Snow is Cold

The other day I was walking to the library (which is pretty much on the opposite side of downtown) and happened to look down an alleyway I was passing to see a big pile of empty drinking bottles on the floor. As I looked, a bottle suddenly flew out of one of the dumpsters into the pile, shortly followed by another..

Comical as this was, if I were a newcomer to the city (well, newer than I am) I probably would have been wondering wtf? However I have learned since being here (through reading a lengthy article in one of the local rags and by observation) that there is a large micro-community (surely a contradiction in terms? Oh well) of homeless people who make a living from “binning”. These binners’ daily routine involves collecting as many recyclables as they can to redeem for cash at one of the recycling centres in the city (there’s a huge facility called “United We Can” on Hastings Street). You see, Canada has a rather different recycling approach to the UK – on every product you buy in a recyclable container (especially alcohol) you are almost invariably charged a form of deposit which is added to the asking price, but which you can get back by presenting the empty container to a suitable recycling centre.

So far I’ve made it twice to recycle some empty beer cans/bottles, but we have a pretty large stack of empty juice cartons (which you get 20¢ back on, compared with 10¢ for beer cans and bottles and 5¢ for soft drink cans and bottles) to take to the depot too. Actually it’s quite cool to get some money back for stuff you’ve already paid for, although we missed out on about $60 (omg I only just worked that out) worth of beer can deposits in Whistler cuz we ran out of time to take them to the liquor store (often you can only present 24 at a time). We’d constructed a sculpture out of empty beercans that flanked both sides of the fireplace and was about 5 cans high 15 across and 8 deep…. Aaaaaaaaaaaaargh. Ah well I expect our landlord’s made off with that by now.

I’m actually quite a fan of the Canadian system, because not only does it encourage people to recycle more but it also presents an opportunity to homeless/jobless people to provide a useful service to the city. The homeless problem is pretty bad here, a lot more noticable than any English city. Many people are suffering from drug or alcohol addiction (there is also a huge problem with drugs here – everything is pretty much readily available and comparitively cheap, maybe around half the price of England), or some form of dementia.

I read a story before written by a reporter who had, in 10 minutes, passed one homeless guy jacking off in a doorway, and another defecating in the middle of the road. In the middle of the day. Nice. I’ve run into a couple of characters, apart from the guy we got to climb the tree in this post, there’s a woman who goes round asking for phone change, which seems normal enough for a while and she dresses presentably, but then she goes psycho and starts screaming abuse. Also there’s another guy who’s always wearing shorts with a similar tactic of begging nicely then going mental, throwing his head back and screaming to the heavens. I dunno, maybe they both got torrets or something :)

There is an area called skidrow on the edge of downtown running from the edge of Chinatown up main street, and I gather into the suburbs beyond. Cynthia was telling me that where she used to live there were dealers selling crack outside her house. Not the best environment for raising her (now 6 year old) daughter. Having said that I guess this is common in a lot of places – St. Pauls in Bristol and Moss Side (sp?) in Manchester must be pretty similar, not to mention LA, New York… Just I haven’t noticed so many crackheads wandering round a city centre before.

The area I was talking about has a decidedly sinister atmosphere about it, which is very out of keeping with the rest of downtown. It’s bizarre how fast the scenery can change in downtown Vancouver, for example you can walk one or two blocks South from Gastown (very touristy) and hit industrial decay and unsavoury characters (although I haven’t encountered any hassle from anybody, in contrast to the punks you find hanging out outside the newsagents in England). Similarly, you can walk a couple of blocks South off Robson street – a buzzing commercial centre of boutiques and restaurants – and hit quiet, leafy suburbia. It’s so strange. Anyway it’s not like I’ve seen people being mugged in the street or anything so it can’t be that bad, there were just LOADS of homeless people hanging around outside what I figured was some kind of shelter.

In fact now I think of it I was caught unawares one time whilst throwing some rubbish out at the back of our building because a guy was walking down the alley then suddenly comes up to me and says, “do you mind if I take a look through your bin?”, lol.

Right that’s enough essay for now, hope you’ve found it interesting!

I’ve modified a version of jixor’s bread crumb trail plugin to work with pretty links, as used on my recipes pages on this site.

You can get it here, please refer to the original page and the file itself for usage instructions.

Forgot to say before that on the way home, after lying on the ground to take some night photos, we went to the 24 hour supermarket and played a bit of rugger with a cabbage until the security guard came over, then we tried to break into the locked cheese cabinet, but when we got to the checkout were told we could get cheese in a different section so legged it over there, then launched processed cheese slices at the cashier woman (fortunately she saw the funny side), then stole a huge reel of stickers that was lying around on the other side of the checkout and went on a mission plastering all the shop and car windows with these stickers all the way from the supermarket to my house and then a distance further on down the road too to hide our secret location, lol.

I received my first fan mail on Wednesday :)

“I just quickly listened to the silenced mix. Great track choice. Just what I
like most.
I’ll be looking forward on that day to hear you play.

– Koen De Jaeger”

Cool huh? I was on top of the world heheh. By the way, “that day” is September 30th, 2005 and the venue is ‘Silo’ – Leuven, Belgium, start saving.

EDIT: By the way, if you want to listen yourself you can get the file from audiotropik.com.

Last night me & Pete went to see Hybrid play at the Plaza club on Granville St. We met one of the guys and his entourage outside too without realising it :) the set was cool but a little disappointing, last time I saw them (at bedrock in London) they were awesome, but that night sasha, freq nasty and the dub pistols were also playing so it was kinda hard not to have a good time.. Digweed is playing on Sunday too but at $30 a ticket plus the associated drinking fees I don’t think I can justify the expenditure :’( if anyone wants to bail me out, my paypal address is…
Just kidding. Unless you **really** want to give me money of course – email for details ;)

After the gig finished last night we want wandering round the streets too and I got a few wicked photographs, will stick them on the web soon. None of the bush jumping capers of last time though.