'Welcome to Vancouver: a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone'

Having spent approximately 10 hours between the chronological hours of 10am and 11am yesterday, mostly spent watching ice bergs and ice sheets, prairies and ginormous mountains, I made it to Vancouver!

The approach into Vancouver really is stunning - mountains and sea, and in our case the luck of a beautifully clear blue day. Though I must say, Vancouver looks an awful lot like a real Sim City from the air - complete with mountains and rivers in silly places and neat little grid systems with cute little cars wending their way around...

Anywayz, having been grilled by some terribly efficient woman at the airport, they decided that I wasn't so bad after all and let me in. Leaving the rest of the BUNAC group flight people to it, I left to go and find my hostel (having hedged my bets wrongly as to which they might be staying in). A short train and bus ride later I finally got to put down my bags - carefully packed to be 22.9kg precisely - which was a massive relief!




Despite having guessed wrong on the BUNAC hostel, the first person I ran into in my room, a lovely girl called Nicky, is also on a bunac worknig holiday visa having just arrived from Seattle (though she's actully Australian). Rather than waste the stunning weather we'd been greeted with - we might not it again for months (!) - we decided to go out exploring.

Heading in direction in particular, we ended up at English Bay Beach, which gave pretty awesome views of the city and the sea. Having so far avoided being squished by cars driving down the wrong side of the road, we nearly were so lucky with the cyclists and skaters who are ubiquitous all down the sea wall. Leaving Stanley park for another day, we headed round the edge of it to the Lost Lagoon. Having been warned about raccoons, more or less the first we did was run straight in to 3 of them, but they were just so cute (well at least until they started fighting...). I would upload the video, but I think my internet connection might cry. So, that's raccoons down, mooses and bears to go... ::)

Heading past the angry raccoons, we discovered the Lost Lagoon, which you can see on the right. I think the picture just about sums up why so many people like Vancouver (It took all of about 5 minutes to win me over).




Having already taken the obligatory "look I'm next to the sign welcoming me to where i am" picture, we were intrigued to come across another welcome sign near by informing us very clearly that we were in a nuclear weapons free zone. Both vastly relieved at the news, we fell about laughing at the sign and coupldn't help but take a picture, of course...





Having had out wander for the day we decided to head back into town to see if we could find the hostel that the others were staying in. Using my spidey-travellers sense, combined with the knowledge that there is a bar at the bottom of that partciular hostel, I figured we might run in to some of the group - and low and behold, about 15 of them were sat there complete with beer and food. Spent a lovely evening getting to know them, and explaining the finer aspects of ice hockey. By 8.30 we were absolutely shattered - funny that - so me and Nicky headed back to our hostel, via the absolutely gorgous smelling Thai place on the corner - the single best Thai food I've had since I was in Thailand. Soooo nice (except that it had more chilli in it that was strictly necessary and left my nice dry-from-flying-for-10-hrs lips burning all evening.

So, I guess that was that for the first day. Seems rather like more that you can actually fit in to 24hrs... oh, wait...

We're just about to head of to the orientation now, having had bagels and lovely things for breakfast (you could have had a muffin or a scone if you waned... weird...), so hopefully they'll say useful things and sort us all out.