Posts tagged with city.

Pros and cons of campus digs

Bryce Warnes, March 18, 2010 at 5:42 PM

 

I don't live in Vancouver. I live in a town called UBC. It has restaurants, a hospital, a police station, recreation centers. It has streets lined with tall trees and an old library that looks like it should be haunted. And when you leave UBC to visit the city, it's clear that you're crossing a boundary. There are signs. They're quite large.

 

It's not so bad being isolated from the city, from the sirens and spinning wheels and lights that never go out. Walking to class in the morning, I'm guaranteed to at least see a few people I recognize, if not ones I know. Leaving campus, faces start to blur, locations become less distinct. Bearings are lost. I spent a few weeks becoming comfortable with this place when I arrived, and over the past months, the lay of the land has become ingrained in my bones. UBC feels as familiar as any hometown I've ever had, but the city beyond remains a tangled mystery.

 

I won't be living here next year. That is for certain: My number in the line-up for residency is somewhere in the billions. Unless I pitch a tent on Wreck Beach, or find a reasonably-sized janitorial closet on campus, I'll be in Vancouver next year. The real city. The big city. The wilderness.

 

A long, long time ago, when I was trying to decide where to attend university, I went through stacks of promotional pamphlets and third-party reviews for Canadian schools. They all mentioned the campus - its beauty, its convenience - as an important factor for deciding where to go. At the time, this seemed frivolous. Who cares where you go to learn, so long as you get the information - and the degree - you want? How does attractive landscaping or a nice climate affect how you study?

 

That varies, depending on the individual. But even if the place you live does very little to change the way you learn, it will define how you live. My friends in the city know the best bars, the best restaurants, the best places to go dancing. They can find their way home wherever they are in the city without Google Maps or the help of strangers. I envy them their knowledge, but I don't aspire to it. Let them take the lead: You choose the bar tonight. Which bus do we need to catch? How many blocks are we from home?

 

 I have to wonder what it's like to go to a university that isn't removed from the city it occupies, but integrates into the landscape - like McGill, for instance. Being separate from the city, and by extension, the adult world one is on the verge of entering, seems like it would delay an individual's growth. By merging knowledge of city life with knowledge gained in the classroom, maybe the transition from student/youth to worker/adult becomes smoother.

 

Or maybe being a step removed from nightclubs and gridlock helps to focus a student on their immediate task - education. Keeping the rest of the world at bay might help a person stay attached to their scholastic role, without getting drawn away from the distractions of worldly life. When the first European universities were established, students lived monkish lives, retreating from the toil and chaos of everyday existence to focus on their books. Maybe the campus away from town is a holdover from that style of learning.

 

The school years are a time for finding one's place in the world, literally and figuratively. It's mentally disruptive to have this ever-changing notion of home - from here, to where I grew up, to wherever I'll be next year in Vancouver proper. But it's part of the process of growing up.

 

I realize now that there is a reason people care so much about where they're going to school, in much the same way that people care where they are going to live. Choosing what place to call your home is important, because it's bound to have an affect on who you are. It's true: You take yourself with you wherever you go. And you take wherever you are with you when you leave.

Tagged with campus, city, living, distraction, bryce, warnes | Comments (6) |

Dating Vancouver

Bryce Warnes, October 30, 2009 at 9:18 PM

 

I went down by the rail yard to visit the Vancouver Flea Market. The sky was a uniform grey and cast a distinctly X-Files pallor over the city. At 9 a.m. I found myself browsing tables full of unidentifiable knick-knacks, collectible toys and remaindered pharmacy stock. A Russian lady selling jewellery very sweetly threatened to steal me away from the person I was with. She also offered to give us a special deal on some necklaces, so maybe it would have been a fair trade.

 

I've never lived in a city before, been surrounded by this many people or buildings. I thought it would be depressing to leave the Island, and before moving over I began to idealize it in my mind. There was no way I'd be able to survive without the winding back roads and the wide open pastures, the bird song and the rustle of the wind. I began modifying my memories of the place, inserting quaint fairy-tale cottages and clear babbling brooks. When I thought of Vancouver Island, images of rustic cowherds and cheery milkmaids appeared in my mind's eye. The seeds had been sewn for my first genuine case of homesickness.

 

When you spend most of your life in some half-mythical bucolic paradise, it never occurs to you that a city can be beautiful. But Vancouver can be, from the right perspective. This morning the SkyTrain I was riding emerged from the tunnels below ground, peeling back the darkness like window blinds. I could see out across the jumbled buildings to the water, where a dozen cranes hunched in the fog, blinking their lights to an unheard rhythm. It was a gloomy scene, those huge machines standing at the ocean's edge like prehistoric creatures frozen in time. Nothing could have been further from the environment I'm used to, but it was as beautiful as any country vista.

 

Can an individual have a relationship with the city they inhabit? The sum total of the rest of the city's occupants, plus the architecture and infrastructure they support - is it possible to regard that as a single entity, as some sort of hive or meta-life-form? Given humans' behaviour in groups, their ability to act as a cohesive - if insanely complicated - whole, is it really such a stretch to see Vancouver as a person? When you first meet someone, they're foreign to you. It's hard to predict how they'll behave, and your first interactions may seem clumsy. Once you become accustomed to one another, though, barriers start to drop. You get familiar with that person, learn what to expect from them, their habits and tics. In time, you may find that you are a perfect match for one another - or the opposite. Either way, the development of a relationship with a place mirrors many aspects of that with another person.

 

If Vancouver has a personality, it's a complex one, greater than any lone human could encompass. The individual parts of its psyche speak a wide array of languages and behave in very different ways; and while they may all claim to be part of the whole, they often work against one another. They're like the cells that make up an organism - always some are dying, and always new ones being made. Waiting at the bus stop in a crowd of individuals spanning more demographics than I can count with both hands, it's hard to see this place as one thing, as one elaborate creature or machine. But over time, as experiences accrue and become memories, a person begins to emerge. It's not a person that I can easily summarize; I'm not sure anyone is.

 

At the very least, imagining Vancouver as a single entity makes it easier to deal with the shock of adapting to a new environment. I like to see the city as someone I'm trying to woo, maybe even seduce. The first few weeks here were just flirting - nights at bars, evenings spent downtown. Then we went on a few dates, to North Van and Richmond and Gastown, getting to know each other, becoming comfortable, developing little inside jokes and references. I'm not sure exactly where we stand right now. Things could go either way. At this point I'm tempted to draw parallels with getting to third base, but that may be taking the analogy too far.

 

My friend Erik told me about his first date with the city. It was last year, on his second day here. He was riding the bus downtown, drinking Golden Wedding and trying to get the lay of the land. Erik's from the same part of the Island as me, and it's not hard to imagine what if felt like for him, getting off the bus in East Hastings, half-cut and new to town, with no idea where he was going. (When he told me this, Erik took care to note what he was listening to on his iPod. It was "East Hastings," by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, an appropriate theme song and one of the most desolate tracks committed to tape during the 20th Century.)

 

It was cold and raining,  and a woman in clothing inappropriate for the weather came up to him and asked if he could spare a cigarette. Erik uses the term "workin' gal" to describe her, but I don't think that's politically correct enough to use without quotes. It's better to say she was in a desperate situation. Seeing this, he reached into his pocket for the pack. And just as he did, a police officer rounded the corner.

 

The situation looked suspect. Erik left East Hastings with great speed. He was lucky to do so on a bus, and not in the back of a squad car. Even a spontaneous act of charity had done nothing to soften Vancouver. Defeated by weather, the law, and his own charity, he went home with half a bottle of whisky and a bus transfer. This was his first date with the city as he described it to me, and I'm happy to say I've yet to have a similar experience. My relationship with Vancouver seems to be off to a smoother start, although only time will tell whether we're really right for each other. There's no rush, though. We both have plenty of time. And if Vancouver proves a harsh mistress, there's always the woman at the flea market. 

 

Tagged with city, homesickness, vancouver, beauty, bryce, warnes | Comments (9) |