Canadian Travel Notes—DAY 11

The tour guide briefly introduced today’s itinerary: departing from Vancouver International Airport, the first attraction is Queen Elizabeth Park → Lunch → Canadian Movie → The birthplace of Vancouver – Gastown → Canada Square where the World Expo was held in 1986, Stan Lay Park → Ferry Terminal.

A quarter of Vancouver’s population is Chinese, and there are signs everywhere in Chinese, English and French. Lie Zhiwen is a city with a population of 180,000 and a Chinese population of 140,000. The locals jokingly call it the "liberated area".

The first major feature of Vancouver is that there are many Chinese people. Although the total number of Chinese people in Toronto is larger, their proportion is small, only about 10%. In the Vancouver area, the status of Chinese people is so high that mayors, governors, etc. all give themselves Chinese names.

Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing has three major investments in Canada: real estate, gas stations, and UBC. He provides many scholarships. If there is a patent, Li Ka-shing has the right of first refusal if he pays for it. A recent well-known case: HPV vaccine, a nine-valent vaccine, which costs about 100 Canadian dollars per shot and 4,000 Hong Kong dollars per shot, which is very profitable.

Vancouver is also known as the "Sakura City" and "North Hollywood". Movies such as the Mission: Impossible series were filmed here. 1,300 film scenes are shot in Vancouver each year. Before the 1980 World Expo, great efforts were made to renovate the city and use floor-to-ceiling glass construction, so it was also called the "City of Glass".

(Semi-circular greenhouse built with 1570 pieces of glass)

(This is the restaurant where Clinton held his summit)

This park was named Queen's Park to commemorate the British royal family's visit to the territory in 1938. It has the largest cherry blossom tree in Vancouver.

There is also a century stone next to it. In 1954, the Vancouver government put all Vancouver's population information and other information in an iron box and buried it under the tree. I hope future generations will open it in 2054.

The entire Vancouver is 33 kilometers away from the US-Canada border, and the border is divided by a straight line at 49 degrees north latitude. This dividing line was signed in 1846, when the Canadian Confederation had not yet been established. The United States originally wanted to draw it at 54.4 degrees, and the British divided it at 42 degrees. Later, after comprehensive negotiation, the line was drawn at 49 degrees.

If this line is in China, its location is north of Harbin and south of Mohe. Although Vancouver is at such a high latitude, it has a comfortable climate due to the coastal mountains that block the cold air from the Arctic. It has a high-latitude oceanic climate, with humid and rainy winters and dry and cool summers. In the past ten years, it has been rated as the most suitable city for human habitation. . Vancouver has only two seasons, the rainy season and the dry season. Winter is neither cold nor summer is hot.

There are advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantage is that Vancouver and Seattle are the places where most people suffer from depression. First, there are long days in winter and little sunshine. The second is that people here lose calcium very seriously. The third is that ultraviolet rays are extremely strong in summer and are prone to skin lesions and allergies.

After visiting Queen's Park, near noon, we headed to a Sichuan restaurant for lunch. After being in Canada for so many days, I can finally eat spicy food!

Originally, we had no expectations for this movie. The tour guide was very excited about it. But when we finished watching it, everyone unanimously agreed, "It's great! It's too short! I really want to watch it again!!!"

The tour guide said that he would ask the driver to take a short detour and show us the ugliest and darkest place in Canada. Vancouver is an international metropolis and relatively free. Marijuana is legal (4/20 is the Marijuana Festival), and homosexuality is also legal in Canada. There is a gay parade every July, and the government has a place specifically for the sale of recreational marijuana.

In this darkest corner, on the street, there is a safe injection house, where nurses will help you professionally inject marijuana and drugs.

So, why does the Canadian government want to set up safe injection houses?

Because Canada has universal medical care, except for eyes and teeth, all medical care is paid for by the government. Therefore, if drug addicts share needles, they can easily transmit hepatitis and AIDS. The annual cost of injecting houses is about 3 million Canadian dollars. If they are not established In safe injection houses, these people are cross-infected, and it costs 200 million to treat these people. This is the original intention of establishing safe injection houses.

We can clearly see that in this darkest area of ​​​​the neighborhood next to Chinatown, most people have gray skin colors, deformed bones, stooped walks, and all their teeth. They sit or lie on the roadside and look at the sky while walking. , don’t look at the road. In this place, the speed limit is 30 kilometers per hour to prevent driving from hitting people who are addicted to drugs and can no longer cross the road normally.

The boss of Mengniu bought a house here in Vancouver. It is the most expensive high-end apartment in Vancouver, but compared with the price in China, it is not bad. The sea view apartments here cost about 12,000-13,000 Canadian dollars per square meter. Vancouver has the highest level of wealth in Canada. Chinese investment immigrants are all in Vancouver, so there are more wealthy people here.

Vancouver relies on four old and four new industries to support its economy:

Four old people: forestry, fishery (salmon), mining, agriculture (blueberry, red plum orchard).

Four new areas: film industry, beauty industry, electronic software development (Microsoft's largest software testing center), biotechnology.

Totem Town: The aboriginal people of North America, now known as: First Nation, Inuit, had only language at that time but no writing, so they recorded it with totems. The World Expo Organizing Committee selected 13 totems (replicas) from all over Canada to come here. The top of all totems must be the thunderbird, which represents the supreme power. The thunderbird brought glacier mud from afar and cured the malaria of the indigenous people.

Among them, only one totem has no color. The chief said that he cares about the environment and had been hunting beavers as a trade between Britain and the United States. At that time, the chief had a dream that the beaver and the man were brothers, but they were just wearing clothes, so the totem was not colored.

When it's my turn When our bus was ready to board the cruise ship, we returned to the bus and drove to the interior of the cruise ship in an orderly manner. There would be staff directing each bus to park at the corresponding position.

When the car is parked, we can get out of the car and go to the upstairs deck, restaurant, seating, and small shop.

You can browse at will, go to the deck to enjoy the sea breeze and watch the sunset, or find a comfortable seat to rest in the cabin, or enjoy the delicious food in the restaurant on the ship.

The sea breeze on the deck was really strong. It was cold as soon as I stepped out, and my hair was blown like a crazy woman. In the end, I rested inside the ship while waiting to dock.

After docking at the port, we got back on the bus and drove off the ship in an orderly manner. After disembarking, we headed to the hotel to rest for today’s run. Tomorrow we will start the penultimate day of our journey in Victoria.