November is not the best time to see Vancouver. It rains a lot and the spectacular mountain and sea views can disappear as you reach for your umbrella. But this was the time the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation leaders chose to meet and bring 3,000 media folk. Vancouver is so popular with tourists that the APEC invaders would only have been sure of a bed by coming off-season. One hotel owner boasted that he turned down President Clinton and his entourage because it would have meant refusing an earlier booking.
Nearly eight million visitors spent at least one night in Vancouver last year which is not bad for a city of 514,000. But even more spectacular is how Vancouver is attracting permanent residents from across the Pacific.
When President Jiang Zemin of China flew in from Beijing, he was arriving in an increasingly Chinese city where only 44 per cent of inhabitants speak English at home.
Over one-third of the population of Greater Vancouver is now of Asian stock but the Chinese has been the fastest growing ethnic group, nearly all coming from Hong Kong, with their British passports.
The Vancouver Chinatown is one of the largest in the world and there are suburban areas with almost exclusively Chinese shopping malls.
There are Chinese TV and radio stations and Chinese language newspapers have circulations bigger than the English dailies. Two separate economies are emerging in Vancouver.
There is an historic irony here as earlier this century a law was passed to keep the Chinese out of Vancouver where many had settled after helping - like the Irish - to build the Canadian Pacific railroad through the Rockies down to the coast.
July 1st, 1923, became known to the Chinese as "Humiliation Day" because of the immigration law which restricted new arrivals to diplomats, students and merchants. The result was that only 44 Chinese arrived for the next 25 years.
The influx of industrious Asians in recent years has made a dent in Vancouver's former reputation as "Lotusland" where the laid-back inhabitants thronged the countless coffee shops, the cinemas and the theatres. Or they were on the nearby ski slopes or sailing and fishing on the magnificent estuaries.
Bette Middler once said during a performance here: "I've never seen so much coffee in all my life. The whole town is on a coffee jag and still nothing gets done any faster."
The natives used to hate reading about the boring "niceness" of their city so here are a few not so aspects. Traffic jams are getting worse and there is also a growing pollution problem which is particularly unfortunate in such beautiful surroundings.
There is a dark side to Vancouver which the visitor is warned away from in the eastern downtown known as "Skid Row". It has the highest rate of heroin use in North America and the fastest growing HIV infected population according to a handbook prepared for US officials attending the APEC summit.
Some of the people also believe in leprechauns. Tanis Helliwell, M.Ed., last Saturday launched her book called Summer with the Leprechauns: A True Story. She is also organising a "mystical tour of Ireland" for Vancouverites next May when they can "play and learn from leprechauns" and visit Achill which she calls "the home of leprechauns and faeries" (sic).
Maybe the Guinness was flowing too freely at the launch in the Irish Heather Bistro in the old Gastown quarter. But the Guinness family knew what they were doing when they bought up prime property for a song in North Vancouver during the 1920s Depression years.
The brewing family also built the graceful Lions Gate suspension bridge across the Burrard Inlet to encourage people to buy sites and today it is one of the most sought after areas, much of it designed by the famous architect, Arthur Erickson, in the 1950s when he was barely out of college.
The Orange Order was once a thriving institution in Vancouver with 40 lodges and about 5,000 members, descendants of "Scotch Irish" from Ulster.
The 12th of July was celebrated with King Billy on his white horse until 1941 when they had to make do with a grey horse. By 1964 the horse had become a car and by 1971 the parade had petered out as only a few hundred were turning out.
Bob Geldof kind of took over for a while as an Irish presence when he worked for the Georgia Straight newspaper as the "entertainment editor" in the 1970s. He is listed as one of "Famous BC People" in the guide to British Columbia given to the media covering the APEC summit.
Vancouver will claim just about anyone who has put a foot there and acquired a bit of fame later. Pamela Lee Anderson of Bay Watch is "BC's best known export" the guide says, although fish products and timber may soon pass her out thanks to wily Canadian negotiators at APEC.