Vancouver B.C. is just two and a half hours north of Seattle, Wash., but for much of the pandemic it might as well have been on the moon. Beginning in March 2020 the U.S.-Canada border was closed to non-essential travel, and once things opened up last fall, Covid tests were still hard to get, or expensive, or both. This past week Patricia and I visited for the first time in a long time—to see family who moved there in Oct. 2019, as well as a John Mulaney standup concert at the Queen Elizabeth Theater. (The show was cancelled; more on that another day.)

Here are some non-essential observations on the city to the north:

• Bare midriffs on women are in.
• So are skinny pants and highwaters on dudes. It's Revenge of the Nerds Part XXXI.
• Vancouverites are wearing Yankee caps? What is this—Europe? 
• The downtown area hardly seems to have suffered from the pandemic. Right now, parts of downtown Seattle seem like a ghost town, just you and the crazies, and the only thing missing is a tumbleweed blowing between you. Downtown Vancouver on a sunny Sunday afternoon—in the Robson Square, Canada Place, BC Place triangle where we were—was bustling with the aforementioned bare-midriff women and drainpipe dudes. Everyone was out.
• As was the smell of pot—more so than in Seattle. You win this round, Vancouver!!
• As were the mountains, which are much closer to the city than the Cascades and Olympics are to Seattle. Ditto, Vancouver!!!
• I'd guess about 75% of the people we saw walking around outside were masked.
• The anti-vax trucker protest in Ottawa was all over the news before we went, but the only such protest we saw in Vancouver was truckless, on foot, and about a dozen strong (or weak). They were marching near Robson Square, carrying the usual, sad, anti-vax and anti-science signs, and followed by a mocking crowd twice their size.
• The lines at the border were short and efficient. Our Canadian border guard was kind of like a hard-ass Kate Winslet: looked like Winslet, sounded like a drill sergeant.
• To get across the border you had to fill out an app, ArriveCAN, which gives you a QR code when you're done. You're told to show this at the border but they didn't want it. Hard-ass Kate Winslet just wanted the passports (which had been uploaded to the app), vax cards (ditto), and proof of a negative PCR test within the last 72 hours (oddly not uploadable to the app). Anyway, we were allowed in.
• Are rest areas an American thing? In the north part of I-5, there's one every 30 miles or so, but no equivalent once you hit Canada. So odd. They seem like they'd be a Canadian thing.
• From a distance, the Vancouver skyline looks ordinary to me: a lot of tall glass buildings in aqua and teal. Patricia liked it. 
• They're still building a lot. We kept hearing and running into construction projects. Even when we visited the Vancouver Art Museum and were walking through the John & Yoko exhibit we'd hear the bang-bang of construction on a second-floor exhibit opening in spring.
• The John & Yoko exhibit was so-so, the third floor exhibit wasn't much, but I dug the Shakespeare folio exhibit on the fourth floor. It could've used more words, though. I would've liked comparisons. You're looking at the first folio from 1623 under glass, and turned to the first page of “Romeo & Juliet,” and a comparison to, say, the Modern Signet edition would've been nice. I misremembered the “bite my thumb” back and forth, for example, and thought it was sooner and thus missing here. But the folio did include the maidenhead joke.
• I experienced my first 4-D movie at the Vancouver Aquarium—a short film on octopi, which we attended with our nephew and his kids. The first time air blew on the back of my neck I think I jumped about a foot.
• In the end, though, I'm not a fan. With movies you want immersion, not distraction, and that fourth D is distraction—like someone poking you every other minute. I kept flashing on the 1993 movie “Matinee” starring John Goodman, which was based on the life and times of impresario/con man William Castle, who trumpeted such features as “Emergo,” “Percepto” and “Illusion-o.” This was that, but science-y.
• We ate well: from a sushi joint in Kitsilano to a ramen place in West End to a Mr. Shawarma food truck near Robson Square.
• There's a giant chandelier hanging beneath the Granville Bridge. Apparently it's an art piece. 
• Atop the Burrard Street Bridge, we saw a giant bald eagle, with an insane wingspan, soaring around, followed by a half dozen cawing crows. Sure, crows.
• Overall, the city is much cleaner than Seattle, and we saw very few homeless and no homeless encampments. I was assuming the Canadian government was doing something right, but our niece says the homeless are mostly in the Downtown-East neighborhood, which we never visited.
• Even so, our niece and nephew, with their two small kids, plan to stay. Whenever our nephew hears about the active shooter drills in American elementary schools, he thinks: Why go back?