How to meet people in Vancouver when you've just moved there

Vancouver is the only city in this series with a name for its problem. Locals call it the Vancouver freeze: people are polite, nobody is rude, and nobody invites you anywhere. Surveys have found loneliness to be the city's most-cited complaint. You did not imagine it.

The good news is that the freeze is about invitations, not about people, and Vancouver's calendar is so shaped by weather and mountains that the invitations almost write themselves.

The outdoors is the social life

Nobody here makes friends at a bar. They make them on the Grouse Grind, the 2.9-kilometre staircase up Grouse Mountain that the city treats as a fitness test, open roughly May to October; on the Stanley Park seawall, nine kilometres round the park and flat the whole way, with the same runners on it every morning; at Deep Cove, where the Quarry Rock hike takes ninety minutes and ends at the doughnut shop everyone ends at; at Lynn Canyon, the free suspension bridge for people who did not pay for Capilano. Kits Beach on a summer evening is the closest thing to a public living room, and in winter the same crowd is on Cypress and Seymour with skis.

Every one of those is a plan a stranger can propose: "Grind Saturday 8am, coffee after" is the most ordinary sentence in this city.

November to March

It rains. Not dramatically; persistently, for five months. The city moves into cafés, breweries and board-game bars, and the neighbourhoods that matter are the ones with a strip of them: Main Street through Mount Pleasant for the breweries, Commercial Drive for the cafés, Kitsilano for the yoga and the brunch. Ramen queues on Robson are a genuine social institution; a forty-minute line is a forty-minute conversation with whoever is behind you.

Richmond, and the bubble

More than half of Richmond is ethnic Chinese, and Mandarin and Cantonese are as common as English from Aberdeen Centre to the food street on Alexandra Road and the summer night market. Chinese is the second language of the whole metro, at around one in five people. If you arrived from China, this is the shallow end: the first week is easy here.

It is also the trap. The Chinese ecosystem of Richmond, Burnaby and the WeChat groups is complete enough that a year can go by inside it, and the freeze never gets tested. Use it for groceries and dim sum. Cross the river for the rest.

Practical

A Compass card does the SkyTrain and buses; the SkyTrain runs until about one. Everything is expensive, which is why the parks are where people go. Hastings Street through the Downtown Eastside is a place to be aware of rather than afraid of. The usual rules hold: first meeting in public, tell someone where you are going, keep your own way home. The safety page has the rest.

Where MeetMap fits

MeetMap is a map of small plans happening soon near you. Each pin has a time, a place and a number of seats; take one and you are in the group chat. In Vancouver the plans are the outdoors with a time attached: "Seawall run, 7am, easy", "Quarry Rock Sunday, doughnuts after", "Board games on Main, 7pm, three seats".

If the map is quiet, post the first one. The freeze is a shortage of invitations, and one person posting a time is the whole cure. Two weeks of that is the whole method.