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The Vancouver Museum , 1100 Chestnut St (Mon-Wed & Fri-Sun 10am-5pm, Thurs 10am-9pm; $8; tel 736-4431, www.vancouvermuseum.bc.ca ), traces the history of the city and the lower British Columbian mainland, and invokes the area's past in its very form - the flying-saucer shape is a nod to the conical cedar-bark hats of the Northwest Coast natives, former inhabitants of the area. The fountain outside, looking like a crab on a bidet, recalls the animal of native legend that guards the port entrance. Though it's the main focus of interest at Vanier Park, the museum is not as captivating as you'd expect from a city like Vancouver. It claims 300,000 exhibits, but it's hard to know where they all are, and a visit needn't take more than an hour or so. A patchy collection of baskets, tools, clothes and miscellaneous artefacts of aboriginal peoples - including a huge whaling canoe, the only example in a museum - homes in on the 8000 years before the coming of white settlers. After that, the main collection, weaving in and out of Vancouver's history up to World War I, is full of offbeat and occasionally memorable insights if you have the patience to read the material - notably the accounts of early explorers' often extraordinary exploits, the immigration section (which re-creates what it felt like to travel steerage) and the forestry displays. The twentieth-century section is disappointing, most of the time looking more like an antique shop than a museum
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