Tourism & Culture
It’s minus-seven degrees Celsius, I’m encircled by a jagged crown of snow-capped mountains and the white breath tumbling from my open mouth suggests a serious attempt on the world chain-smoking record. But even though I’m only wearing swimming shorts, I can’t remember ever feeling so toasty.
“Come on, it’s time to sing ‘Happy Birthday!’” calls Ryan Mountain over his shoulder, as he sweeps by with an impossibly full tray of dishes heaped with spumoni ice cream. He leads a troupe of young male servers to a table of giggling pre-teen girls.
When the organizer of a major U.S. medical convention visited Victoria in February, the blooming crocuses and other signs of spring that characterize the city in the imaginations of winter-gripped Eastern Canadians were hardly in evidence. Instead, panhandlers and low-end...
Behind dozens of two-inch-thick doors, along a narrow passageway that’s likely cited in dictionaries under the word “dank,” stare the faces of villains such as crinolined Martha Needle. She finished her crocheting early one day, went suddenly off her middle-class rocker and poisoned most of her family. Luckily, these nutbar miscreants...
Thousands of Chinese tourists would flock to our shores, they said. We'd be drowning in visitors, they said. One small question: where the hell are they? For decades, U.S. tourists have been the mainstay of B.C.'s tourism sector. But a...
For Gadhia, president of Gateway Casinos, B.C.'s second-largest casino company, the trip was also a homecoming; he left Tanzania as a 10-year-old boy and moved to Canada. "I wanted to give a sense of meaning to my return as well as contribute to my adopted country," he says. Not a conventional...
I'm sitting outside a beachside café in Los Angeles in the middle of an unexpected storm, yawning uncontrollably as I wait for a hangover-busting greasy breakfast. Luckily, I'm enclosed in one of those see-through plastic shelters cautious restaurateurs attach to their patios when they don't trust the local weather forecast.
But as I prepare to throw myself at the door, the pilot’s clipped tones crackle overhead, announcing our descent into Kuala Lumpur. Triggering a scramble of activity from sleep-deprived passengers who’ve been in stasis too long – it’s like watching a cave full of uncoordinated grizzlies blundering out of hibernation...
It was meant to be just another Olympic-hyping press conference, complete with photo ops of the visiting Torino Games CEO Cesare Vaciago chumming it up with VANOC CEO John Furlong. But reporters who showed up at the mid-July event expecting...
In a globalized world, goods move, capital flows, people travel, but cities stay put. Streets and buildings and seawalls are the ultimate fixed assets, each set on the map, locked into its own particular site. Or so I thought. Now...