Friday Night in Vancouver

posted at 1:27 am
on Oct. 1, 2005

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I had an interesting evening.

First, dinner and a movie with old friends—we saw The Big Hit, and old Marky Mark starrer that was available in only one super high-end specialty video store.  I was actually horribly embarrassed to walk into that Japanese import and Criterion collection store and ask if they had “The Big Hit,” and the woman behind the counter seemed to share my embarrassment.

After dinner, I went to the official opening of Rain City’s office, and ran into lots of people form around town.  Rain City Studios is a Web design and development company run by two very friendly and nice guys, Mark and Rob.

Also there were Boris, Lindsay, Sarah, Hendrik, Rachael, Will, Celia, Stephen, Alexandra (who I didn’t get to say even a single word to), Bobby, Jody, Colin, Colin’s belle (sorry, my name brain was full!), and the incomparable Kathleen.

We had a great time, even playing an actual game of Twiseter, which I thought only happened on T.V. or in the ‘60s.  And, oddly enough, just like in dreams I’ve had about playing twister at some hip, drunken party, I ended up being the guy who spun the arrow.

Anyway, at the party, I told a story, and Boris reminded me I’d already told it, but that I hadn’t blogged it yet, so here it is.

Susie and I stayed in Le Meridian in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a very tall hotel built directly across from the central train station.  It’s got 35 floors, and we were in the very top story. (On the right in the photo.)

The view from our hotel was spectacular.

But the hotel was completely isolated.  The lobby was on the fourth floor, and the hotel was surrounded by roads.  Taxis drove you up a spiral to the fourth floor drop-off area.  Form the hotel, you could go walk across a sky-bridge east, to the train station, but the west side was directly beside a major freeway, and you couldn’t go west at all.  There was a museum you could see from our room, about 500 meters away, that I tried to get to by walking for two hours in a circuitous path.

The doorman at the hotel later told me it had never been reached by a hotel guest except by taxi, though I later determined that I could take the train two stops, get on a bus and come back, and get from the bus stop to the museum.

I never did make it to the museum.

All in all, Kuala Lumpur was full of oddities like that.  Super amazing buildings, parks, projects and such, but laid out haphazardly, or integrated poorly in their surroundings, or unfinished in some way, and all very hard to access without a vehicle.  Not that I’d drive in that city.

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