Vancouver's Sordid Side
Vancouver, Canada, is a wonderful city. But like everywhere else, it has places you'd rather avoid. There, David Carrigg and Kate Webb of the Vancouver Province show us, lie several gritty tales. In "Undercover with The Province," Carrigg stays in a blood- stained room at the Cobalt Motor Hotel, where several people have been murdered. At a scrap dealer in Surrey, he watches druggies convert stolen metal into cash, then tries his hand at selling payphones. He encounters more blood as he rides the midnight SkyTrain to King George. At an illegal all-night warehouse party under the Oak Street Bridge, Kate Webb mingles with under-age revelers:
An hour in, a teenage girl on a cocaine-and-beer-fuelled rampage spies me in a hallway and sticks her arm out to smack me square in the face.
She was the same girl who earlier had called me a "slut" for having the nerve to talk to a male friend of hers who was offering directions to the boy with the multicoloured pills.
I venture into one of two dark, soundproofed rooms in the back, just behind a dance floor where DJs are mixing throbbing electronica on a sound system too powerful for the modest space.
"Talk to the guys at the front," one young woman tells me when I ask her where she got the rail of coke she's about to snort. "They can get you anything you want." http://www.canada.com/theprovince/news/story.html?id=8c264f7a-334d-4005-a4ab-2d0d0eee5bf4&k=55735