Greetings from Vancouver, a very clean city. When you live in Vegas, traveling to other cities can pose a rather annoying problem: most are not 24/7. Las Vegans tend to do well in New York, the City That Never Sleeps, but up here in pristine Vancouver, you tend to forget that you can’t get a drink at 11:00am (not that I drink at 11:00am. My husband does, sometimes, but that’s another post) or go shoe shopping at 10:00pm (yeah, okay, I do that).
The thing a desert dweller like myself can’t get over is the water. It’s everywhere. This city loves fountains, and they have some spectacular ones. The only place I’ve seen with fountains this pretty, and abundant is Rome. But the ones here are modern, of course, as Vancouver is a baby of town compared to creaky old Rome. Can a person have fountain envy? I think I do. When I first moved to Vegas four years ago, I remember laughing because even the gas stations had fountains, one in particular was rather large and garish. Then, we started realizing that, gee, we live in the desert, and there are nearly a million of us, so perhaps we might to conserve water. So bye-bye fountains.
It’s true what they say: Canadians are a friendly lot. Their cheeriness punctuates my bitchiness. I feel like the Wicked Witch of the West in this town. I’m all in black, I don’t want to greet complete strangers, and I really don’t want to make room for this in crowded elevators. There is another convention in this hotel beside the one I’m attending, and I don’t know what these folks line of work is, but good lord are they annoying. It’s easy to recognize them. They wear little brown badges that hang from lanyards around their neck. They pile on charter busses to go do group activities, like gondola rides. I have no idea where they go on gondola rides, and maybe they are talking about gondolas that take people up mountains, as opposed to the Venetian smelly canal kind. Either way, when they go on their gondola rides, there is a line to get on the elevators. Numerous times, I’ve been sandwiched in with these friendly people, who talk loud when they chit chat about gondola rides, and we stop at every floor because there are more people waiting to pile on. It never fails, two or three cheery jackasses on the elevator – almost invariably in the back, call out, “hey get on, we’ll make room. The more the merrier.”
Yesterday, I had had enough, so I responded with, “No, not the more the merrier. This is ridiculous.” A woman with a frosted hairdo, the kind that you get at the hairdresser and then have to sleep in for a week, gave me a look, then turned around to her husband and made a face indicating, “What a grouch.” Of course I’m a grouch. I have a fat, bald man standing on my feet.
I’ve come to realize that being polite can be rude when multiple people are involved. If Dick and Jane are on an elevator with the entire membership of the Elks Lodge, and the car stops on a floor and Dick and Jane say to the three people standing in the hotel hallway of that floor, “Hey, get on!” then they have been rude to the Elks Lodge, but polite to those people.
This kind of behavior is an oddity that I have only seen in Vancouver. Maybe it’s the fact that this town is so clean and cute that it brings out the best, hence the worst, in people. I’ll tell you though, it’s enough to make you want a drink at 11:00am, or even 9:00am.
