Getting the flavor of...Vancouver’s very own Hong Kong

Vancouver’s very own Hong Kong

Visitors to Richmond, British Columbia, could easily mistake this vibrant Vancouver suburb for a city in Asia, said Margo Pfeiff in the San Francisco Chronicle. Of its 200,000 residents, 60 percent are Asian, many of them recent immigrants from China and Taiwan. I always start my visits to Richmond at “the curvy, modern Aberdeen Centre,” a high-end mall with frequent cultural exhibits. The mall is part of Golden Village, a “high-density cluster” of shops and restaurants at the heart of the city’s booming commercial district. Richmond has a reputation for serving “the best Chinese food outside of China,” and it offers more meditative pleasures too. After “a post-lunch chanting session” at the International Buddhist Temple, I stroll through grand gardens modeled after those in Beijing’s Forbidden City. Finishing the day with a bicycle ride, I pass Vietnamese women in traditional white gloves, as Chinese dragon boats glide by on the river beside me.

Mud-season New Hampshire

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Many New Hampshirites will tell you that the best time to visit their state is during mud season, said Diane Bair and Pamela Wright in The Boston Globe. We found this to be true by stopping in at Lincoln and Woodstock, two towns on the Pemigewasset River, on a weekend when most of the snow had melted off the local ski slopes. The fun began with a “bumpy, up-and-down, stomach-lurching” ride on an ATV rented from Out Back Kayak. “The muddier the better,” remarked the proprietor. We skipped taking a kayak on the icy and roiling spring river, but reconvened the next morning at Alpine Adventures, home to New England’s first zip-line canopy rides. Everyone in our group was “a little nervous” as we climbed to the first platform and looked down an 800-foot-long line that dropped to the valley floor. But we hit the landing strip elated, “meeting each other with high fives and hoots and hollers.” It’s nice sometimes to feel like a place is all yours.