Victoria got Binged
A couple of days ago I came across a link for Bing Travel‘s Walking Tours in Great Cities, which features 15 great world cities. The series starts with Chicago, and for some reason I didn’t (still don’t) see a list of all the cities (nor can I find a starter page). So it wasn’t until this evening, while I clicked through every single city, that I saw my very own Victoria BC listed as Nr. 7, wedged between New York (Nr.6) and Rome (Nr.8).
That’s quite the feather in the city’s tourism industry cap!
Word of caution, though: don’t take the blurb literally, it’s full of predictable cliches as well as outright bloopers (apparently, you can visit the site of “fur-trade-era Fort Vancouver [sic]” right here, in Victoria, oops…):
The old world and the new meet in Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, which has a decidedly English air while celebrating its own local history. Start at the Fairmont Empress hotel — especially known for its afternoon tea — and the Parliament Buildings on Victoria’s scenic Inner Harbour. Head east on Belleville to the Royal British Columbia Museum and the totem-pole-filled Thunderbird Park, then cut back west on Humboldt to Government Street, where you’ll find the site of fur-trade-era Fort Vancouver. Head left at View Street to visit Bastion Square, then north to Pandora Avenue and Fisgard Street, where you’ll find one of the oldest Chinatowns on the continent.
The route laid out on the map (slightly different than what the blurb describes) is conventional – from the general vicinity of the Inner Harbour’s Causeway and Empress Hotel to Fan Tan Alley in Chinatown – but it’s picturesque enough. An added bonus: the mapped route includes a jog (geographically-speaking) around St. Ann’s Academy and through the Humboldt Valley area.
List of Bing cities, in order:
1. Chicago
2. Paris
3. San Francisco
4. Washington DC
5. Prague
6. New York City
7. Victoria
8. Rome
9. Charleston, SC
10. Hong Kong
11. Boston
12. Buenos Aires
13. London
14. Montreal
15. New Orleans
Presumably you can customize these maps and make, say, an art gallery walk or heritage walk.
Comment by robert randall — August 10, 2010 #
I am so unbelievably tired with the “a decidedly English air” cliché. What in your opinion might lead people to continue to propagate it? Is it a tagline fed to people by Tourism Victoria? Or are they reading “bumpf” from years ago, and it is just laziness?
When we moved back to Victoria in the early 1980s and I was involved in the tourism and hospitality industry, yes, we had the air of “little old England” but do we now?
Comment by Janis La Couvée — August 10, 2010 #
Hear, hear, Janis. I didn’t get too critical about it, since the “Fort Vancouver” blooper was already a huge strike against the credibility of whoever wrote this, and my reputation for being “too critical/ being a ‘Negative Nancy'” precedes me anyway – but yes!, I’m sick of putting up with this “we’re so great because we’re so unbelievably backward and stuck-in-the-past” BS. And Tourism-propagated BS it is. Unimaginative in the extreme.
.
The blurb I wrote for FastCompany, when I got Victoria into their FastCities series in 2007, was (imnsho) infinitely better, giving weight to both the heritage-based aspects as well as our potential for forward-thinking (particularly “green”) initiatives, and how both combine to produce a special kind of energy here.
Comment by Yule — August 10, 2010 #