Vancouver

God bless junkets. Jennifer had a paper accepted for the American Educational Research Association conference held in Vancouver BC. A more spectacularly situated city I have yet to see.  Downtown is a mass of aqua colored glass sky scrapers set against some remarkably beautiful mountains and the sea. It also seems to have the best network of parks of anyplace I've ever been. Stanley Park is great and there are dozens of cool little squares and the like all around the city. That said, the city also has this totally surreal vibe of a place whose main product seems to be livability, almost all of the construction is new residential high rises that are going up literally wherever you look. Our hotel is right by three different sites where they are building condos. Nobody really seems to work here, at least not like the other really rich cities that I've been to like New York or London. There every one seems to be rushing off some where, but in Vancouver it's like they are all just chilling. I speculate that there is just an enormous amount of second home ownership that occurs here. You make your money doing whatever in Tokyo or China and then you move to Vancouver for the prestige of it or the parks or the nearby mountains or the Marina or the friendly Canadians. Don't get me wrong, it's great, just weird.