After checking into my hotel I walked around a bit, getting quite comprehensively drenched ("It's that fine rain - soaks you though."), to try to get a feel for the city. And I quite like it. Despite the weather. It's got a busyness - a "this is where it all happens" buzz - like London, but it seems to retain an extremely friendly atmosphere. People here constantly seem to smile and greet you as they pass, even though much of the time I've had my head down trying to avoid the rain dripping down my face. Occasionally I've managed a grunt in reply. No one seems to bother with French much round here either... I quite like that too.
In one of the slightly brighter moments this morning I managed to get a picture of the totem poles in Stanley Park, and a hazy picture of the city's skyline:
Stanley Park looks like it could be quite a nice place but most of it is currently closed to the public. It sustained severe storm damage earlier in the year and they are still trying to clear up. The residents seem to be coping well though: I passed a family of geese (2 adults, 5 young) walking in the opposite direction on the path out of the park. They honked a polite greeting as I passed. I honked back.
Later, in a bid to avoid the rain, I visited an attraction called Science World. Far from the Open-University-with-luminous-beards-and-fake-smiles image that its name conjures up it was actually quite interesting. It's a sort of small scale Science Museum, with lots of buttons to push and levers to pull (which I did). Not sure I learned much, but it was dry.
I'm off to Victoria on Vancouver Island tomorrow. It's an early start and a late finish so I don't know whether I'll have chance to post anything until Wednesday.
Oh, and now I'm back at the hotel, the sun's come out.
