March 13th, 2006
"So, like, he was like ahhh! and I was like ahhh! and we were both like ahhh!"
-Overheard at lunch today, spoken by a woman much older than I would have imagined...* * *
We went to Victoria for the weekend.
Used to be kind of a nice place, Victoria was, provided you didn't mind waiting outside the liquor stores with the little old ladies lining up to buy their quotidian bottles of sherry.
But the little old ladies are gone. Too bad, since the number of liquor stores has blossomed to a per-capita rate that must rank higher than the rest of Canada—maybe the world! I noticed this fact when we came down the Pat Bay highway into town. It seemed as though every block had a couple or three of them. I was a bit surprised at this, but then I remembered how I used to consume alcohol whenever I came to Victoria to visit my friend Martin as he terrorized the halls of UVIC. ("Hey, whose turn is it to carry Martin home tonight?")
So there is a clue about the change in Victoria: All the little old ladies have died off, leaving behind the regular cast of university trouble-makers. A change in the character of Victoria, and I can't say I like how much nastier it makes the overall feel.
Now, add to that the fact that there are a lot of people moved down the Island from towns where mills have closed, or maybe from towns where there's nothing much to do (and not a lot of work ethic to find something to do anyhow). And there are an awful lot more pan-handlers on the streets lately. They aren't quite as aggressive as Vancouver's pan-handlers, but there are way more per capita, which means that it is only a matter of time before they start shouting at the backs of people as they attempt to walk down the street, or standing in the way. There were a lot of them—maybe two or three per block—and they were mostly young men who didn't show any signs of mental disability. Just standing there having a good time with their buddies and asking people who walked by for money. Are things really that desperate for young men on the island? Some folks were, as I said, older and probably moved from a mill town where the work evaporated with the closing of the mill, and some others were, as in Vancouver, mentally ill.
Thus, there is another contributing factor to our experience of Victoria: A lot more panhandlers, and so a lot more stressful walk down the streets of Victoria.
Another thing that we couldn't help but notice was the car traffic in general and trucks in particular. All cars were in a hell-bent fury to get to the next red light (that's the way traffic works, by the way: Pass people like crazy if you must, but it'll only mean you'll get to sit at the next red light a little longer while they all catch up to you—but this is a longer rant, I should come back to it some other day). They're as bad as Vancouver drivers. Maybe worse, since they clearly expect the other drivers to sit still while they try to drive circles around them. Nasty. And maybe all these terrible drivers are like that because the aforementioned little old ladies don't drive anymore to act as a moderating factor, or perhaps they're just a bunch of transplanted Vancouverites who are driving like assholes because Victoria turned out to be just as bad as Vancouver (probably because they are there ...) But, in any case, the cars move fast, recklessly, and just plain stupidly. But it was the trucks that scared us the most: Twice we nearly got run down by trucks who didn't merely act negligently, they accelerated to make us scramble out of the way! Yes, this appears to be the latest fad in Victoria among truck drivers: Frighten the tourists by threatening their lives. Maybe there is some sort of love-hate relationship going on, or maybe they have decided that tourists are bad for their trade because they get in the way and slow everything down ... but whatever the reason, they now take runs at people.
So there is another item to add to the list of Things Wrong with Victoria: The traffic, in particular the trucks.
Finally, there were a myriad of stores and restaurants closed or out of business. We saw a lot of stores that were closed on a Saturday! You'd think that was prime time, wouldn't you? Restaurants closed on a Sunday afternoon? Come on! If you want to attract tourists, shouldn't you give them something to spend their money on?
Oh, or maybe you expect they are broke after paying for parking their cars downtown, because I noticed that your parking has increased in cost significantly: Parking meters are almost as expensive as Vancouver's, and the parking lot we eventually settled on was more expensive. So perhaps Victoria planners are not as short-sighted as those parking costs would initially indicate: Maybe they just figured they'd take more money at the start of the day and distribute the wealth to all the stores that would then stay closed instead .... Well, at least that is all I can think of.
The other thing we noticed is that there are a lot of boarded-up closed store-fronts in some part of Victoria. It looks awful.
So Victoria:
It's as though your whole city decided to pack up and move to one overpriced narrow corridor along Government street where your truck drivers could kill and terrorize more tourists per trip; you could concentrate the pan-handlers along the streets so that we could run a wilder, more stressful gauntlet; and you could increase, exponentially, your profits from parking costs.
Well, if that was the intention, then I am here to attest to the success. We were thoroughly disappointed with the changes that have come over Victoria in the last year or so, and we have no plans at all to return now. We like going away for weekends every once in a while, but we have crossed Victoria off our list of destinations.
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