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Exploring Vancouver
2021-12-24 18:27I finally took transit!
Turned out that Google Pay doesn't have a special deal with Vancouver, it's just that the local transit will take any contactless credit/debit card on the buses etc. So I could just pay with my credit card. Neat! But there's a 20% discount if you pay with a Compass Card, so I walked to the nearest train station to buy one. Never mind that my savings will probably amount to one takeout meal.
The nearest train station is a 12 minute walk, which seems long for being in a dense downtown. The machine was finicky, one of those with a very thick touch screen, or glass in front of the touch screen(?) so it's hard to press things accurately. But I eventually succeeded.
SkyTrain frequency was every 3-4 minutes, nice! Train is short, but still has the open connection between cars, like the long Montreal lines or the Toronto yellow line. Masking decent but one Asian woman had her surgical mask pulled down.
I headed to the Waterfront. Saw water. It looked mostly industrial, train tracks and Seabus, not scenic. Turned right, heading into Gastown. Picturesque. Turned right again, toward Chinatown, but then right again on Hastings. Whoops! Very Skid Row. And missing a cross street, so stuck there until Abbott. Left, left on Keefer, finally hitting Sun Yat Sen Park and eventually Chinatown. I didn't come across the gate I think is there; I find find a place where I could get dim sum to go, though a bit pricey: US$5.80 for 4 ha gow, likewise for inferior siu mai. Elsewhere, US$5.60 for BBQ pork on rice.
It was only 5pm, and part of me felt I should keep walking around in the 'warmth' (1 C, but better than the -12 of an arctic air mass), but things weren't that lively and I had food. Took the 023 bus toward home, and wow, it was a *short* bus. 21 seats, I think. Windows cracked open, and audio announcement of the stops; driver sealed in a plastic enclosure. Apparently we were 5 minutes ahead of schedule at Pacific though, so were going to wait, and from there it made sense to just walk home.
I think my phone is seriously bitrotting. Or infected. There'd been an oddity a while back of my SSH key not working anymore, but today I noticed several apps have lost their icons and the OS says "not installed" when I try to run them, though if they were really uninstalled they shouldn't be there at all. I'll be really pissed if I can't recover the book notes I'd been making. Ghost Commander didn't have permission to copy screenshots to the external SD card, either. Eek!
Turned out that Google Pay doesn't have a special deal with Vancouver, it's just that the local transit will take any contactless credit/debit card on the buses etc. So I could just pay with my credit card. Neat! But there's a 20% discount if you pay with a Compass Card, so I walked to the nearest train station to buy one. Never mind that my savings will probably amount to one takeout meal.
The nearest train station is a 12 minute walk, which seems long for being in a dense downtown. The machine was finicky, one of those with a very thick touch screen, or glass in front of the touch screen(?) so it's hard to press things accurately. But I eventually succeeded.
SkyTrain frequency was every 3-4 minutes, nice! Train is short, but still has the open connection between cars, like the long Montreal lines or the Toronto yellow line. Masking decent but one Asian woman had her surgical mask pulled down.
I headed to the Waterfront. Saw water. It looked mostly industrial, train tracks and Seabus, not scenic. Turned right, heading into Gastown. Picturesque. Turned right again, toward Chinatown, but then right again on Hastings. Whoops! Very Skid Row. And missing a cross street, so stuck there until Abbott. Left, left on Keefer, finally hitting Sun Yat Sen Park and eventually Chinatown. I didn't come across the gate I think is there; I find find a place where I could get dim sum to go, though a bit pricey: US$5.80 for 4 ha gow, likewise for inferior siu mai. Elsewhere, US$5.60 for BBQ pork on rice.
It was only 5pm, and part of me felt I should keep walking around in the 'warmth' (1 C, but better than the -12 of an arctic air mass), but things weren't that lively and I had food. Took the 023 bus toward home, and wow, it was a *short* bus. 21 seats, I think. Windows cracked open, and audio announcement of the stops; driver sealed in a plastic enclosure. Apparently we were 5 minutes ahead of schedule at Pacific though, so were going to wait, and from there it made sense to just walk home.
I think my phone is seriously bitrotting. Or infected. There'd been an oddity a while back of my SSH key not working anymore, but today I noticed several apps have lost their icons and the OS says "not installed" when I try to run them, though if they were really uninstalled they shouldn't be there at all. I'll be really pissed if I can't recover the book notes I'd been making. Ghost Commander didn't have permission to copy screenshots to the external SD card, either. Eek!