Excuse Me for Being Green

Until this morning, I had a new favorite tea place in my new 'hood. Muzi Tea Bar is on West Cordova, across from Waterfront Centre. They feature approximately 60 different teas, which they serve with vanilla milk, steamed apple juice, and all sorts of other lovely things. Basically, it's fancy tea. But I like it. I also totally bought into their sleek white modern interior, and the lovely chai smell that wafts towards you when you come through the door. I've been making a habit of going in every day, either in the morning on the way to work or at lunch, and have been trying all sorts of different teas: Royal Assam with rose petals and vanilla milk, Vanilla cardamom chai with pepper, Matcha lattes...you get the picture.

I am still waiting for my shipment of all worldly possessions, which I believe has been pilfered by Somali pirates, as it's now been almost 12 weeks since I surrendered all my belongings to the slightly-shady moving company in the UK, who insists it's all on a boat. Somewhere. Anyway, amongst my (lost) things is my reusable coffee mug. Early last week I decided I couldn't stand all the paper cups I was using and couldn't wait for my shipment to arrive, so I bought a 27% recycled material reusable plastic travel mug. It's small enough to fit in my purse, but is a 12 oz cup (a "Tall" size at Starbucks). I've been presenting it for the past week or so at Muzi for my daily tea fix, and they have never had a problem accommodating me. The staff are mostly young women, who have all been lovely, and even give me an environmental discount for using my own cup. I often have a chat with them about their day, the weather, whatever. It's nice. It's "my place," or fast becoming my place.

This morning was a different story. The woman who I suspect is the owner or manager, as I often see her sitting in a corner of the bar with her laptop, was on the bar, and did not look happy to be toiling as a mere barista, rather than presiding, as usual, as Empress of the Tea Bar. I ordered a Matcha latte. After eating crap at the Canucks game last night I was feeling like I needed some green tea goodness. The woman looked at my (clean) cup and sort of wrinkled her nose at it. She then prepared the milk and the matcha, and poured the entire jug of milk into the cup. Naturally, it almost filled up the cup and so there was room for maybe an ounce of matcha. Normally, the baristas at Muzi pour the tea and the milk together, so that you get an equal amount of both in your cup. Maybe this means that I get smaller amounts of both, because my cup is smaller than their standard paper one, but that's OK by me, as long as it's equal parts tea and milk. After she had filled it with milk and pretty much no tea, Empress Tea Bar looked at me and sneered, "Um, what is this cup? It must be tiny because I still have a lot of tea here. It must be like, 8 ounces." She plunked it in front of me.

I said, "Well, it's a standard "tall" size at Starbucks. And you are usually able to fit a whole serving size in it for me." She didn't acknowledge that I had said anything, and immediately began preparing the drink for the next customer (there wasn't a line), leaving all the matcha I had paid for in the stainless steel jug in which it had been brewed. She didn't offer to pour the extra into a paper cup for me, or offer to remix it in my own cup so there was more matcha and less milk. She just...pretended I hadn't said anything and that I had disappeared with my silly little environmental mug. The girls on staff didn't know what to do, and, embarassed, turned and began busying themselves with tidying the counters. I know, having been served by all of them, that they understand that by pouring the milk into the cup first, she had basically cheated me out of all the matcha. But of course, they can't cross their boss.

So. I stood there for a moment, being ignored. Then I simply put the lid on my cup and walked out, feeling like an idiot. I'd just paid $4.00 for hot milk and humiliation. What a way to start the morning.

And you know what? I shouldn't have to feel like an idiot. Using a reusable cup is one very easy thing that everyone can do to reduce their consumption. In fact, it's a nothing step. Everyone should be using their own cups. Paper cups should be as taboo as plastic shopping bags are fast becoming. So, I wanted to use my cup. And Empress Tea Bar made it very difficult for me to do so. If I had less conviction I might have said, "Now, that was embarassing. And it was a big hassle. I won't use this cup anymore," and gone back to paper. I didn't get the product I paid for, and I got attitude that I certainly didn't order. But you know what? I'd rather go elsewhere than slink back to Muzi and their white paper cups. Badly done, Muzi. Badly done.

I'm Still Here.

Beloved MacBook has been out of commission for some weeks now, and thus, my blogging has ground to a halt. It's driving me nuts that the extent of my ability to update my site has been confined to tweets sent from my iPhone, because as we all know, I like to say a little more than what I can fit into 140 characters. In fact, I find it impossible to say anything in 140 characters. Sigh.

So, this one illicit blog for now and then I'll go back to waiting for Apple to fix MacBook.

Life is slowly settling into a routine. The construction at Woodwards continues apace, which means, whether I like it or not, I'm awake at 6 when the generators start and the construction team arrives outside my window. They tend to go like stink until 11 pm at night, but the progress seems, well, glacial. I'm not sure why everything is taking so long, in terms of construction at the SFU School of Contemporary Arts and the Community Arts Space.

It's a bit disorienting to suddenly have, well, a life. I go to work, I come home at a reasonable hour, and still have time in the evenings to spend time with friends and family. And, um, I don't work on the weekends. I feel guilty about it. But, I don't actually have to. So...hopefully the guilt will abate soon.

Filling my suddenly deliciously free evenings and weekends has not been hard. I've painted two walls in my house, haunted second hand and vintage stores to pick out just the right, 60's era, Don-Draperesque furnishings, baked (!), cooked, visited with family, gone to movies (see Fantastic Mr. Fox, it's delightful), met friends at Muzi for tea, read books (finally got my limited edition copy of Robert J. Wiersema's The World More Full of Weeping, which I highly recommend), and gone for wanders around downtown, to see what's changed and what hasn't. I bought a Christmas tree and decorated it with my mom and my aunties. I have had some crazy nights out as well, to the Eastside Culture Crawl, to see Lady Gaga's Monster Ball tour, and to the good ol' Freequeency Top 40 drag show at the Odyssey (which was, now that I think of it, uncannily similar to the Monster Ball)...

Keeping busy has staved off the worst of the inevitable homesickness I knew I would feel for London once the euphoria of being home wore off, despite how challenging and unhappy the recent months (well, year and a half) there were. I know, without a doubt, that it is healthiest for me to be here, in Vancouver. That doesn't mean that I don't miss London, or miss the best parts of it, anyway. Of course I don't miss the stress of the work, the loneliness of being so far from friends and family, and the day-to-day grind of living and working in London. But I miss flirting with Billy on the Thamesclipper on my way to work, I miss slipping out for coffee at Taylor Street Baristas with Tony, I miss being part of a team of brilliant, hilarious, caring associates who I looked forward to seeing every day, I miss starting to chatter at my office-mate David at 10 am and not stopping until I left in the evenings, I miss seeing trashy movies at Piccadilly with Ben, meeting Mike and Dorota for dinner and a good gossip in Mayfair, scouring the Internet for cheap theatre tickets, and visiting my beloved markets. So, despite knowing that I've made the right decision, I still dream of London, waking up in the morning and feeling its loss.

On the few nights when I'm not headed out to see someone or do something, I've settled into the routine of coming home, cooking dinner, doing laundry, and watching Ghost Whisperer. I know, I know. It's trash. It's horrible. It's Jennifer Love Hewitt. My mind knows all these things, and yet, every night, I flick it on while I bang the pots and pans together, while the laundry swirls around, machine humming happily in the background, and every night, inevitably, I cry my eyes out at the conclusion where somebody goes into the light. Every. Time. It's ridiculous. I told my aunt this last week, when I went to her house for a family dinner. She said, "That's a pretty sad comment on your life, that you go home and cry all night." Maybe it is. I think it's great that I get to go home, period. And the crying, well, it's cathartic. Maybe I'm crying out all the frustration and loneliness of the past 18 months, the anger at myself for going in the first place, and the anger at myself for not making it work. All I know is, right now, today, I'm happy. And if I needed to have a good Melinda Gordon-induced cry to get here, well, that's fine by me.

What Makes a Home.

All of my possessions were packed up in mid-September and sent on their merry way, I thought, by slow boat to Canada. However, for whatever reason, the moving company we paid more than enough money to transport things hasn't even bothered to put them on a boat yet, which I found out when I called Friday morning to check on their status, as they should be arriving any day. I was upset, but also unsettled. I want my things. I'm home now, I want to feel at home. I want my books, I want my pictures on the wall. I want my SHOES!

Anyway, I sulked for most of the weekend about it. It stresses me out to no end, but there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.

Tonight I had a couple of girlfriends over for dinner and Gossip Girl after we finished work. I baked a veggie lasagna. We scarfed homemade Caesar salad while commenting bitchily on all of the questionable wardrobe choices on the show, mainly wondering aloud why Serena was working in a senator's office looking like a ho. We watched Currie play soccer with her kitty-ball. We put on Justin Timberlake and danced around. We drank wine out of jars. We talked about boys while I puttered in the kitchen. After the girls left, and I had finished loading the dishwasher, I realized, what else do I need? I am home and at home, whether that stuff makes it across the Atlantic or not.

Transport Stories.

While I don't perhaps fit the stereotype of the British Columbia hemp-wearing, tree-hugging environmentalist, I have always been very passionate about the environment. In elementary school I helped launch a green schools initiative that saw the school nationally recognized as a "Green School" a year after I left. At Pearson College I was one of the school's "recyclers," who dragged a red wagon from house to house and building to building once a week, picking up recyclable materials to be sorted. As part of the Environmental Law Centre at UVic's Faculty of Law, I participated in a number of pro-bono environmental cases.

Sure, I make bad decisions along the way. I love shoes, like, alot, and books, and consumerism in general. But I try to buy my clothes from local designers and valiantly attempt to eat seasonally as well as locally. London knocked alot of the shopaholic out of me, as 1) I was too busy working to shop and 2) I had no money to shop, and I've since made a conscious decision to be a bit more, well, conscientious about when and how I consume: India Knight of the Times has written a great little book called "The Thrift Book: Live Well and Spend Less" which offered some great ideas on how to reduce my urges to buy, buy, buy, and as it becomes, well, trendy, to care about these things, it becomes easier. Most importantly, I think, I have always made a big effort to live a car-free life, to live and work in one area, so that I can walk everywhere and hopefully reduce my carbon footprint a little bit more.

Living car free certainly wasn't easy growing up in Victoria. Transit was (and presumably still is) infrequent and unreliable, and while I made attempts to bike ride, rollerblade and walk, it wasn't always a feasible option and in 2001 I bought my first (and only) car, an orange 1986 Hyundai Excel that was affectionately referred to by family and friends as "The Drama Queen" (Note: my brother drove the Drama Queen in 2002 and 2003 when I was living in Montreal and was understandably mocked for it). I sadly sold the DQ in 2004 before I left for England, for $50 more than I had paid for her, and to this day, she has still been seen put-putting around town.

In Montreal I got my first taste of urban life and was hooked. I loved having every sort of shop within walking distance of my front door. I loved taking the Metro. I loved urban greenspaces. I loved living "downtown." I traded in my high heels for flats and walked everywhere. I was a converted City Girl and that has never changed. In London, while I took busses, boats and Tubes, more often I walked. I visited local markets on Saturdays and Sundays. It felt healthier somehow, although admittedly less convenient than driving down to my local Thrifty's and stocking up. When I moved to Vancouver for the first time in September 2005, I thought my City Girl ways would be able to continue without a hitch. There's Skytrain, I thought. And busses. I'd be fine.

Wrong. I stuck it out a year without a car, living in the West End, and walking to work downtown, but it wasn't easy. I could never go to IKEA for cheap kitchen goodies, or even Wal-Mart to pick up reasonably priced necessities like toilet paper and shampoo. I was relegated to downtown grocery stores like Urban Fare and IGA, which weren't always cheap. And I got drenched, every day, for 100 days or more, walking to and from work in the pouring rain, umbrella being wrenched inside-out by the wind. I sang with a choir that required me to travel the entire Millennium line every Monday night to get to rehearsals, which often meant I spent the return trip home, around 10:00 pm, avoiding scarily aggressive panhandlers and, sadly, mentally ill people, on Skytrain. It felt so unsafe that I began to dread it and I dropped out of the choir.

When I got called to the bar, as a present to myself I joined Cooperative Auto Network, a non-profit carshare, and life became infinitely easier. I had a car when I wanted it, for going out to the suburbs to visit family (as visiting me downtown often appeared to be too inconvenient), and for the all-important IKEA runs. I could easily get to rehearsals without leaving two hours ahead of schedule (two hours which I didn't often have, due to work). I wasn't exactly living a car-free life, though. So, when I moved home this time, I thought, "Let's give it a go again." I am living an 8 minute walk from my office, which even in the rain I thought I'd be able to tolerate. I'd heard great things about the Canada Line, so maybe transit was a viable option in Vancouver again? I decided November would be my "test month." Could I get by just on a monthly buss pass?

The first experiment went well. I got myself to Main Street to meet friends taking the Canada Line to King Ed, then bussing down King Ed to Main. The new Canada Line was clean, I liked the perky "attendants" in Green gor-tex jackets who checked my tickets. It was certainly speedy. Alright, so the bus doesn't come every 2 minutes as in London, it took 12 minutes to arrive, but that was alright, it wasn't raining too badly. Waterfront station is within spitting distance of my front door, so I was home lickety-split. I thought it was great.

I'm not so sure after today. I had to return a piece of computer equipment to a shop on Broadway and Burrard. It's been bugging me all week that I need to return it, so I checked Translink's website to see how long it would take me to get there by bus from my office at Waterfront Centre. 20 minutes: I could either take a 17 bus, or take the Canada Line to Broadway-City Hall, and then a 99 B-Line down Broadway.

It all started out fine. The Canada Line really is great. I had no wait for the train, it was exceptionally clean, and I had somewhere to sit down. When I arrived at the station, I crossed the street and hopped on a passing B-Line. Unfortunately, Translink had steered me wrong: as my bus sped past my destination, across Burrard, I approached the female bus driver. "Excuse me," I asked. "Are you going to be stopping anytime soon, as I've just overshot my stop." "Nope," she barked at me. "Next stop is Macdonald" (translation: really really far out of my way). "Oh," I said, a bit confused. "Translink told me I should take this bus." "Well then you should have got off at Granville," she said (translation 2: walk the 8 blocks to the store). No customer service here. No hope that she would take pity on me and facilitate a "red light exit" for me (where the driver flashes open the doors as a red light so you can flee before the night stop. Forbidden, but nice when it happens). I got off at Macdonald, sighed, crossed the road, and waited for another bus to take me back to my location. After 10 minutes or so, a 17 bus came, so I hopped on it (after checking with this driver that I could get where I needed to go). All in all, including the 10 minutes that I spent in the store making my return, my trip, from office chair to office chair, was 96 minutes. This included walking to and from Waterfront Centre (6 minutes), waiting time for Canada Line trains to arrive (0 minutes), travelling time on Canada Line (14 minutes) waiting time for busses to arrive (36 minutes), time actually spent on busses (30 minutes). Not good enough. It's a distance of 3.7 kilometres. Google Maps says I could have walked one way in 48 minutes, ie, I could have walked there and back in the 96 minutes it took me to take transit.

This had me muttering all kinds of things under my breath. Vancouver is apparently the most "livable" city in the world, according to a number of surveys, but if transit, and other kinds of green transportation were included in this study, and if people who can't afford (or like me, choose not) to have a car were surveyed, I find it very hard to believe. Every tourist coming for the Olympics would need a rental car, I thought. There is no way this transit system, which in BAU (that's lawyer-speak for "business as usual," sorry, I couldn't help myself) cannot get me, a person who *kind of* knows where she's going 3.7 kilometres in under an hour, there was no way it was going to be user-friendly for people with no working knowledge of the city's streets. On my return bus ride, I found myself calculating monthly car payments. I was prepared to throw out my green principles for the sake of convenience: it seemed ridiculous that I not be able to use transit on my lunch breaks to run errands and, uh, live my life. I don't get to take hour and a half long lunches, I get the normal hour. I don't have time to leave at 5 pm to meet someone for 7. Vancouver is a world-class, cosmopolitan city, I thought to myself. Why is its transit system still in the dark ages?

In attempting to answer that question, I thought about my fellow passengers: on the first bus I took, there were two people in wheelchairs, several very very very elderly people with varying degrees of mobility, two people who had some kind of mental disability, a gaggle of students, and more than one person (not identifiable) with a personal hygiene issue. This is a marked difference from London, where a) people with disabilities are hardly ever seen, and b) the average cross-section of riders yields much more of a variety of people, in terms of demographics. In London, transit really is for everyone (only the really ridiculously super wealthy don't take it; even super wealthy people I knew in London got everywhere by Oyster card). On this bus today, I was reminded that transit here really does seem to be used, generally speaking, by people in the lower economic classes (Note: I'm not making a judgment here, I'm just observing). I can't speak for commuter transit, as I don't take it, but even on my return bus through the core of Vancouver, it was just old people, sick people, and poor people: more wheelchairs, more people with disabilities, and more old people barely able to climb onto the bus.

So why aren't more people like me, who can afford cars but live in the city, not taking transit? Sure, it was lunch hour, so my rough ethnography may be skewed, but I've taken the bus in the past on weekday mornings and it's the same type of people. Nary a yuppie in sight. The norm seems to be, if you can afford a car, you drive. You drive to avoid the inconvenience and hassle of taking transit in Vancouver, like I experienced today. As a result, the people who are left to use transit and who should be demanding more user-friendly trip-planning interfaces, more frequent stops, and more busses on the road (not to mention another Skytrain line or two) are those who don't really have the resources (and in some cases, the capacity) to make their voices heard.

What's the solution? I think it's to force people onto transit. I know it's been hugely unpopular, but the congestion charge in London got people out of their cars and onto transit. Make it cost to drive in the city. We've already got the Westcoast Express and express commuter buses from Tsawassen and Delta for the people who would have to drive *really* far, but the focus shouldn't just be on long-haul commuters. You need to get people from Marpole and Kerrisdale and Commercial Drive and other parts of East Van taking transit, and not just into the downtown core for work. Anywhere. Anything north of Broadway, anything west of Main, to, say, Macdonald, there should be a congestion charge. Public parking should be prohibitively expensive. Throw in more of a tax incentive for transit passes (there is already a rebate available, but it's not much). Get more workplaces offering transit passes as benefits. Get more people taking transit and Translink will have to throw more resources at it. In short, they'll have to build a system worthy of Vancouver's reputation.