Descending before landing

Yesterday we had our first meeting with what will be our home base and offices. We occupy the first floor of a building on Cordova Street. The building is located in the absolute poorest neighborhood I Vancouver. This become apparent to us when one of VC one million homeless people decided to camp out next to our entrance. Furthermore the area has the largest concentration of HIV and Hepatitis C in North America.

The building is called the Stanley hotel and was at some point in the distant past, a decent hotel. The building is owned by the province, but pending a plan of what do to with it, has been left decaying for many years. In short our floor looked like shit.


The challenge, seeing as KaosPilotes don’t have the privilege of calling anything a problem, is for us to get the place presentable before Tuesday. The budged is nothing worth mentioning so we started doing what be do best, raising funds (begging, borrowing & stealing). The neighborhood is friendly though and we ended up getting a lot of stuff that will come in handy. We even have an Army Navy Shop right across the street. Spread out on three floors you can get anything from plumbing to women’s shoes.


But all work and no play makes you grumpy and bitter. Taking that into consideration we have somehow found the time to check out a few of the local bars. A funny experience was forcing our Irish team manager to come with us to an “Irish” bar. His national pride nearly coma in the way of the endeavor, but me managed to persuade him. Though to out disappointment there were neither leper cons nor river dancing there.