After a vicious day of travel — one technical delay meant a missed flight, 4-hour holdover in Chicago, and a total travel time of 17 hours to get to Vancouver — Sunday was great.

Van is supposed to be cold and raining; but the rain isn’t here now. Spent the day wandering around downtown, with the bulk of it in Chinatown (which is huge). Apparently, 30% of Vancouver is Chinese. By my count, non-Chinese accounted for about 1 in 50 of the people in Chinatown; which meant that it wasn’t a tourist trap, but a vital community that we dropped in on for a day.

Had a great lunch at a random place with no English name. Handmade potstickers and hearty noodle soup. Only “guests” in the place, as everyone else was local. (Will find some photos later).

Really tired; about to go out and hit the art world today. Conference starts on Tuesday. Looking forward to it,

Saw a bizzre coincidence on Canadian TV last night: the editors of local Vancouver newspapers talking about the future. The Sun’s editor was out of touch, but in a good way. His main concern was the death of advertising-supported investigative journalism. He has a real point, but I think ad-supported reporting will thrive in the future. It’s just going to take awhile to get the new systems in place. One of the other panelists said, flat out, that such changes won’t happen until “quite a few newsroom leaders are replaced.” Heh heh. Then the local alt-weekly guy whined that target publications by the Sun were killing his business. Boo hoo.

Good point made about the difficulty / necessity of bringing as many voices into the conversation as possible — especially in a place as diverse as Vancouver.

Oh, and the SuperBowl was yesterday. Watched first half in a pub; second half in the hotel. Steelers won easily (as I thought they would). Seattle never really showed up. And where was Shaun Alexander?