Vancouver: practical tips

The rain jacket, not the umbrella

The rain here doesn’t match what you imagine: no storms arrive, just constant fine drizzle that can last days. From November to March it rains almost every day, and the result is around twelve hundred millimetres a year, twice Madrid’s. It snows little and it melts fast, because the ocean moderates.

That’s why nobody uses an umbrella and you’ll see very few people with one: you wear a hooded rain jacket, you wear footwear that copes, and you carry on living outdoors, running the seawall in the wet included. If you come in winter, come equipped and don’t try to wait it out, because it doesn’t stop.

And one compensation: thanks to that rain there’s a temperate rainforest inside the city. Both things are the same fact.

Unceded territory

You’ll hear a sentence as soon as any public event, concert or talk begins: that we’re on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. It’s said at the airport, at the university and before a hockey game, and it isn’t an empty formula.

The word that matters is “unceded”. In most of Canada treaties were signed with Indigenous peoples: fair or not, but signed. In almost all of British Columbia nothing was signed: the land was occupied without agreement and without purchase, and legally that matter is still open, with cases in the courts right now. That’s why the sentence here isn’t a courtesy: it’s a description of an unresolved legal fact. Knowing it changes how you hear the city.

The price, the tip and the smell

As across Canada, the ticket price excludes tax, twelve per cent is added at the till here, and the restaurant tip is fifteen to twenty per cent and isn’t optional, because it’s part of the wage. Between the two, the bill goes up by nearly a third: count it before deciding whether somewhere is worth it.

And something that surprises you on arrival: Canada legalised recreational cannabis federally in 2018, so there are licensed shops on ordinary streets and you smell it constantly. It isn’t a tolerated zone or a particular neighbourhood: it’s legal across the country. Smoking it is regulated by province and municipality, and in Vancouver you can’t in parks, on beaches or near children, though that’s enforced flexibly.

If the smell throws you, now you know what it is.

Mobile data

In Vancouver the phone is for one very specific and very local job: checking the mountain webcams before going up. Grouse and Cypress are half an hour away and half the year their summits are in cloud, so you can pay for a cable car to see fog. Every resort has a live camera and it takes two minutes from bed.

Coverage is good in the city, on the SkyTrain and on the Victoria ferry, on the Sea to Sky and inside the forest there are stretches with nothing, and that matters if you’re doing a trail.

An eSIM activates before you leave home and works on landing, which helps here with the first thing: checking the SkyTrain fare, which went up in July 2026 and is only charged in one direction.