Microbreweries On Every Corner
Vancouver has so many craft beer breweries, that many of them are named by the neighborhoods or even the streets they are on: Powell Street brewery, Main Street brewery, Coal Harbor brewery, Strathcona Beer Company, and many more. There are still streets, bridges and park benches unclaimed by a brewery, but those are disappearing fast.
Inclusive Public Pools
What can be less exciting than a pool? A chlorinated water reservoir where lined up bodies move in straight lines – hardly something to write about. Well, enter Kitsilano pool – the complete opposite of every boring pool out there. Located on the Kitsilano beach, its view on the North Shore Mountains and the English bay is breathtaking. Want more? It’s a saltwater and heated outdoor pool.
So what makes it inclusive? For one, it’s wheelchair accessible. Not as in “you can enter the pool building on a wheelchair” accessible, but as in “you can wheel right into the water” accessible. It also has aquatic wheelchairs one can use freely.
Operated by city, the public pools’ entrance fees are very low. In Kitsilano pool, it’s $6 for an entire family. That’s the closest to true communism the humanity has ever come.
Here’s another way the pools here ensure that everyone is comfortable using them: universal change rooms and “Trans people welcome” signs.
The children here are first-class citizens as well. The children corner in the Hillcrest public pool is a full-blown aquatic playground with free-for-use floating toys, suddenly appearing fountains and a mini “river swirl” where children can learn to keep on the water while moving with the flow.
You see, in Vancouver a pool isn’t a consumerist perk of country club members, but an unalienable right of every person.