Why Vancouver? Why You?
Honorable mentions
7 essays that came close to making the top ten
Thank you all for submitting your entries.
I love Vancouver. It’s my home. I look around and see all the iconic images. Each place holds a special memory and each of those memories also has the power to rip my heart apart. Twelve years’ worth of visiting Vancouver’s best places with my god-children meant a never ending cavalcade of “adventure days.” The […]
I have crossed many borders to come to you, Vancouver, and somehow I knew I have come closer to home. The highways shrank from six lanes to two, green as far as the eye could see. A display of low hanging clouds. Wild flowers even. Your views of the mountains delight me, and still remind […]
He might have been a jockey in his younger days. At not much more than five feet tall, his lean, wiry frame blended in among the kids who swarmed around his old VW Beetle. Maybe his jockey past was just my wishful thinking, born of the imagination of a horse-crazy city-locked girl. Regardless, horse history […]
Every window, wall and walkway of that city has been saturated with memories of you. It is no longer the aloof city we found together in the autumn of our youth – that emerald place compelling us from just beyond our reach. We found that city together and made it our own. On every grey […]
When people fall in love in the movies, it takes about two hours. They meet in some cute way like bumping into each other in a crowded hallway or getting into the same taxicab. There’s mood lighting, there’s a dramatic soundtrack and everyone has perfect hair. The happy couple might have to overcome an obstacle […]
To help me with this essay, I asked my ESL students, “What does Vancouver present to newcomers?” They shared an honest, sometimes startling, collection of observations: Sneaky moss; coffee galore; free tennis; city folk who look like they are going camping; dogs in houses; potheads; the smell of rain; “nerds” on bicycles (no offence); healthy […]
Vancouver was the magnet that drew my ancestors from across the continent or the hemisphere, so I am genetically predisposed to love it. Three hundred years after his seafaring antecedent was born in England, a machinist-engineer from New Brunswick moved to Vancouver’s West End with his wife and young son to take a job in […]
Semifinalists - 10 essays that can still win! Voting continues