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Sundays still aren’t good for me, sad to report: are they good for anyone? It isn’t a day of rest anymore, it’s not a religious holiday; a lot of people in retail and service have to work, and so, outside of eating frantically prepared eggs at a overcrowded brunch service somewhere, Sundays seem to have been stripped of all meaningful purpose.
We have decided, therefore, to use them in a reverse traffic sort of way. Where do large groups of people go on Sundays? Besides brunch, the pool. Therefore, we eschew, in addition to brunch, all Sunday pools. Which part of town, otherwise annoyingly busy with commerce and traffic, is deserted of all non-tourist lifeforms, and therefore easier to navigate? Robson. Naturally, we take no pleasure in going to a part of town so utterly past it that mostly you feel sorry for it, that you don’t even gawk after a few blocks, instead you avert your eyes at all the shuttered and struggling real estate: it’s just embarrassing for everyone. But sometimes you still need to look for something and the idea is to get in and out as quickly as you can. Robson is now unpleasant fatigue duty—the urban equivalent of cleaning latrines. Yesterday, we drew that short straw. This is my report. (Upper) Robson (the downtown and shopping district part) no longer feels like a real version of the city. It feels like a simulacra of what once was, like the Waikikification of that part of the city is well and truly under way. In the same way that Honolulu seemed to exist to house the staff needed to operate the fake tourist city of Waikiki, East Vancouver now seems to exist to house the staff required to operate the fake city of Upper Robson Vancouver. It’s the Disneylandification of Vancouver. Its final Fake-assification. If you will. Robson now boasts all the urban charm of The West Edmonton Mall. Comments are closed.
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