It felt strange going to the opera before having a good, solid meal, or even taking a shower. Still, last Saturday morning I hauled myself up, out and onto a bus just after 8, heading toward downtown Vancouver in search of the Scotiabank Theater.

The occasion was “The Enchanted Island,” the Baroque pastiche that was the latest in the Metropolitan Opera’s series of live high-definition broadcasts to movie theaters around the world.  These broadcasts have brought new audiences to the Met and other entrepreneurial performing arts organizations, from the National Theatre in London to the Bolshoi Ballet. (Two years ago, I saw a billboard for a screening of “Macbeth” in Chengdu, China.) My friends Leslie and Mike were also going to “The Enchanted Island,” but at the Walter Reade Theater in New York, where the show, and the opera across 65^th Street, went on at a more civilized 1 p.m.

Being new in town, I allowed plenty of time to find my way and arrived with almost an hour to spare. The theater wasn’t open yet, and the few other earlybirds outside were looking around for breakfast.  A kindly jogger suggested an Italian café a couple of blocks away, where I ordered a bowl of stick-to-your-ribs oatmeal — and a good thing, too. Inside the theater, a welcome-and-etiquette announcement noted that the concession stands would be open by intermission but asked patrons to “please refrain from eating popcorn during the opera, as the sound can be distracting.” I remembered wondering at my first HD broadcast, “I Puritani,” if it was proper to eat popcorn at the opera. 

It also felt a little strange watching the onscreen crowd taking seats inside the Met, just a 20-minute subway ride from my New York home and practically next door to my second home in recent months, the Vivian Beaumont Theater (Travels With Joey, July 13, 2011).  The broadcast omitted my favorite moment at the Met, when the Austrian crystal chandeliers are raised to the gold-leaf ceiling, dimming the house lights and indicating the music is about to begin.

Confession: I know it’s heresy, but I’ve come almost to prefer seeing opera in movie theaters and later on PBS to attending live at the Met. It’s not just price. (Good seats at the Met tickets can run into hundreds of dollars, as opposed to $24.42 Canadian for this broadcast.) The Met’s acoustics are glorious, even up in the family circle, but the house is so cavernous that it dwarfs the singers even from parts of the orchestra. During Barbara Cook’s solo concert there in 2006, when I sat in the very last row, I could confirm by the blond mane that yes, that was Cook onstage, but I could make out nothing she was doing. On the broadcasts, performers are movie-star size, and multiple cameras provide close-ups and shots from many angles rather than a single point of view. Subtitles, even for English librettos, make not only the plot but every word clear, thus eliminating the need to study in advance, as I used to do before the Met installed its titling system in 1995. Intermission features, also shown on PBS, give the audience something to do beside go out for popcorn during half-hour breaks.

I had been curious to see who in Vancouver would turn out for an opera screening at 9:55 a.m., and no surprise: no one looked under 40 except members of the house staff. In fact, there were far more young faces in the onscreen Met audience than in the Vancouver theater. The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s concert of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony  on Monday night drew a much higher proportion of younger people. As for the Wednesday matinee of the Tony Award-winning “Red” at the Vancouver Playhouse – well, anyone who ushers knows who goes to Wednesday matinees. This performance drew seniors and a school group, and few in between.

“The graying of the audience” is the nemesis of classical art forms like opera and ballet, which so many people find intimidating. How, presenters worry, will these forms, and thus their organizations, survive into the future if young people aren’t coming?

My arts journalism class at the University of British Columbia has been assigned to compile a Google Calendar for the semester. When I’ve checked it over the first two weeks, I’ve found listings for the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, the Taboo Sex Show, Street Food City, the Stop the Presses! Journalism Film Festival, K-Pop/J-Pop Night and “The Vagina Monologues” (posted by Kate, who’s in it). But, with the exception of  “Red” and a local production of “Waiting for Godot,” there are few for institutions like the Vancouver Symphony, the Vancouver Opera and Ballet British Columbia. Is the problem the ticket prices? Lack of education in the arts? Or is it that the students just can’t relate?

Yet there is reason for hope, even though no one but me admits to having watched the Met’s “Anna Bolena” on PBS from Seattle over the weekend. Mohamed, who grew up in Bahrain, enthusiastically looks forward to learning about opera and ballet, Western forms to which he has had no exposure. Jennifer arrived for class on Monday with a stack of library books. “Puccini,” she explained. “I’m sort of obsessed with ‘La Boheme.’  It could be my final project.” Gudrun rushed up to me after I mentioned the Met HD broadcasts during our first class. “Are you going to ‘Goetterdaemerung’?” she asked. I am, and she was deeply envious. “I couldn’t get a ticket,”  she said. “My mother was so disappointed.” They had seen the other three operas in Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. Of course, Gudrun is from Iceland, a country that has nearly 90 music schools and still takes classical music seriously.

So I’ve suggested that the opera-shy consider attending an encore of “The Enchanted Island.” There’s nothing to be scared of. It is no more than a mashup – a modern word for pastiche, defined by Wikipedia (and really, where else would you go for the definition of a word like mashup?) as a “song or composition created by blending two or more pre-recorded songs.” (Think “Glee.”) “The Enchanted Island” is a mashup of hits from three or four centuries ago, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun.

In this case, the mashup is a matter of not only the music (by various Baroque composers) but also the new English libretto by Jeremy Sams, which inserts characters from  “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” into “The Tempest.”  “It certainly helps to know your Shakespeare,” the British-accented woman next to me remarked at intermission, but even if my students don’t, they’d have little trouble following the story, especially with subtitles spelling it out. The over-the-top visuals alone are worth the trip. And as a mashup, what is “The Enchanted Island” but a part of the “Remix” culture we’re studying, in which elements of existing art are sampled and recombined to create something new? (For a fuller explanation, see Lawrence Lessig’s book of that name. It’s on our recommended reading list.)

At the conclusion of “Apollo’s Angels,” an exhaustive history of ballet, Jennifer Homans regretfully declared it a dying art. Is opera another? There’s no reason it needs to be in an era when Rufus Wainwright — Canadian! And best known as a pop artist — is about to have his first opera performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. (The Met originally commissioned it but pulled out because Wainwright insisted that the libretto be in French.)

For the record, the Feb. 11 live broadcast of “Goetterdaemerung” at the Scotiabank Theater was already 90 percent sold when I bought my tickets, the day after they went on sale in late August. It starts at an even less civilized 9 a.m., and it won’t be easy to make the curtain, or sit through six hours of Wagner in an undercaffeinated state.  But I’ll be there.

Postscript: After the opera, I spent the afternoon at the Vancouver Art Gallery looking at “Shore, Forest and Beyond: Art From the Audain Collection,” which, sadly, closes this Sunday. The exhibition’s two floors cover centuries of art in British Columbia, from First Nations artists of centuries past to contemporary ones of many ethnicities, with an especially fine display of my own collecting passion, masks. But that’s a different form of enchantment.

If I needed any reminders that the world has changed, I could have found them in my luggage for Vancouver.

For my early travels, I used to pack exactly two electrical devices: a hair dryer and a travel iron, along with a boxed set of adapters. First the iron fell by the wayside as I learned to pack wrinkle-resistant clothes and realized that few people would care, or even notice, if I looked a bit rumpled. The hair dryer followed when hotels started supplying them. On my 10-week trip in 1985 to China, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand and Tahiti, I brought back 17 articles for The Boston Globe – all from a few reporter’s notebooks.

Then I started carrying a Grundig mini-radio in my purse for long bus rides (it came in handy on 9/11), later supplanted by an iPod Nano that let me carry my own music. When I started teaching abroad, I needed my laptop. On a three-month trip to Eastern Europe in 2008,  it served first as a teaching tool and later as a traveling companion; at an open-air wifi café in Split, Croatia, I would answer e-mail over early-morning tea and, at the end of the day, edit my photos over a glass of wine. In China the laptop became my workspace, entertainment center and lifeline to the world. “My whole life is on that laptop,” I told friends, and two years later, that hasn’t changed.

To Vancouver, I brought no fewer than five electronic communications devices: the laptop; a  Nook for bedtime reading; a brand new iPad, a Christmas/birthday present from my friend Heidi; her hand-me-down iPod Touch (code-named Alvin for our late friend whose picture she used as its wallpaper), which has replaced the Nano in my purse; and the international cellphone I carry but rarely remember to turn on. Make that six: at the last minute, I popped my little digital recorder into the bag, in case I need to do interviews. There are at least four separate chargers, carried in the “electricals” box (a souvenir from China, decorated with a frog or lizard motif) along with three flash drives, two extra sets of  earbuds and a spare USB cord. The electricals box can go into checked luggage, but everything else is carry-on, for which I now have a small wheeled office bag.

So much for traveling light.

The keyword here is “communications.” As a visiting professor in the University of British Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, I am back in the business in earnest, and these days, communication means mobile. When I first walked into my classroom, I found several long rows of work tables, empty except for pop-up electrical outlets. The notebooks students bring to class are mostly electronic, not paper. When I was their age (oh, to think of those words coming out of my mouth!), a journalism classroom was equipped with clackety manual typewriters, bolted to the desks. Here there’s a desktop Apple for the teacher, wired to projector and sound. My iPad is still too precious to carry around, but whenever I feel the need to look cool, I can whip Alvin out of my purse and peer intently at the little screen. Sometimes it even connects.

UBC’s program is entirely multiplatform, which means that no one majors in print or broadcast or online journalism; everyone learns to do everything. If that sounds a little scary to an old-lady print journalist, she need only read one course description for reassurance: 

Integrated Journalism (iJournalism) is our core journalism course, designed to familiarize students with the grammar and syntax of media across platforms, including text, audio and video. It provides hands-on experience in a simulated multimedia environment. Emphasis is placed on accuracy, meeting deadlines, and learning the elements of journalistic style.

Grammar and syntax. Accuracy, deadlines, the elements of style. Even if the school’s “newspaper,” TheThunderbird.ca, is a website billed as a “news service,” it sure sounds like journalism to me.

It occurred to me that in my first two visits to the school’s state-of-the art Sing Tao Building, I hadn’t seen any newspapers. “Does this journalism school get any actual newspapers?” I asked Barry Warne, who runs the front desk. (Every organization has one person who can answer any question, solve any problem, supply any need. In this school, it is Barry.) “No,” he admitted, “we used to subscribe, but I was the only one reading them. So we canceled. Everybody reads it online.”

A platform is just a platform; what counts is what goes on it. So, like everybody else, I’m reading The Vancouver Sun and The Globe and Mail online. (The Georgia Straight, the local equivalent of The Village Voice or The Boston Phoenix, does arrive at the school in print.) Once again I’m also reading my hometown paper, The New York Times, online after nearly a year of rediscovering the print edition (Scrolling back, April 9, 2011). I’ve had to revert to one old habit: appointment television. For seven Sunday nights, I’ll be home by 9 to watch “Downton Abbey”; the wonderful apartment I’ve rented has no DVR cable box, and PBS won’t let me watch online in Canada. No matter. I’ve enjoyed that Sunday-night date for more than 40 years.

Steps away from all the modernity are UBC’s Museum of Anthropology and its spectacular grounds. There, in the cold, fresh midday air, I strolled through a totem-pole gate to gaze across a pond north toward Burrard Inlet and the mountains beyond. In this oasis of peace and timelessness, out of wifi’s reach and without a newspaper in sight, I began to understand what British Columbia is all about.