30 December 2023 – An ambition for the new year: If you’re going to waste time, at least waste it well.
As the quote marks show, I didn’t come up with this all by myself. It is a long-ago slogan of the Comedy Central channel on TV, one that I remember with considerable amusement.
It comes to mind as I arrive at Waterfront Station comfortably early for a rendezvous with friends. I have time to waste. I choose to waste it by loitering in parking lots either side of the station, with their long views across railway tracks and Port of Vancouver busyness, on across Burrard Inlet, all the way to North Vancouver and the Coast Range Mountains.
I immediately start swooning, yet again, all over the “giraffes,” a feature of the Port — their name another remembered joke, coined by a friend noting the similarity of container cranes to the giraffes of his childhood.
The scene looks like an O-gauge tabletop layout, but it’s for real: train tracks, and trains, and Helijet Terminal (complete with helicopter, there behind a tree), and orange giraffes (the biggest, the “super post-Panamax cranes.” part of a 2019 expansion project), and a SeaBus trundling its way from Waterfront to Lonsdale Quay over on the north shore.
I shift parking lots, from the east side of Waterfront Station to the west. I’m still loopy with love for the giraffes.
A backpacking young tourist observes mournfully that the staircase in front of us is blocked off, and asks if I know where he can rent a bicycle. I wave an arm vaguely westward and suggest he head toward Convention Centre East / Canada Place (the building), just off Canada Place (the street).
Away he goes. I hope I am right.
Then I forget about him, squint my eyes and go loopy for those stacks of containers, piled up on terminal docks.
This is an extremely modest photo of a fairly modest stack of containers. If you want to see photography worthy of the subject — examples of which first awakened my interest in their sculptural majesty — spend some time with the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. (Spend time with all his images. Time definitely not wasted.)
I follow the path I suggested to that tourist, and discover…
Yes! Rental bicycles.
Phew.
One more love-sick photo of the giraffes, this time with a float plane spiralling up from the Vancouver Harbour Flight Centre as an added attraction…
then a shift sufficiently westward to bring both the North Van sulphur piles and the Bon Voyage Plaza The Drop sculpture into view…
and I’m almost out of waste-able time.
A quick hop across Canada Place (street) to admire cascades of water funnelling down into the green space beside the tourism centre…
and it’s time to go meet my friends.
Time well wasted indeed.
WALKING WOMAN 
Lynette d'Arty-Cross
/ 30 December 2023Happy New Year; all the best for 2024. 😊
Ana
/ 31 December 2023I love wasting time and doing it in the best way possible. My best wishes for the New Year.
J Walters
/ 31 December 2023I always appreciate hearing how you’re “looking” at things — ie the cranes are giraffes, how wonderful. Thank you for the Burtynsky reference because I was not aware of his container photographs, which preceded my introduction to his work and which are – as you say – is time definitely not wasted.
bluebrightly
/ 3 January 2024I’m partial to that final “love-sick photo of the giraffes.” 🙂 There’s a business down here that sells (maybe rents, I don’t know) really small cranes. It’s on 5, the highway to Seattle or Vancouver, and we always smile when we pass the extensive line-up of petite giraffes, looking on expectantly from the side of the road.