Cheap Richmond hotel. Alarmed awake each morning by jumbos taking off directly overhead and traffic screeching and roaring nearby. Grab the schedule and pick up the pace while merging into pedestrian and vehicular traffic and trying to remember landmarks. Can’t see ’em. Everything has changed.

Breakfast is a hotel lobby buffet blur of tastlessness and foreign strangers subtly competing for the few five-minute sit-and-chew chairs. The streets of Richmond clogging the arteries to the Vancouver cubicles-in-the-sky with the desperately working-to-keep-up with their property values.

Lots of new cars, tho.

The commuters stay awake by listening to the radio shows pump lies, propaganda and ‘traffic-on-the-fours’ (which means the traffic news is updated every ten minutes at 4 minutes past the hour, fourteen minutes past the hour and so on). Everybody is late. They all seem anxious.

What’s not to like?

Admittedly this bleak view of city life is partly just my own perspective. I haven’t had to move this fast in years. Well, months anyway. I was down here in the land of industrial hockey last November but I must have had some latent aggression to work out because I tended to merge better, drive faster, park quicker and hear less of the din back then. Today? Well, today is a bit like sensory overload. Gotta hone some skills. Fast.

We’ll adjust. It will just take a bit longer I guess. Or maybe I’ll try to find a friendly drug dealer and score some ‘speed’. Shouldn’t be too hard judging by the few face-averting pedestrians who are loitering and not zipping about. Most of them wear ‘hoodies’ and stand at the junction of several streets and lanes. Must be like a secret-language sign that says, ‘Get your red hots here!” But I could be wrong. There are too many of them to all be drug dealers. Some must be buyers.

But urban adjustment is necessary. Really. Put another way: When I checked in two nights ago, Maggie the receptionist said, “Oh HI, Mr.Cox. Nice to see you again.”

“Well you’ve stayed here before and you and your wife are amongst the only ones who ever talk to me. You know? Like a person. It just doesn’t happen much at all anymore. People just exchange their names and Visa numbers. So, I remember the few who actually talk with me very easily.”

Harsh. This lady must see hundreds of people every day. She is young, Chinese and very pleasant. And no one, it seems, takes the time to talk with her. What has it come to, eh?

I guess I’ll never adjust. I talk too much.

I prefer option B, anyway. Sal is on the phone booking a ferry for later today. Retreat is a perfectly honourable course of action when faced with overwhelming force and we have always believed in discretion being the better part of valour. Now we know what it means.

Translated: get out! GET OUT NOW!!

AAAAAaaaaaaarrrrrrrrggggghhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!