I'm writing this perched on my Juliette balcony, trying to catch some breeze as the city air is becoming stifling after weeks with no rain. Below me, a man is perched on the brick steps of SFU reading a book, and his dog is sitting straight up, leaning on his master's back, and people-watching. I wish Currie could come outside with me and people-watch too. Instead she is lying on her back, flapping her tail and meowing at me. My Venus Flytrap plants are working overtime trying to eat all the flies swarming around our sauna of an apartment.
Work has been incredibly busy of late (how many times do I say that in a day? I wonder), and tomorrow will be no different - I have a call at 7 am followed by a meeting at 7:30 a.m. Last week I tried to also cram a social life into this busy work schedule, with fair-to-middling results: most of the time I was so tired I didn't want to go out, but clenched my teeth and went anyway. Also, the frenetic pace wore me down and I'm sick again. Nothing like being a sickie in the heat of summer.
On Saturday some friends and I went on a walking tour hosted by the Vancouver Police Museum called "Sins of the City." We got a deal on Groupon, otherwise I would never have even heard of the Vancouver Police Museum, which is housed in the old Coroner's court on East Cordova. It boasts the only morgue that actually allows visitors. When I arrived at the museum, my friend Kate and her husband Theo were taking mugshot photos of themselves in an old jail cell.
The tour was fascinating and sordid. We heard more about Errol Flynn's autopsy, and his genitalia, than I would ever have cared to know. We wandered through Japantown, which, shamefully, I hadn't even known existed at all, let alone blocks from my house, at Powell and Gore. A large festival with live music, lots of kids running around, and women in beautiful Kimono was going on in Oppenheimer Park, and I resolved to come back.
We looked at houses that had belonged to madams fleeing San Francisco after the Great Earthquake - their names, like "Marie Lopez," still tiled into the entryway. We toured the trap doors of Chinatown, used to help gamblers escape from the police by moving from house to house without seeing the light of day. We were regaled with stories of Gassy Jack, and his barrel of whisky, and learned about the six acres that had formed the original township of Granville, in modern-day Gastown. I realized, as we heard one fascinating tale after the other, that I know next to little about my adopted home town. I have read countless books on London history, and growing up in Victoria, you absorb it - but Vancouver? Still a mystery, yet to be revealed. It's time to make a visit to the library, I think.
The tour at the Vancouver Police Museum runs every Saturday afternoon from 4 to 6. I highly recommend it.
As for me, I (sadly) don't think I can do the whole out-every-night, work-every-day thing. I'm going to bed at 9 p.m. tonight. I must be getting old or something.