My new favorite building(s) downtown is the West Burnaby Meeting Hub. It definitely deserves its own thread or DB entry, but that will have to wait for now.

Though a big beautiful building in a very prominent location on the waterfront, I never really tried to look around inside it till yesterday. (Perhaps I'd been shooed out of the Pn Pcfc Hotel too many times.)

A couple months ago I found on some "Top free things to do around town" blog the idea to go for an official tour of the complex. I can recommend the hour-long tour, though mostly as an appetizer. We were told the usual forgettable details, like how many hundreds of thousands of square feet of convention space they house, how much a starting wedding package costs ($30,000, all in), and how they recycle their gray water and have grass growing on their roof. More memorable was the movies and TV shows that have filmed there (Mission Impossible, Robocop, Amazing Race Canada).

More memorable still was the tantalizing glimpse into the service areas, which extend the entire length of the Hub, like a concealed central nervous system. At one point, our tour guide electronically unlocked a hidden door, held it briefly open, and said, "We're not going to go in, but down that hall is where the huge, cutting edge, high-class kitchen is, which serves all of the ballrooms and meeting spaces in both of the buildings." (WTF! Did she think we didn't want to see that?) She also mentioned that, behind the public underground concourse connecting the two buildings, with its pleasant view of the harbor, was a long service corridor (you can call it a tunnel if you want), through which that fancy food was carted from the West to the East building.

That tunnel was my goal yesterday.

And here it is, in all its glory:

Though ostensibly inaccessible to yobbos like you and me, the service areas are all connected, so all you have to do is get in somewhere to get in everywhere. And this complex is just too huge and too active for every door to stay shut always. I finally managed to find an incompletely closed stairwell door in the north end of the West building, and wandered via clean, cavernous, chair- and table-lined hallways and stairwells all the way around the U, through the service concourse tunnel, and finally to the north tip of the East building. Here was my approximate path, drawn in pink on a googly satellite map.

I encountered many staff members (especially in the vicinity of the staff break room!), but none of them gave me dirty eyeballs or seemed inclined to question my right to be there. If the number of lockers are any indication, they must have more staff than any one person can keep track of. I wore no ID badge, but I did tuck my shirt in. And I carried nothing but a pocket flashlight. A backpack or camera on tripod might have made me a lot more dubious. I saw no security.

Under the iconic "sails" of the East building.

There is so much to explore. The place is just awe-inspiringly massive. They'll tell you that they have 430,000 square feet of meeting space, but me, I'd like to know how many dozens of thousands of square feet of service areas they have.

I will be going back again and again. I urge you to do the same.