Vancouver from on high (a few pics)...
So I drove up to the Cypress Bowl lookout tonight to take some panoramas. I need to get up there more often as it offers one of the best vantages on the city. I'd like to take a few more panoramas in different lighting. At any rate I came away with 3 relatively good panoramas, 2 I have on photosynth here (Make sure to zoom in and pan around):
http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=9a24227e-f0a7-4f84-9409-c34fae5d9ec8
And here
http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=4b7a15f0-7936-4a59-bfbd-548a4a58fb50
Here are links to 2048px long versions of them, the full size 30000px long versions seem to break flickr:
http://tinyurl.com/lgkacj6
http://tinyurl.com/n4bpgz7
http://tinyurl.com/lgq9bxl
And here are 3 other non panorama pics that I came away with:
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I like these a lot! You are so lucky to live near Vancouver......it's a beautiful city.
I am enjoying the textures in the sky...
And your panoramas are wonderful!
Thank you for sharing these...
There certainly are pluses to living here! There are some negatives too, it's expensive, but we really are spoiled. 
...they always told me to bring loose tobacco and a flat of beer, things that were pretty expensive there. I'd never seen cigarette tubes and rolling machines before then, but in Canada it was a cheaper alternative to expensive cigarette packs.
I met a bunch of Canadians when they held their first memorial ceremony at the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in D.C. in '86. Canada wasn't involved in the war, but a of of its citizens crossed the border to enlist in U.S. forces, and at that time they had identified 60 Canadians who were KIAs on the Wall--including the son of a man who had served as Canada's equivalent of the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The number of Canadians on the Wall has grown to well over 100 now, and it's probably higher. The U.S. service branches often identified their "home of record" as the place where they enlisted, so their Canadian nationality wasn't apparent from military records and statistics.
There was an interesting difference I found between Vietnamese restaurants in the States and in Vancouver. Refugees who'd supported South VN during the war came to the U.S., while Canada received a lot of emigres from North Vietnam. The affinity of the two groups was very different.
As an experiment, I sang to the staff at a Vietnamese restaurant in Vancouver a Vietnamese song I'd learned from an ARVN officer during the war. It was a patriotic song that was very popular in the South, and my rendition would leave VN refugees in the U.S. laughing and applauding. In Vancoouver, it was received with scowls of disapproval.
One of the several Vietnam Veterans' groups in Canada is based in Vancouver--Vietnam Veterans in Canada, whose membership includes both Canadians and American expats.
I have a friend on the island there now, Gavin, who is one of the vets I met in '86. One of the funniest guys you could ever hope to meet. A USMC vet, he joked that he served with the 756th R&R battalion. When the Canadians invited me to march with them in a 'Welcome Home Canadian Vets' parade in Michigan one year, I found myself marching with Gavin--who was marching in bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, with two beers in his back pockets. 
Just a couple of footnotes for you...
I hope the restaurant staff didn't put anything yucky in your food...well, at least we know they didn't toss in a pufferfish liver! 
Since people seem to do a lot of writing online, data repositories like DU will be great sources for historians of "the way things were" from our era, kind of like the old letters from the Civil War that were read on Ken Burns' history series.
If you can think of other stories of your personal experiences related to history, how about putting some in your journal?
Thanks so much for sharing them with us! Beautifully done! 
I got very interested in the area, got to know it since I used to be responsible for their TV listings in the newspapers.
I should probably know this, but don't.... What is the name of the mountain in the distance? Is that where they held the Olympics?
But they are an acquired taste 
A lot has changed here in the past few decades. A LOT of money has flown into the city. Density has skyrocketed, along with property prices (now one of the most expensive cities in NA), lots of new construction. Lots of good things too though.