Canada, fuck yeah

Vancouver is the fucking awesomest. Valhalla, Canadian style. Definitely if the F-word ever dumps me, I'm moving here the next week. Just wrapping up a lovely visit with Elvis and his lady and sad to be leaving, though happy to be leaving through Vancouver's aeroport, which is also the fucking awesomest. They have a fucking jellyfish tank in the lounge area, how fantastic is that?

Anyways, I've loved this city ever since I first saw it but loving it in another way now; loving its ugliness, to be honest with you. Loving the simplicity and the boxiness of the houses and buildings - so strange! I used to hate that sort of refusal of gratuitous architectural prettiness in the New World, and its favoring of cheapness and function - because it's part of a living landscape. Things are still alive here, like in the other Canadian cities too, and I love that. I love it for what it is; I'm not claiming any sort of nationalistic environmentalist fanciness relative to poor, dead, shagged-out Europe; we're just emptier as a country and our cities really started taking off only after people understood people need parks, trees and gardens.

I cover a lot of Asian industry at work, environmentally destructive sorts, and lately it has really been striking me how justified the Asians are in getting pissed off with European environmental groups that complain about their activities. Europe got where it got (ergo est, no famines and functioning social services) by exploiting their continent to the point where it's become a complete environmental catastrophe, as close to a dead zone as a non-desert gets, for hundreds of years. And now it just looks like Europeans want to change the rules - and that without even giving up their economically ridiculous farming subsidies in favour of letting a decent quantity of land go fallow and making biodiversity some sort of policy priority.

Yeah, I'm done with Europe. In the meantime, rolling around in all the Canadiana like a pig in shit. God, we have the cutest accents in the world, I totally forget when I'm away.