We’re staying in Surrey while visiting Vancouver, and we drove around Surrey to run errands and drove through Vancouver to see the city.

As we drove through the downtown section of Vancouver I noticed first the vast number of people walking in the city. Large numbers of people at every street corner and walking on every street. I mean large, much more than I ever saw in San Diego, and even more than I’ve seen in downtown New York. And, in the bad part of town there were so many homeless people…dozens of them on every block! I even looked down one alley and saw probably 20 or more people sitting down or walking around. I’m sure I even saw a drug deal in just the second or two that I could see down the alleyway. I’ve seen segments on Canadian TV news shows about the fact that the city is unaffordable for many people and that it has caused a huge homeless problem. Yep, I saw that!

This is a very densely populated city! Lots and lots of highrise apartment buildings, both in the downtown area and in a couple of the suburbs. Burnaby, a close-in suburb, had over 15 buildings that were at least 20 stories high.

Another thing that struck me is the ethnic diversity. As we drove around we saw very few black and hispanic people and lots and lots of Asian people. Many, if not most, of the store signs both downtown and in Surrey were in both English and some Asian language, probably Chinese. We also saw a lot of Sihk men wearing the turbans, both walking and driving around. In one neighborhood of Surrey we saw so many that I looked up ethic demographics of Vancouver. Less than 1% black. Less than 1% hispanic. About 25% Asian and about 11% ‘South Asian’ which includes the Sikh people. Only 52% are Caucasian. The article I read even mentioned the exact neighborhood we were driving through, saying in that particular neighborhood there was the largest concentration of Sikh people, at about 76%!

Vancouver is a very pretty city, with the mountains to the north and east and several harbors and inlets. It’s actually kind of isolated on the coast because just a bit further north along the coast are a mountain range that isolates all other coast communities except by boat. The Trans-Canada Highway is the only way to get east, and the Al-Can (Alaska-Canada) Highway follows the Trans-Canada Highway for several miles east before it turns north.

The weather is about what we expected for September, not too warm during the day but not too cold yet at night.

We are enjoying our stay here in the Vancouver area!