Isn't it funny that it is the things you don't expect to make an experience exceptional, that capture the imagination and transform the experience from the ephemeral to the substantiated...?

Skyscrapers straddle old brick buildings, cherry blossoms line residential and commercial districts and colourful characters line the streets of Chinatown; Vancouver is a city of beautiful contradictions and it thrives for it!

As I walked around the city of Vancouver, a few things jumped out at me... Vancouver city is home to about 600,000 people, which is slightly more than Dublin, but the city serves over 2.2 million people that live in the city and on its outskirts; yet the city has a sleepy feel to it. The pace is slow, bordering on lackadaisical and it jars with the environs... The skyscrapers bearing the names of the world's largest financial institutions, the flash cars revving through Gastown, the metro system whirring that only a city this size can accommodate. Yet everyone is walking slowly, almost aimlessly as they make their way to some cafe or another...

Vancouver was built on the land of The First Nation people and expanded by peoples of varying and diverse cultures and it is upon this diversity and the contradictions within it that the city thrives on. The streets are lined with cherry blossoms and as you walk through the blossoms, expecting nothing but residential housing, a skyscraper pops up as if out of nowhere. The cherry blossoms arrived years ago as a gift from a Japanese emissary but instead of planting a small grove and leaving it at that, the trees have gone everywhere from the West End as far as Victoria Island; there is even an annual planting festival to commemorate and beautify the city. This is not Dublin anymore...