OK, this place is raining on me again but I can see why people love this city so much. At first I thought it was all the partying - usually going on at high volume downstairs from my bed at 1am, enough to make the floor in my bathroom actually tremor - and that the appeal lay mostly in local beer and music, both v good but not so much fun when travelling alone. But I think the real draw card is that there is always something on. When I arrived it was Vancouver Fringe Festival, now as I am checking out the Vancouver International Film Festival is beginning, if I stayed for that then I wouldn't get out of town before the International Writers Festival fired up. There are heaps of theatres, impro shows with the theatre sports league every week, laser shows at the planetarium on weekends, hockey games and music music music. If I stayed around for everything that was on or coming up I would never get out.
So there, maybe Vancouver is one of the world's most livable cities (in the Top 10, according to Lonely Planet) even with the rain. It certainly has the best comic store I've ever been to. : ) (Though I will admit I was geeking out more over their collection of Gustav Dore and other old timers more than the superheroes.) Still haven't found any decent maple syrup though...
Meanwhile, I don't know what the other 9 are. Paris? Florence? Toowoomba? I don't know. But Portland and Seattle also rate pretty high on livability scales and they are where I am off to on this rainy afternoon.
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well according to this site: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2299119.stm
[b]Vancouver and Melbourne top city league[b]
"If you want to live abroad, Vancouver and Melbourne are the places to do it, a survey has revealed..."
for the record the top ten were:
1=: Melbourne, Vancouver
3: Perth
4=: Geneva, Toronto, Vienna, Zurich
8=: Adelaide, Brisbane, Copenhagen, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Oslo, Montreal
granted this survey is from 2002, but I can't see Melbourne slipping all that much since then with the Melbourne Fringe Festival, Melbourne International Arts Festival, St Kilda Festival, Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Spring Racing Carnival, Melbourne International Music Festival, Melbourne Underground Film Festival...etc, etc, etc!!!
why would you ever want to leave?
Leaving Melbourne's good to get a sense of what else is out there. Like Paris! Paris also has plenty of theatre, arts, food, wine, film, music etc. No horses though (that I know of).
Perth??????
What about the WASC (West Australian Superiority Complex)???
Doesn't that put people off?
By the way, I did read an interesting article once entitled "Vanbourne". It basically comparted the world's two most livable cities.
I think it concluded that Melbourne was better (had it been published in a Vancouverian(?) newspaper, I think the result may have been different).
They say "Vancouverite". Vancouver and Melbourne are pretty similar - Vancouver's main advantage being its proximity to the skifields (one, with the rather Melbournesque name of "Grouse Mountain" is accessible by city PT - you can see the chairlift from downtown), Melbourne's being that if something is going through your rubbish at night it is more likely to be a possum than a bear.
Do we trust a survey that had Adelaide in the Top 10?
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