So now that I have left Vancouver again, I guess it’s time to write a bit about my trip there.  That is, a bit more than the bleary impressions that first night.

I write this from Heathrow’s Terminal 2 (which strives to be as overwhelmingly capitalist as Terminal 5, but is older and smaller and fails to quite carry off the “intimidatingly posh” look).  Thankfully, after a much-needed sleep at our soon-to-be rental house in London, and a delightful breakfast with our lovely hosts-to-be-landlords, I am vastly clearer headed than I was when I first hit Vancouver.

I have been drawn to the Pacific Northwest ever since I first visited there more than a decade ago now.  The lush evergreen forests, the mild climate and silver sunlight, the water and the mountains — they all call to some part of me.  Metaphorically, people seem drawn to the elements — fire for the brilliant and sere desert, the rich earth of farmlands, the water of the seas and rivers, or the air of the mountainscapes and the great plains.  I feel the water and the air in my soul — the call of the gulls, for which Legolas laments, sings also to me.  The Northwest, an intimate marriage of the sky and the sea, feels right at some deep level.

I also love the art of the Pacific Northwest First Nations (or Indians, if I’m being less PC).  Although I appreciate the aesthetic of the Navajos’ geometrical patterns and the curves of the hand-thrown Puebloan pottery, I really love more the abstraction and the themes of the Northwest.  They love the skies and the oceans and the creatures that inhabit them.  Raven’s wings grace their art with curves above Whale’s elegant flukes, with a spectrum of life intertwined between.

All of these things call to me when I visit Vancouver, teeming metropolis that it is.  Even as I wander the streets of this vast, gleaming, and almost painfully-hip modern city, the mountains hang above me and the scent of the ocean is never far.  Art appears randomly on street corners and honors the otherwise inhuman lobbies of corporate skyscrapers.  Evergreen trees peek between buildings and fill the fantastically beautiful parks that grace this green city of water and light.

Like New York and Chicago before it (and Albuquerque and LA and San Franscisco now), Vancouver is another modern melting-pot of cultures — in this case, the predominant Canadian Euro-caucasian ancestry culture sluicing into the influx of pan-Asian cultures in a chaotic, non-laminar mixture.  In this socio-cultural reactor of a city, you are bombarded with the sensations of half the world.  A myriad of sushi joints are interspersed among French and Italian cuisine, European chocolatiers, and Canadian steak and smoked fish; Indian art galleries nestle between high-end jewelers; and a dizzying array of multinationals, vending everything from chic evening wear to hip Gore-Tex laden outdoors adventure gear to grungy tourist kitsch shipped by the cargo-container from cheap manufacturers across half of Asia, bombard you from all sides.  It’s an electric-feeling place, where the signs are as often in Kanji or Korean as in English or French, and you can hear a dozen languages on the bus.

For all of it, though, and as much as I love the location and the feel, I realize that it’s missing some things that I have come to love of Madrid.  Madrid, for all its lovely-but-homogeneous Spanish culture, has a sense of time and identity that Vancouver can’t match.  Though it’s hardly the oldest city in Spain (rising to prominence only in, I believe, the sixteenth century after Ferdinand and Isabella moved the capital there), it’s still far older than most cities in North America, and it’s clearly more “adult”, in some sense, than the unruly teenager of Vancouver, striving to decide its own identity, on the cusp between childhood and adulthood and struggling with growing pains and puberty.

Madrid gives an almost paradoxical sense of calm and, for all its melange of tiendas and restutrantes, a sense of unity that is lacking from the somewhat frantic-seeming pace of a modern megalopolis like Vancouver.  Even the presence of tiendas reveals the difference — Madrid is a city of neighborhoods, where every barrio has its own panadería, frutaría, peluquería, locutorio, papelería, pastelería, pollería, carnecería, and charcutaría.  (Or three or four charcutarías, each selling “the very best” jamón iberico pata negra.) Even in our very short time there, we’ve gotten to know many of the shop vendors by sight, and they smile when we enter and cheerfully put up with our broken español.  There are the cervezarías, where, like “Cheers”, the same crowds gather every evening for tapas and cañas of the local cerveza.  Each area has its own iglesias and plazas, its own escuelas and bancos and comisaría de policía , its own public sites and history and art.  For all that Madrid is larger than all but about four cities in the US, it feels like a much smaller city, because so much life revolves around the neighborhoods.  Even in Madrid’s business centers, you have only to turn a corner to find a cervezaría or bocadilla shop tucked between the ministries, consulates, or banks.

Vancouver doesn’t have that feel — at least given my (admittedly drastically limited) experience there.  True, I have spent my time mostly in the heart of the business and financial district of the city — Vancouver’s equivalent of Manhattan, I suppose — but even so, it doesn’t feel quite as personal as Madrid.  There are a barrage of restaurants and clothing shops lining Robson St (Vancouver’s “Golden Mile”, I think), but they all feel a bit touristy.  There are none of the shops that make the place livable for residents — the individual greengrocers and butcher shops, the corner store where you get shampoo, or the low-key corner pub where they always know your name.  There are no bread shops, streaming with locals in the morning buying their baguettes or tostas de casa for the day. Instead, you’re surrounded by glitter and fine food and towering skyscrapers, monuments to modern international commerce.

It’s likely, of course, that I’m simply exploring the wrong parts of Vancouver.  It is, after all, a vast city, of which I have sampled only a tiny fraction.  So it’s quite possible — probable, even — that there are neighborhood districts, somewhere, with that same sense of hominess and community.  But somehow I suspect that they will be the exceptions rather than the rule for this hip modern metropolis.  Vancouver feels like a “car city” — having come into its own in the age of modern transport that ties together, and yet ironically isolates, our modern culture, it feels like it never had a chance to develop the localized society of the walking-speed neighborhood, where your horizon is limited to where your Tevas can take you in a lazy afternoon and the shopkeepers know you because you buy eggs there on the way back from the metro every other day.

Still, that part of my soul that longs for the sea and the sky and the evergreen forests does resonate with Vancouver and the Pacific Northwest in general.  Even if, as I think likely now, I never live there myself, I will always be called back to camp in the mountains and sail the rivers and oceans and explore the byways of the great cities.  I was glad to be there for a few days, and I’m glad to be heading back now.