New Vancouver Tourism video

This promotional video of Vancouver from Tourism Vancouver has been making its way across facebook and other Canadian sites and as someone who has blogged a few times on the lack of quality promo videos in Korea I thought I'd share a good one.

First off this video does a great job of creating that pacific northwest vibe. I've often said that my citizenship is Canadian, but my identity is pacific northwest (if I'm cheering for a crappy ball club it's the Mariners, the Blue Jays can go f*ck themselves) and this video captures that really well. It shows off Vancouver in a great light and makes it an attractive destination year round (I notice the winter shots were all up in the mountains above the rain :P). The video, for lack of a better word, "feels" like the Vancouver.

Of course it skips over some parts that a serious traveller would need to know. Poverty in the downtown eastside is comparable to Cambodia (having seen both I feel it's a fair comparison) and a week doing all those things, even using Vancouver's public transit (on the rare occasions when it will get you where you need to go), will cost you more than a month in SE Asia. So for anyone reading and thinking about visiting do keep that in mind, it's pricing is comparable to London.

However, for sheer beauty (especially in the summer) no where I have been to yet compares to Vancouver and the pacific northwest. There are very few places on earth where you can go skiing, whale watching, eat world class food, go to a Chinese night market one night and a British pub the next or just sit at a coffee shop or the Granville Island brewery and enjoy the ocean views. Also, for a city of over 2 million (if you add Surrey, and to be fair we should) it's remarkably clean. Of all the places I've been only Singapore really matches Vancouver for cleanliness

and in Singapore they don't f**k around

so if you've never been check it out, after a while in Asia the laid back northwest vibe may be exactly what you need.