Michelle and I took some time off in New York City last week. We’d done all the touristy things in past Big Apple trips, so the bulk of our time was spent engaging in various self-indulgent behaviors. When we weren’t passed out in the marvelous Ace Hotel, we were drinking lots of really good booze, staying up to ridiculous hours and walking, walking, walking and people-watching in the blistering heat with good food either in our mouths or on our minds.

The trip was a barn burner: too much fun every day. In the midst of all the good times, however, I couldn’t help but feel a little embarrassed as a Vancouverite. New York is a very permissive town in comparison to my own. I could buy a single can of beer at a corner store at midnight, be ridiculed in my hotel bar for asking if they’re still serving drinks at 3:00am (“Of course we are! You must be from Canada…”), and eat just about anything I wanted from an almost obscene abundance of street food vendors.

People weren’t dropping dead on every street corner as a consequence of those petit freedoms. They were having a jolly fine time of it, and really, I’d never seen New York look and feel so vibrant, clean and healthy in all my life. It made me wonder at how much better Vancouver could be if City Hall and the provincial government just loosened the reins a little. We have our strengths, sure, but the barriers to enjoying oneself freely as they do in so many cities elsewhere are often so hard to surmount that it makes it tricky to muster the will to even bother sometimes.

The more I walked around the more I asked myself what it was that our municipal governments were so afraid of back home. If it’s mayhem on the streets, I don’t see it. If it’s food poisoning or rampant alcoholism, I don’t see it. While I realise that there have been baby steps toward progress here (the fumbling toward street food; the addition of an hour to liquor licenses), the generally restrictive attitude remains firmly entrenched, an ugly birthmark disfiguring our potential. Indeed, if I took one thing home with me from this trip, it was a tired sigh rather an epiphany. I love my city more than any other, but it would be especially nice if it took its damn nappy off and grew the fuck up.

That said and cast aside (I do like to bitch), here are a few of the things we ate, drank and saw. Enjoy…