Tour de Concrete in a Sea of Ineptitude on 9/11

Then ...

It's time to ride a tandem again.  

NOT!

I called Yiman again, but not to ride A tandem, but rather to ride IN tandem.  
Of course, after meeting at Science World (NO, I'm not calling it T****, World of Science, because that's just dumb capitalist brouhaha!). 




The day is not starting too too well.  I have already travelled 10 kms by bicycle from my NV hotel.  My hotel room was reasonably quiet for Vancouver (read: noisy), probably due to the fact that tourist traffic is slowly diminishing.  When I'm sitting at breakfast and try to use my cell phone as a WIFI router, I detect to my utter delight (NOT) that my phone is ROAMING.  I'm in the middle of Vancouver and I'm roaming?  WTF?  Even repeated re-starts of the phone don't seem to fix the problem.  Great.  More 3rd world infrastructure in a city that prides itself of being the 3rd nicest in the WORLD.  
Someone should conduct a study to investigate the correlation between ranking of a city in the Economist's World's city ranking and the percentage of the cities' populations that is on Prozac or some other Anti-depressant.  

One call is coming through from Yiman, telling me that she might not make it since she can't get her bicycle out of storage.  10 Minutes later she calls again, but gets bounced right to Voicemail.  But I can't call my voicemail. I can't call anyone.  I send Yiman a text message that I can't call, but the text message does not get sent.   So I stop at a community centre to use their public phone.  But Yiman does not answer ;-( 

I get to Telus World of Science as the place is now called thanks to the great invention of corporate sponsorship. For people outside Vancouver: Telus is Canada's leading telephone service provider. Their advertising motto is "The Future is Friendly". 
I enter the lobby to ask where the public telephones are. There are none.  When I ask the clerk behind the counter whether he sees the irony in the fact that a place that carries the name of Canada's telephone company doesn't have any telephones, I just get a blank stare in return.  Wow. No phones and retarded employees. Gets better and better.  If this is the future, it's neither friendly nor desirable.

Not my pic

Fortunately, Yiman is already there when I exit Science World with steam coming out of my ears.



No pictures were taken along the bike ride to Denman & Georgia because I was busy pedaling after turning off my engine so as not to put battery-free Yiman at a disadvantage.  Very good and inexpensive lunch was had at a fabulous Thai restaurant close to the South-West corner of Denman and Alberni.  Unfortunately we were the only guests, which is entirely undeserved for this place.