There is a corollary to that, but we’ll get there soon enough.

Today was another gorgous spring day in Vancouver and Chris and I took full advantage. Despite Chris’s broken hip damaged hamstring from working out fighting a bear, we performed yet another epic hike around downtown looking to see what was what. This after a suitable breakfast at Tim Horton’s and an hour long story-time at Chapters.

This time, for the first time in a while, we ventured down along Robson Street to see what was happening. The first thing we learned was that the Gap’s cargo pants Chris likes are $5.00 cheaper on Robson than at Metrotown. Huh.

As usual, we were reminded that there are a disproportionate number of idiots out on any given day, especially a sunny Saturday morning. Some of these idiots fall into the class my brother introduced me to… the touron. The short explanation involves boats or planes, still or video camera, gawking or pointing and general insanity.

Another class we simply refer to as “Die cancer-ass-face, die, die, die.” They’re the ones who wander slowly along with a smoke hanging out of their face (or in their hand), a cell phone and a coffee, casually waving their cancer-stick around in a somewhat silly attempt to kill everyone, while not doing themselves any harm. They always manage to get just ahead of you and walk just fast enough to stay there. They also tend to swarm at crosswalks.

There’s also the mob. I’m not talking about Tony Soprano meets the Yakuza type mob, or Vancouver’s own Bacon Brothers (not the band), I’m talking the group of 3-10 people travelling in a pack down the sidewalk, and managing to take up the entire width of it while behaving somewhat like a swarm of birds. They mill around inside the mob and present tiny microscopic changes in size open just long enough to fool those trapped behind them into thinking it might be possible to pass. Then, for no discernable reason, they swarm back to other way and close the opening, while still maintaining full use of the entire sidewalk.

As we said before though, some people are nice. Having made the mistake of buying a $4 cup of tea from Blenz (in a flurry of tea-choice indecision), Chris needed a replacement green tea and I offered to throw myself upon the Starbucks sword and get him his favored Zen Green tea from the nice new Starbucks at Robson and Denman (Nancy-Ann, Bojangles is gone). It’s very nice inside, and the wonderful 12 year old barista was super nice and friendly and sweet about letting Chris use the bathroom before she knew we were going to buy anything. But in her niceness she gave Chris China Green Tips, not Zen Green tea. Strike 2 for tea.

We swung into Doggie Style Deli or whatever it’s called on Denman Street where Chris engaged the nice woman in conversation about a new bag for Rumble. She was nice, extolled the virtues of their current selection of bags, and then to seal her place in todays “nice” category, gave us 2 tiny little freshly prepared piece of dog treat for Rumble (who wasn’t even with us). One was turkey something, the other was liver. He loved them but looked vaguely confused when he got those instead of his usual cookies.

There were other nice people today (the folks at Timmies, the folks at Little Sisters, Fat Burger, lots of random strangers) but some stood out.

Oh, and Chris. Chris is nice too!