Three weeks in, and I’m starting to get a feel for Vancouver. And, too, its resident Vancouverites, whose appellation sounds like that of a race of Doctor Who villains*.

I started to write about the various different excursions I’ve been on since I arrived (all courtesy of our customers/hosts in the office in Richmond), but frankly it’s difficult to string a coherent narrative together from visits to bars, restaurants, amusement parks, barbeques, African dance performances, cinemas and parks, so I won’t even try. Instead, here’s the synthesised version, free of meandering anecdote and chock full of glorious generalisation.

Vancouver is a Big City. That’s the impression I get from taking a firsthand look. It has all the ingredients of that ideal city that you see in movies, read about in books and explore in videogames.

It has distinct districts, where the architecture, the landscape and even the people form an indivisible, identifiable whole: the downtown eastside, doubling as a low-rent Chinatown, where junkies and prostitutes wander the streets just blocks from the towers of the CBD; Yaletown, where glamourous urbanites flit from style bar to style bar in luxurious European SUVs; Commercial Drive, where the remnants of ’70s hippie culture mingle with the ironic stylings of the Vancouver hipster brigade; the West End’s gay village and high-rise condos, and so on.

It has a ridiculously diverse visual appeal: driving north along Oak towards downtown, there comes a point when the road simultaneously straightens out and falls aways towards False Creek, and when it does so, it opens up an astonishing view of the downtown tower blocks framed by the trees along the roadside and capped by the North Shore Mountains. Then, cycling round Stanley Park, the city disappears behind the trees and the view across Burrard Inlet reveals the mountains up close, the the yellow mounds of sulphur of North Vancouver’s port nestling beneath them. Above you is the suspended green strand of the Lions Gate Bridge, seeming too spindly to support three lanes of traffic pouring into and out of the city at the start and end of each day.

It has a gridded street layout, 4-way stop signs, right turns on red, hotdog vendors, and all those other things which have been subconsciously implanted in your head by summer blockbusters and Tarantino pulp. All in all, I’m reminded most (of all things) of Grand Theft Auto’s Liberty City, constructed to give the flavour of a big North American city, but an artificial one which fits within the confines of a games console’s memory. In the past I’ve been a bit dismissive of Vancouver exactly because of this. I’d thought that it was a twee facsimile of the typical North American city — it’s a popular destination for film and TV productions, in fact, precisely because it can be made to look like just about any of the ‘real’ ones — but in fact it maybe is all of them, lumped together in a peculiarly harmonious Canadian way.

So there you have it.

Yeah, anecdotes would have been better.

* The Vancouverites probably hail from the Tom Baker era, as opposed to the ‘Strata’ (the local name for a housing association) who sound much more of the David Tennant series.