Good point about finding local books. Last time we were there I picked up the History of Music in BC (1850-1950).

I'm mostly looking for the used book stores that are bigger on the inside than on the outside. You know the sort of place that doesn't look like it will be much, then you get inside and keep going farther and farther back, through narrow halls and tiny rooms that are all piled floor to ceiling with books? Places that are made for browsing as much as finding. The ones the live up to Terry Pratchett's definition of L-space -
... even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one of those that look as though they were designed by M.C. Escher on a bad day and has more staircases than stories and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is : Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good book really is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.
Terry Pratchett : Guards, Guards, p 3
Thanks for the tip about the Goethe Institute. I studied at their school in Bonn for a winter a few years ago. If I do end up getting into UBC I may reconnect with their programs.