Or, y’know, Gastown, part two!

Swan and I didn’t stop after seeing that dog, although that dog was really furry and I really wanted to pet it. I restrained myself though and we went on out of Gastown into the surrounding streets. But before I go on, a picture of one shopkeeper’s explanation for his day off:

That’s right. SHUSH. Nobody disturbs dem noodles when dey sleepin’.

Anyway, journeying in Vancouver means you’ll get so see a lot of art in a lot of different ways. There’s traditional art (and the psuedo-gateway to Chinatown!) like this:

Fun fact time again! (Read: Andrea goes to Wikipedia and looks up interesting things to tell you)

Apparently this particular gate, which sits on Pender Street, was donated by the Government of the People’s Republic of China. The current structure you see now was rebuilt and renovated in 2005 with concrete and steel. It was then unveiled before the then-governer of Guangdong (廣東), Huang Huahua (黄华华).

Of course there’s also another sort of art. Graffiti can certainly cheer up construction areas.

 Speaking of construction, there’s a lot of construction in Vancouver. Or at least, everywhere I go on a regular basis I see scaffolding (and I don’t mean the educational kind), temporary wooden boards or even plaster walls, signs to redirect traffic and warning signs cautioning people passing by.

Oh, and there sometimes construction workers.

Sometimes

As we walked along, Swan and I also caught sight of something mysterious. Something even more mysterious than the ambiguous smiley face spray-painted on a hard-to-reach place.

We saw… the unfinished road.

 

I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for this phenomenon but really I’d like to make up my own story about this. There’d be something about a spectre trolley that was the ghost of a real trolley that used to carry passengers happily and without a care, until the company that owned the trolley declared itself bankrupt and shut down. To add insult to injury, the women who bought out the land of the old company built a gate over the trolley’s old tracks, forever barring the trolley from reliving it’s glory days on the rail.

Every afternoon, at the first stroke of sundown, the spectre of the trolley can be seen rolling on the rails through the green gate, unable to discontinue its daily routine of trundling back into the trolley station from whence it came.

You know it’s legit when someone uses the word “whence.”

Aside from all these neat snapshots though, Swan and I were actually on a mission to look for a bookstore. And what did we find… but a bookstore of the strangest but most sensible labels I have ever seen.

Also note the titles The Lady is Afraid and Spinsters in Jeopardy =D.

The store was pretty glorious, especially for book-lovers such as Swan and I. Of course we stayed in there ooh-ing and aah-ing for a good chunk of time. But soon enough Swan decided to move on, because this (surprise!) was not the bookshop she was looking for.

There’s a song somewhere in there, I’m sure.

We caught the last gem, Knitting With Dog Hair, as we were walking past to the next bookstore. To this day I still remember: “Better a sweater from a dog you know and love than from a sheep you’ll never meet.” Excellent.

We walked until we finally found the correct store, also on Pender. Maybe this title should have been titled West Pender, but we certainly didn’t walk enough to feel that we had sufficiently covered Pender Street. And by gum, this store was really a bookstore. Actually, I don’t know if the word “bookstore” was even sufficient for this one. The first bookstore we had certainly had bookshelves to the ceiling all jam-packed with words and sentences and pages but this one… well, I”ll let you see for yourself.

And with that, our day together downtown concluded, because I had to go home for dinner.

And that was part of Pender, near Gastown ^^.