The Sheraton Hotel at Wall Centre, Vanvouver, B.C., a lenticular tower cast in blue reflective glass. One wall of room is view. The curtains are drawn completely, the sky and neighboring skyscrapers glow orange, and the city's afoot 16 floors below, inches from the edge of the down-slathered bed.

It's a business hotel. It's all man. Every textile or paper pattern is something that could adorn a pair of boxer shorts. Some of it is silky like that too. All of it is dark.

You are trusted; they know you have money. Nothing is nailed down (a free-standing porcelain soap dish, for example), real photographs—large ones—without glass covers, decorate the walls.

Is an accurate measure of a hotel's "niceness" the degree to which it will go to pick up after you?

Subeez has become a not-to-miss spot. We love the affable gothicness: the wax-lavished candelabras and dark tapestries. Down-tempo dark music plays whether it's breakfast or midnight. Without fail, the beautiful employees are genuinely friendly, which always shocks us. I say I keep waiting for one of them to snub me, but the anxiety is never validated. It's not Seattle.

Contrails of the transPacific skyway striate the view. A small plane dragging words confuses its path with a passengerliner disengaging from high-altitude. Thank god for 3-D.

The Warhol exhibit engendered some respect for the VAG. After the O'Keefe, Kahlo, & Carr exhibit, I'd seriously wondered if Canada was closer to 2nd world than I'd imagined, and that all this glass and height was solely colonial property. The Warhol exhibit is curated by Warhol people, so maybe not all is redeemed. The Marilyn Monroe and Campbell's soup can arrays were awesome. Loved Red Lenin.

We were entering Vij's when the fireworks started. Seagulls abandoned their perches everywhere and at once, crying in fear.

We thought we might be too late for dinner, but we always think that and never are. Vikram said, "Of course we're still seating. In fact, there's kind of a wait." Andrew says if he were to make a list of his top-ten restaurants, Vij's would be included as the best Indian restaurant. That would be true for me too. When you go to Vij's you don't know what you're going to get; you wait until you see the menu to decide on a masala you haven't tried before. When you go to other Indian restaurants, you're trying their version of a masala you already know about. But it's not just the food at Vij's, it's the whole dining package: the atmosphere, the service, the cute little elephants that light the room. It's seamless, consistently so. It's been a couple of years now since we discovered the place; many of the servers are the same and Vikram always minds the show. He makes sure to greet every table. I read in the fancy tourist magazine that came with the room that he is both a master of spices and a sommelier. Be sure to order wine, too.

In the morning light, the glass is more green, marine. Titanic seagulls perch on the deck railings of high-up suites. They are a whimsical kind of post-modern gargoyle. From the bed, we've been watching the residents fail to shoo away the birds and then themselves cower from them. It's been an hour; the seagulls haven't moved.

The Grouse Grind is a long line of breathy and silent people. It's hard but you feel victorious at the end. We did it in 1:15, which feels slow. I made the classic mistake of thinking that because I'm a long-distance runner I could just haul up the thing. I started spritely and after much spending reached the 1/4-way marker. I was crushed.

Sweet recovery. With the luggage and the car hugging the valet, we hopped the bikes to trace the city's thumb. We pedaled below the sweat threshold, catching ourselves on benches along the way and collecting Vancouver's squandered views.