I’m feeling trendy today. I’m sitting here at Waves, writing my blog while drinking coffee. I have never surfed with my laptop in a coffee shop. I’ve surfed on my iPod Touch and I’ve surfed with my cel phone, but never with a laptop. My friend is sitting across from me eating breakfast and surfing around on his Blackberry. I had to work today which is unusual, but we had to shut the power down which required some intervention on our part. I usually don’t volunteer to do overtime but for some reason I felt the need to say “yes”. I could use the extra hours anyway.
It’s amazing how busy this place is. Waves only opened a month or so ago in what I call the dead zone of downtown. On weekends there was nothing open down here. Now, there’s a major drug store, Starbucks and a few restaurants. With all the new condos finally filled with people who leave their house, the “business district” seems pretty busy. It’s good to see. Vancouver is growing and changing so much. I’ve been here for twenty years and it’s not the city I moved to. There have been lots of changes – and most of them seem to be in the infrastructure and the changing of business development areas to condos and residential. There are now a lot more people living downtown. They used to live in the “West End”, but now we have “Coal Harbour” as well. We are hindered in our growth as we have water and mountains all around us, so all we can do is go higher. We used to have height restrictions, but that seems to have gone by the wayside. We now have a sixty-six storey building called Shangri-La in the downtown core. I find that a little disturbing as we are in an earthquake zone and waiting for “the big one”. Hopefully the prices of housing will come down with this economic downturn, and more people will be able to buy. A lot of the places now are owned by offshore investors waiting to see what happens in 2010 when we host the Olympics. It’s a little disturbing to look out at night and see condos with most of their lights off – because nobody lives there. We need people to buy and live in the city. Maybe then we will get some amenities. Everything right now is centered around the Olympics. I have lived ten years in my neighborhood and we still don’t have a decent grocery store anywhere close. It’s a pain for me to have to buy groceries. Finally we are getting one – Urban Fare. That is NOT a grocery store. That’s a high end, high priced, yuppy grocery store. I need to buy the groceries at a reasonable price to eat for the week. Sigh. When I moved in to my condo there were five buildings, now there are twelve…where do these people shop?