congested. this really keeps the flavor of the area alive, and is a pretty gutsy move from a planning view (it works because Vancouver has a good transit system that minimizes the need to drive in to these areas). You can see where in better weather the restaurants and pubs are going to expand out onto those areas and really add some liveliness.

Yaletown is definitely a mixed-use neighborhood, with a growing population of shopping (it’ll likely eventually be a major shopping area along with Gastown and Robson), and a really nice mix of pubs, clubs and restaurants, along with a growing number of lofted residential, plus the ubiquitous green-glass high-rise condos and apartments down in the Marinaside area on the water.

(even that works up here, because while Vancouver has regulated the coloring of the buildings, it demands a lot of architectural interest, so while all of the buildings tie in to each other, it’s far from boring — nothing is square. And from an urban planning basis, there’s a major committment here to open spaces and views, so it’s one of the few urban areas I can walk around without feeling closed in or stuck in canyons, because there aren’t any….)

A typical vacation day for us around here — breakfast is coffee and a scone of some sort (which is no problem around here, since it looks like coffee shops are mandated about every 100 feet or so), and then we walk and explore. Today we headed off to Marinaside, caught a false creek ferry for Granville Island and spent a couple of hours there walking and grumbling at why we can’t get something like that were we live…. I’d kill for those kinds of public markets.

then another ferry to the science center, and we walked the end of false creek to BC place, then from there down to gastown where Laurie wanted to grab something from Hill’s. Then we walked to the seabus, crossed to Lonsdale Quay for a quick lunch (more grumbles. No city should have two public markets like this until every city has one!), then back and over to the Pan Pacific, where we grabbed a taxi back to the Opus, where we turned on the finals of the skins game (curling! yeah!), and I fell asleep for a bit, then down to Yaletown brewing for dinner. And now I’m catching up on net stuff while watching a replay of canada/switzerland in the world juniors. All in all, 2, maybe 2 and a half miles today.

Tomorrow? probably Granville for breakfast, then focus more on Yaletown (there’s a great cookbook store here for Laurie, and a couple of galleries I want to snoop at…). Then perhaps dinner at Provence at Marinaside. Or maybe not, these days tend to be ad-libbed pretty heavily…

Weather is quite brisk — under 40F — but while we had rain (and snow) on the travel day, today and tomorrow both are quite pleasant, partly cloudy, little wind. So it’s great out and about weather if you dress properly.

More pictures once I process them, too.

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