There’s a particular feeling you get when you return to a city after fifteen years. It’s not quite nostalgia, and it’s not quite discovery either. It’s something in between, like running into an old friend who’s clearly moved on with their life while you weren’t looking.
I came to Vancouver for practical reasons, which is maybe the least romantic way to arrive anywhere. There was a Microsoft conference happening in Redmond, and an eight-hour time difference from Germany makes live participation somewhere between miserable and pointless. So I crossed the Atlantic, landed in the Pacific Northwest, and worked remotely from a city I hadn’t set foot in since 2010. But the conference was only part of the story. There were personal reasons, too. The kind that don’t fit neatly into an itinerary, but quietly shape a trip from the inside out.
Vancouver had things to say.
The skyline hit me first. Residential towers everywhere, built, building, planned. They’re not the brutalist slabs you might expect. What surprised me was the variety of it all. Curves where you’d expect corners. Glass that catches light in ways that feel almost deliberate. You can have your opinions about densification, about cities growing upward instead of outward, but it’s hard to argue that this skyline is boring. It has texture. It has personality. It’s becoming something.
And then there’s Gastown, holding its ground as it always has. The historic core of Vancouver, where you can actually feel the city’s past beneath your feet, if you time your visit right. Water Street has a way of filling up with people until it tips over into something less like a neighborhood and more like a stage set. Go early. Go late. But go.
The trip began and ended at YVR, and I want to say something about that airport, because it deserves it. There are airports that process you, and airports that welcome you. Vancouver International belongs firmly to the second kind. The open architecture breathes. And woven throughout are Haida elements — carvings, totems, design motifs — that do something to you before you’ve even left the terminal. They are not decoration. They carry weight. Arriving through YVR feels like an acknowledgment that you’ve landed somewhere with a deep and living history. Leaving through it is harder than it should be. Both times, I stood a little longer than necessary.
That spiritual thread followed me to the Museum of Vancouver, which turned out to be one of the most quietly affecting museum visits I’ve had in years. The exhibition that stayed with me is called That Which Sustains Us — a long-term show that explores how different knowledge traditions have shaped people’s relationship with forests and the natural environment around Vancouver. It traces traditional ecological knowledge of the region’s nations, the consequences of deforestation and urbanisation, and what a return to more sustainable land use might look like. The framing is deliberately non-linear — no triumphant arc of progress, just five lenses through which a story emerges: Land and Water, Food, Movement, Economy, Home.
What makes the exhibition remarkable is who shaped it. Community representatives from the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations were part of the consultation process throughout. That presence is felt. On the walls of the gallery, words are projected in two Salish languages: hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh sníchim, the languages of Vancouver’s host nations. One community member said something during the consultation that the exhibition seems to hold onto: these languages don’t just describe the land. They originate with it. Both languages are endangered, and the museum has created pronunciation resources to help visitors hear them spoken.
I found myself standing still in that gallery for a long time. There’s something the exhibition keeps returning to — the idea that how a culture chooses to interact with the natural world is ultimately a reflection of what it values. Teachings built on stewardship leave different marks on the land than those that treated forests as raw material waiting to be claimed. Standing in a city where cranes still outnumber trees in certain neighbourhoods, that idea carries a particular charge.
I didn’t make it to Stanley Park this time. The Totem Poles will have to wait for my next visit. And I know there will be a next visit. Vancouver has a way of affecting me that I find hard to explain, and I’ve long since stopped trying to resist it. The Pacific Northwest has always given me a sense of home. Not home in the sense of a specific address, but home like a landscape. Something spiritual, something that settles in my chest and stays quiet there.
I don’t know exactly what it is. Maybe it’s the mountains you can see at the end of every street. Maybe it’s the particular quality of the light off the water. Maybe it’s something I picked up in 2010 and never fully let go of.
Whatever it is, Vancouver still has it.
Edited with Grammarly.
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