Oh yeah: Don't forget the parking levels!

Ropolis at Rotown is Canada's second-biggest enclosed shopping mall. (That sounds impressive, I guess, but it's about 48% as large as the first-largest.) Built in 1986, it acts as the city center of Rotown. Ropolis's 450 shops, and a nearby Skytrain station, make Rotown an appealing place to live, apparently, because highrise condos continue to pile up here like termitariums.

If you hate shopping as much as I do, you may be as delighted as I was to discover the mall's many service corridors, stairwells, freight elevators, and backrooms.

Aside from being tantalizingly off-limits (some, but by no means all of the doors leading to the corridors say "On-Duty Employees Only), these narrow, battered, high-ceilinged corridors are also almost always completely empty. They therefore offer a refreshing reprieve from the noise and crowds of the public areas. Whenever possible, I use them as "short"cuts to wherever I'm going.

The corridors do not connect all together, but there are a lot of them, they mostly look alike, and with their strange twists and turns, it is quite possible to get lost in them. That's fun; but it's also fun to try to see everything, and to do that you need to know where you are.

There are maps in most of the service corridors to help you get around. Here's one, which I started, but did not finish, annotating:

This is the least blurry of about three snaps I took one night with my cell phone, while eating a sundae outside a loading dock after mall hours. While patiently framing, stabilizing, and taking the third shot, someone came out of a door and stared at me. When I was done, I turned to see a security guard. He asked if he could help me. I said no, I was just trying to, you know, get to know the building. He asked if I was an employee. I said I was not. He was puzzled by this, and became suspicious and unfriendly. I suddenly found it very hard to explain what exactly I was doing. I said that I lived in the neighborhood and shopped there occasionally; finally I admitted that I was interested in figuring out shortcuts to get around. "All right," he said, "but you realize that it looks a little suspicious?" He took down my driver's license, I apologized for the trouble, then I beat a retreat.

All you really need to know is that MOST of the doors that say "Alarm will sound" are not hooked up to an alarm. If you know (e.g., from the map) that a door leads to a service corridor, it definitely is not alarmed. Employees go in and out of there all the time, obviously.

When you get tired of wandering the service corridors, and you've tried the doors to all the electrical rooms, and ridden all the freight elevators, you may want to explore the storage rooms and back areas of the bigger, "anchor" stores. These areas are also usually pretty empty, and full of picturesque clutter, stock shelves, janitorial equipment, and other intriguing nooks and crannies -- and lots more doors leading who knows where.

The stock room at Toys R Us is larger than the front public area.

The mannequin room in the basement of Sears is kind of sexy.

This tiny backroom desk at The Bay reminds me a little of a shrine.

All this is great fun, but for me, the real attraction at Ropolis is the roof.

I should say the west roof. The east roof, around the foodcourt, is still unknown to me. I haven't figured out how to get onto it.

The vast west roof is covered in gravel, dotted with noisy ventilation outlets and HVAC units, and divided by footpaths one concrete slab wide. It is a strange and beautiful landscape, rather like a giant zen garden. It is a lovely place to go to be alone and thoughtfully drink a beer or smoke a cigarette.

It is probably best enjoyed at night, when the overlooking office towers are not so full of people, and you are less visible.

At night, too, the massive skylights are lit up from within like glowing sculpture.

Peer down into strange backrooms, staff rooms, and intersticial spaces, and try to figure out how to get there.

Spoiler alert. Do not read the next paragraph if you want to figure out how to get on the roof by yourself.

Actually, I'm not going to reveal much. There are three stairwells that will take you onto the (higher part of) the west roof. One is locked, one is usually locked, and one is a fire exit, which emits the feeblest alarm when the door is open. You can seek these out, or you can just walk boldly out the fire exit doors of Silvercity, before or after you've enjoyed a movie, because these doors which claim to be alarmed are in fact not.

Okay, that's it. Go have a good time, and save your money.

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.

Douglas Hofstadter, somewhere in his big book about translation, talks about a game he played as a young'n, called "Leftmost Rightmost." You walk (or drive, or ride) down the street till you reach an intersection. You take, alternately, the leftmost then the rightmost option. (Sometimes straight might be "right," because it's your "most" right option.) That's it. It provides surprisingly satisfying randomness.

I play this game looking for locations. I like best: hotels, hospitals, malls, community centers, construction sites, buildings under renovation or asbestos abatement, office buildings, churches, city halls, cemeteries, libraries, airports, box stores, public buildings of any sort, parkades, and abandoned buildings. Especially hotels.

I spent an afternoon infiltrating hotel pools in the Richmond airport-hotel district. My method was straight out of Infiltration zine: Carrying a classy oversize shopping bag (instead of a backpack), I rode the elevator up to the room levels and borrowed a towel from a housekeeping cart, which I threw over my shoulder. I removed my pants and sandals in a stairwell -- it's OK, I was wearing swim shorts underneath. Then I found the pool/fitness room, and waited outside the cardlocked door, sending fake flustered text messages like someone who has forgotten his key in his room, till someone went in or came out. No more than four minutes of patience required.

The Westin Wall Centre, pictured on the right, supplied towels (that's OK; I brought my own) and little else. Lockers in the change room needed real locks, though there were signs telling you how to operate the nonexistent electronic lock system. The pool was small and crowded. The hot tub was hot. Overpriced poolside dining available between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m., at a $3.75 delivery charge plus 16% gratuity, charged to your room. It was 4:58, and I didn't have a room, so I passed. The fitness centre looked alright. 1.5 stars.

The pool at the Radisson, pictured left, near Aberdeen skytrain, was even less illustrious. They were out of towels (that's OK; I brought my own), or had never stocked any. Lockers were coin-operated but half of them were jammed. There were standing pools of water in the change area. The hot tub was tepid. The pool water was cloudy. The fitness centre looked neglected, and had twangy Chinese music being piped in. Shame, Radisson. 0.5 stars.

Sometimes I think I use urban exploration as what Alan Watts calls a way of liberation -- a way to see through and outgrow some of society's vapid conventions.

At other times, I think I'm just looking for quiet places I can have to myself.

Cemeteries are good places for that. They are like huge manicured parks that hardly anyone ever visits.

The Sea See Burial Park in Burnaby, south of Imperial and west of Patterson, has become one of my favorite places to go for a walk or to sit and mull.

The mausoleums are cool and silent as churches, stately and ornate as museums.

There are many styles of monuments, and they are spruced up by plastic flowers, photos, Christmas cards, poems, or objects beloved of the deceased.

Some families have private sumptuous alcoves:

Outdoors, there are a variety of graves. My favorites are the little enclosed memorial gardens, some of which are pre-purchased, and not yet occupied:

Even the occupied ones provide a pleasant spot for the weary explorer to pause and contemplate his or her mortality, or just enjoy a beer in the cool of the evening.

If you feel the need to trespass on the living, there are a groundskeeper's locker room and equipment storage area under one of the mausoleums, as well as some cluttered fire stairwells. The small chapel has a few back rooms like this one.

Happy exploring, and memento mori!

I think every person needs to develop their own code of ethics, so what's ethical for someone else may not be ethical for you.

Is lying unethical? I think we can all think of good examples of (little) white lies. (Open any ethical dilemmas textbook.) In this case, a little massaging of the truth to avoid getting punished for what is, after all, a stupid law, doesn't seem at all unethical to me. It's not a white lie (it's only serving the liar), but it's not a black lie either: it's not hurting anyone.

That's the thing about lying. Weirdly, it goes from being ethical to unethical if you get caught at it. Nobody is ever hurt by a lie, until they find out it's a lie.

I lie a lot, at least by implication, when I'm infiltrating and I bump into employees or security. Usually my default lie is, "Just looking for the bathroom," or "I'm lost, and trying to find my way back out onto the street, can you please help me?" I don't feel too bad about these, because generally they are undisprovable, and nobody's going to be hurt or insulted by discovering I've just lied to their face.

So I try to draw the line at disprovable lies, like, "Yes, I do work here."

This is both self-serving and considerate, I think. I probably hate getting caught in a lie as much or more as others hate being lied to.

But the other day I got carried away. I'm always spinning plausible stories that I can tell people if I'm challenged, and finally one came spilling out by accident. I was opening doors on a fairly busy conference level of a hotel, and found myself in a service corridor where three employees were arranging things on trays on carts. I blurted, "Oh, I'm looking for the stairs." (My inner story at this time, which I was trying to project through body language, was that I was a guest who didn't like elevators and wanted to climb up to his room.) The nearest employee said, "Oh, are you trying to get upstairs or back down to the lobby?" Here is where I should have come clean, but I said automatically, "Upstairs. I don't know if it's possible, maybe I need to just take the elevator ..." Pleasantly she led me to a nearby stairwell, asking on the way what floor I was going to. As I was fully committed now, I said at random, "Seven." "Wow, you're going to climb all the way to the seventh floor!?" I laughed and said, "Yeah, and if I feel good, I might just keep going!" --That was true.

I felt bad afterwards, not so much for lying, but for having drifted into a situation where I could have easily been caught in a lie.

Surrey: Doors Open 2014.

Highlights: veggie hot dogs; pakoras; the girl at SFU who said that "It's an open campus, so any door you can open, you're free to enter"; the flight of tasters at Central City Brewpub.

The City Hall tour was pretty lame, but did take us onto the mayor's swanky balcony. Aside from this, probably better explored on any average day of the week.

From the self-guided tour of Central City office tower.

The exploring got better, and the photos got worse, when the event was over, and I killed some time at East Delta Remembrance Sickhouse, and the nearly completed office block across the street.

William T. Vollmann, writing about hopping trains, says cutting fear down to size is an operation "not unlike brushing one's teeth. It must be done over and over." (Or, as the Lululemon bag holding my recyclables reminds me, "Do one thing each day that scares you.")

My goal is to set off one stairwell alarm a day.

I visited you recently, Ottawa, and I just want to say, Thanks for being such a great place to explore.

Thanks to the Mnt Hotel for leaving the door to its swimming pool and sauna wide open.

Thanks to the Mrrtt for its formerly revolving banquet floors, with their beautiful views. Two of these floors are accessible to anyone at anytime (just take the elevator!), and the topmost floor is accessible to the determined by service elevator.

Thanks to the guys renovating the old Mpr Theatre on the top floor of the Wrld Xchng Plz, for propping the door open with a fire extinguisher.

Thanks to the guy who let me in to the War Museum at 4:50 for free. It was a whirlwind tour, unfortunately; and unfortunately the emergency exit doors were alarmed. (I always act bewildered when I set one of these alarms off, and back away from it muttering. But since most of these alarms stop once the door is closed again, I really should step through them first.)

Thanks to the National Gallery, which looks pretty easy to just stroll right in to. (I'll test this next time I'm in town.)

Thanks to the Prlmnt Bldngs, for being so easy to infiltrate. And it's a good thing, because the official tours are cloyingly bad.

Aside from some guards posted at the halls leading away from the public areas, and some serious security outside the Senate and House galleries (which you might as well just visit through official channels), most of the deterrents to self-guided tourists are psychological: cordons and "No Unauthorized Access" signs. I went in late on a Sunday and probably could have wandered the halls all night. I admit that I wimped out after about half an hour, worrying that the later I stayed, the angrier the guards would be when they inevitably saw me leaving. (They didn't care.)

Can't see this on the official tour!

The dining room on the 6th floor is a bit expensive for me. There are loaner jackets available for the shabby.

Weird interstitial space.

But my heartiest thanks go out to the Cht Lrr, whose upper floors are shockingly accessible.

You can grub around in the dusty attics, former guest rooms, storage areas, and sweltering engine rooms for hours. You can get onto the roof at a number of places -- great views of Prlmt across the street! Everything seems abandoned and unused, but must not be: doors that had been locked were open, and doors that had been open were locked when I returned a couple of days later. But the number of lockable but left-unlocked doors is still magnificent. If the stairwells don't get you where you want to go, try the service stairwells or elevators, which can be found behind unmarked doors with half-ring door handles. (Go after hours or pass the 7th floor quickly, which seems to be filled with half occupied offices.) Thanks are also due to the refreshing Gold Members' Lounge on the 4th floor, where complimentary candies, nuts, coffee, soda, and newspapers can be found.

Ottawa, je t'aime!