1. Both Victoria and (especially) Vancouver feel very European as cities, compared to Anchorage, Winnipeg, and Churchill, which are more what forty-three years of consuming US/Canadian film and television suggested I should expect. If it weren't for the accents and the signs warning me not to feed coyotes, I'm not sure I would have been able to tell I wasn't in an English-speaking city east of the Atlantic.
I felt right at home, is what I'm saying, at least until I tried to scratch an itch for a decent cider, something Canada does not appear to possess.
2. Humpback whales! They're HUGE! They're elusive! They get under your boat and you think "OH SHIT I don't think we'll win if this turns into a wrestling match"! Seeing them out in the Pacific, I had no trouble at all understanding why Star Trek felt comfortable basing an entire film on the conceit that an alien species would travel dozens of light-years just to check in on these fifty-ton krillbois.
(All my pictures are rubbish, sorry. Have some of a buncha extremely stinky sea-lions in consolation.)
3. The Museum of Vancouver is well worth a trip. I'd wanted to visit the Anthropology Museum, actually, but it was shut for earthquake-proofing (another of those rare reminders of just how far from home I was). The colonial era of Vancouver is well-represented, nicely honest about the city's racist past, and clear-eyed about how its labour history is marred by rabid anti-Communism. In order to get to that section, though, you have to go through three large rooms dedicated to the First Nations peoples who own the land Vancouver stands on (having never ceded it). The result, delightfully, is to turn the entire history of the city of Vancouver into an afterthought, a bitter coda to the true story of the land.
There's a lot here; artefacts, testimonials from today's First Nations communities. The highlight of an extremely strong experience though is the film Mia, which you can see here, and I cannot recommend enough. Just the soundtrack alone gives me the shivers - it feels like the music Angelo Badalamenti was reaching for his entire life.
4. Totem poles are not the cross-continental Native American practice I'd naively believed (I blame Asterix And The Great Crossing). They're a tradition among the peoples of the Pacific northwest, used to tell stories and mark historic events. Victoria is home to the tallest totem pole in the world; presented here with an F for scale.
5. Best food in Vancouver: Sablefish. Also called black cod and butterfish, the former because it tastes like cod (despite hailing from a different order), and the latter because it's so high in fat content, it tastes like its been fried in butter even when it hasn't. You can get it in the UK, for about three times the price of true cod. I haven't yet felt that I can justify the expense, but a couple of times I've come close.
Worst food in Vancouver: Dutch salted liquorice. If the Flying Dutchman were real, this "sweet" would perfectly replicate the taste and texture of the undead captain's curs'd ring-piece.
Honorable mention: poutine, which, like pizza, varies tremendously in quality but is almost impossible to get completely wrong.
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