Brewpub Roadtrip: Vancouver, Canada!

I’m at Lucky lab in downtown Portland, Oregon, or PDX as its known around here. The conversation is good and the beer better. Lucky Lab, like almost every self-respecting bar in PDX, brews its own beer.

With my glass full of hops, my mind on malt, I learn that I’m about to have a three-day weekend. Its President’s Day and I’m in Portland. What to do? Where to go? I know – Vancouver! And not as in Vancouver, Washington, but Vancouver as in Canada!

At first, I was tempted to make the five-hour road trip solo. I wanted to go that bad. I figured this might be my only international trip in 2008, and I didn’t want to miss the chance to cross another border.

Its not that this would be my first trip to Canada – I went to Montréal with my family long ago. But this would be my first trip as an adult and I was excited. Both because I’d heard it was a beautiful city, filled with amazing sights, but also because it is another bastion of good beer.

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Millions of Cairenes in Cairo

Flying into Cairo, Egypt, you might get the impression that you’re going to land in a village. From the air, all you see is empty yellow desert, with a streak of green through the middle. But when you land, you are almost instantly thrown into a maw of urban living. People everywhere.

Most sources say around 7.7 million people live in Cairo, squeezed into the Nile Valley which is only few kilometers wide at this point, or on the near desert plateau. Official government statistics estimate the population density of Cairo at 31,000 person per square kilometer.

This is almost unimaginable coming from Washington DC. We have around 500,000 people in the Capitol with a population density of 3,597/km. How can so many people live in such a small space?

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