Commuting through Narnia :D

Woop! So I finally got to start my job :D There's lots and lots of snow at the moment (*touch wood*), which is excellent for me and very very pretty.



So, ok, the image isn't actually a direct real-life photo, but it does achieve near photo-realism as to what my commute looks like (...if you add a big slope and imagine a road where the lamp post is. There is no lamp post.)

Having to readjust my sleep schedule slightly, in that I have to get up at about 6am... but to be honest I've never appreciated having a job so much, so i reckon I can live. Besides, aside from having the job in and of itself, it has the massive advantage that on my days off, i can look forward to getting up slightly later and going skiing or 'riding' (that is, snowboarding for those amongst you who associate the term with horses...) for free; which is precisely what I intend to do sometime in the next two days...

Anywayz, this is my humble abode for the remaining daylight hours of the winter; secondn[hut] on the right and straight on til [Summer] :


Prettier pictures of the rest of the place to follow when it stops being so snisty (my new favourite (made-up) word for snowy mist...).

Though, it hasn't only been snowing on the mountains. Vancouver had a very cold snap, just like the UK - i leave with my street just a few days ago...

Exciting things I forgot to tell you in the last 'exciting things' post...

So the big elephant of an exciting thing, was that somehow i forgot to tell you all that I saw a real proper mountie :D :D :D all in red with the boots and the hat and everything :D
I really wish i could have taken a picture, but I think it would have been very obvious, and since i think they were just going home, rather rude - but i shall get a picture at some point. Promise.

Secondly, Mount Seymour is opening earlier than they had hoped. It opens tomorrow - yay! The Lessons Desk isn't opening til Saturday, but still, means my first shift is on Sunday and there after I have proper regualr work :D (And a free ski pass :D :D ) Tres excitement. It will be so good to start working. Beats trying to occupy yourself while spending as little money as possible.

That said, I have found one productive way of spending time. I've been volunteering at a Language Centre nearby, being a conversation partner from various Japanese and Korean students who are here learning English. Part of me thinks that there are possibly more worthy causes to volunteer for, but this is quite good fun, and might give me an insight as to whether tefl-y jobs are something i might like to do. Maybe I'll pick up other things later...

Anywayz, hopefully next time i write i can tell you all about my first day and maybe take some pictures up the mountain - there''s a stunning view of Vancouver from up there, and on a clear day you can also see the rather impressive Moutn Baker, which is in Washington state in the USA :D

Curling! Woop!

So, it turns out that learning to curl is quite painful. Either you successfully slide with the stone and in the process, accidently put your knee down grazing it quite horribly, or you don't slide very far at all and end up with a suitably bruised ass.... mmm...

It's also very difficult, and hence probably more amusing to watch... It's basically like making bowling really really difficult for your self by deciding that you need to bowl such that the ball will stop when it gets to the middle pin. Bizarre thing to do...

We went with a group from SWAP (the Canadian organisation that receives BUNACers from all over the work), so we did have games going on, but since none of use could really work out exactly how the scoring worked, I'm really not sure who wo - we had fun trying though...

Anywayz, my best efforts were recorded in suitably action-esque shots:



































So there you have it. My refined curling technique, which mostly involved looking a bit silly and hoping for the best...

Horseshoe Bay and Deep Cove

These places mark the most westerly and easterly points of North Vancouver, and they had cool names so I thought I'd visit.

Both are kind of pretty and have nice little harbours and lovely vistas, but in all honesty there's not much to actually do in either of them - though i imagine if i went in the summer, there would be a number of nice trails to go walking on. That, and Horeseshoe Bay is the ferry port for going to a number of the local islands, including Nanaimo on Vancouver Island.

Horseshow Bay (according to the sign that I took a picture of!) has been a popular fishing and recreation area for over a hundred years, and is terribly quaint, in a Canadiany kind of way. However, it was popular before that when native people went there to gather herrings eggs. There you go, interesting fact for the day, done.

Looking out from the village:


The very small village:


I guess maybe it's not thrilling, but it would be a lovely place to relax surrounded by mountains and sea.

I don't know how well you'll be able to see this, but one of the nicest bits of the bay was when the weather turned all indecisive and the sun was shining on Bowen Island, whilst dark clouds surrounded the other side, and in the middle a large rainbow rose up from the sea. Very cool:




Anywayz, Deep Cove. Deep Cove looked kind of similar, except by that point it had snowed very heavily on the mountains, so it's surrounding mountains were all pretty and white (as you can see in the last blog post).

I didn't take many photos there since it was freezing cold and getting dark, however, I was rather amused (in an extremely geek chic sort of a way) by a sign i saw in a flower bed:



It's always nice when the gardening department has a sense of humour...

And opposite the very same flowerbed, there was some more nice wall art:


One thing I would say about both of the villages was that i think they gave me a bit of a taste of non-Vancouver Canada. Not that there's anything wrong with Vancouver, but there are so many people in it from all over the world, that i imagine it is quite different from quite a large amount of the rest of Canada. So maybe I've got the taste to explore a little further afield, or more remote or local places later on in my stay.

Snoooow!

So muchos excitement where the weather is concerned! Over the last two days the Mount Seymour (my mountain) has had over 70cms of snow fall (and probably more since that doesn't include last night...). And today it's got so chilly that it's actually snowed in Vancouver as well - 5-10cm in downtown Vancouver. Apparently this is already twice the November average, with more forecast to come this week. This all bodes rather well for the predicted La Nina this winter - wetter and colder, mmm...

This is obviously very good news where ski resorts are concerned. Whistler opened yesterday, Cypress Mountain (one of the other local mountains that both my flatmates are working on) opened today, so as I speak my flatmates are enjoying their first day at work. (Or perhaps not, given that they had to get up at 6am... we're just not acclimatised to that anymore!).

As it stands, Mount Seymour is going to open this time next week, but depending on the snowfall over the next couple of days, they might well open it a few days earlier. So that's all rather exciting!

Before it snowed down here over night i tried to take a picture of the impressively snowy mountains (post70cm dump), but unfortunately i couldn't find a good vista that wasn't from a moving bus. Still, you can at least see the snow on this one.


This was taken from Deep Cover, which is moreorless the most easterly point of North Vancouver. I've spent a couple of days visiting the outlying villages that form part of North Vancouver like this, mainly cos it's only a $2.50 bus fare to get to them! I'll do Horseshoe Bay and Deep Cove in another post though.


And in other exciting Canadian news, I'm going to try curling today and am more amused by the prospect than is perhaps reasonable. Pictures shall hopfully follow...

Reflections in Chinatown

So, we went exploing Chinatown, seeing as how we had so far neglected it.

For some background, this Chinatown is supposed to be one of the biggest, most established in the world. There are over 100,000 Chinese in the city, only beaten in size by San Francisco, and they were the second group of foreigners to settle in the city, after the British.


However, for such an established Chinatown, it's actually surpisingly lacking in any overt 'chineseness'. In fact the dragon and the rather trippy-looking panda were more or less it. However, there were other things worth looking at there.

We spent most of our time in the Dr Sun Yat Sen park, which is next to the garden. Me and Hannah were keen for the garden itself, but Tabitha wasn't so keen to pay, so I'll leave that for another time. To be honest, for your own sanity, it's probably just as well because I got so over-enthusiastic with weird photos (as you will find out in a minute) that I can't imagine what would have happened if



So the park is free and public and very much in the style of the garden (so i'm told); rather pretty and in perfect juxtaposition to the city scape that looms behind:



However, having taken some normal, pretty photos of it, I had some sort of artistic fever come over me and decided that recording it through the reflections in the water was more fun (esp when you change the angle later...):




And sideways with leaves...

Trees, with leaves, in water...


Just one tree, but a very nice one:

And by far my favourite - brilliantly clear, and rather surreal:


So that was all rather fun. I do have some other Chinatown moments to put up, but I think i'll start a new post - this one might not cope with all the pixels...

Finally, I saw the maple leaves and thought of the blog, so i took the picture so it could go with the theme :)

Exciting* Things (*for varying definitions of 'excitement'...)

Sooo, what have I done recently?

Well, perhaps the most genuinely exciting was going for training for my ski job. The training itself was, of course, not the most thrilling afternoon ever known, though there were some VERY nice cookies - perfectly crisp on the outside and squidgy on the inside :D Mmm. The reason it was so good was that there's now lots of snow up there! Not enough, mind, but very much going in the right direction! It actually looked like a ski resort, which is good to know! It was also nice to meet the people I'll be working with, who all seem to be really lovely - looking forwards to starting soon!

Much of other random bits of this week were taken up with jumping through all the requisite hoops to join a couple of agencies - see if i can get a bit of work before/on the side of my other job. One of them at least seem rather hopeful, but since i didn't complete my training with them until friday, I probably won't hear anything until at least monday. Hopefully that'll give me something to do as well as some money. I feel I have rather too much time on my hands at the moment... And at least for the last week I haven't been out adventuring much either - don't really want to spend too much until my job actually starts! Still, it did mean I found the time to watch the whole of seasons 3 and 4 of Due South. Awesome.

In an altogether different definition of 'exciting' I also had a wisdom tooth out yesterday, which was certainly one way of using an afternoon! I think I did something to it to aggrevate it the morning I flew out - grinding my teeth or something - and it's been bothering me on and off ever since. When it got painful to eat I decided I ought to do something about it... It was one that had grown out into my cheek and was therefore more or less impossible to clean properly, so this was really pretty inevitable. The xray showed that from the back corner a big cavity had worked its way in. Given that, and that it was useless as a tooth, there was no point in doing anything except taking it out. The dentist was very nice though and put lots and lots of numbing stuff in my mouth and pulled it out so painlessly I didn't even know he'd done it. It was pretty gruesome to look at, so i decided against keeping it for prosperity...

Anyways, having your tooth out seems to be considerbly less painful that i had imagined - certainly it's a lot less painful out than it was in! But alas, it also means that i have to eat squishy, non-bitty foods for a week while it heals, to make sure nothing gets stuck in the hole *shudder*...
And I know there are some 'sensible' people out there who will think i should have got this sorted before i went (it wasn't hurting then!), but given that i don't currently have an NHS dentist at home, I've discovered that doing it here was quite possibly cheaper... (although, it baffles me that as it breaks down the examination and xrays accounted for less than a third of the price, while the sheer brute force of actually pulling it out accounts for the other 2/3rds... strange world...

So there you go, varying kinds of excitement to be getting on with.

And now you are 24...

So it was my birthday! I am officially a year older :)

And thanks to my new found house mates I had a rather lovely birthday too. For once I also got an extra bit of lie in too (well, more like I got up earlier, but still) since Canada's clocks only went back this weekend.

So having had a lovely lie in I got up and check emails, made breakfast etc. Then I went to the gym - been doing rather a lot of that lately (it's only two blocks away - genius!) - which my housemates thought was an abomination - "The gym?! On you birthday? On a sunday?" "Yup". So that was fun, and made the pizza and pie all the more tasty a little later on.

When Hannah had got back in from her training for her new job (9am on a sunday!) I was presented with many wonderour things. Not in the least a shiny floaty balloon, which I fear I shall never grow out of. I also got peppermint tea, which i have been pining for, but unwilling to pay nearly 4 quid a box... and some jasmine tea, which I haven't tried yet. Finally, after some sneaky and genuinely quite sly detective work the day before hand, they decided that lemon meringue pie would more than suffice as cake. And they were very much correct.

Come early evening we had a glass of wine while playing Yahtzee - a game that i had brought the day before for the grand sum of $2 (rather pleased with it!). Then we met up with various other Vancouverites and went out for Italian and then for drinks.

Our waitress was very obliging as well, and stuck all 24 candles into the (by now) rather squished meringue, but clearly the effort was worth it...



Twas a lovely evening :)

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank you all for your various birthday greetings. All of which were well received with thanks :)

And I shall leave you with a final picture of the esteemed organisers - my flatmates - Hannah on the left and Tabitha on the right.

Exciting Adventures around Hallowe'en Time #2

So, I got to trees last time. What have I done since?

Well, I've discovered some new bits of the city I had somehow previously neglected. On Saturday I had set out in search of jugglers and spinners at the art gallery and failed rather in my pursuit until it was too late (they were on the one side I didn't look... *sigh* but I shall find them next week...). However, along my meanderings I did discover Robson Street. Robson is nothing particularly exciting, it just baffles me how, having walked through an intersection of it every day for the first week, I failed to notice that it is a massive shopping/restaurant hub that stretches across the entirity of Downtown. Likewise, I really only recently actually bothered to walk up Denman, which is the other main street of the West End besides Davie (where my hostel was). It's funny what you manage to *not* do when you first get to a place.

Anywayz, marginally more exciting was my visit to Gastown - another area that it's astonishing I managed to avoid for so long, given that it is literally 2 minutes from the seabus (our main route to downtown).

To be honest as much as guidebooks go on about Gastown, mostly it's some 'cobbles' (what they actually mean is 'bricks' rather than concrete, but still), the worlds first steam powered clock (admittedly kind of cool) and all the tourist shops that i thought had been missing from downtown Vancouver. (I'm going to have to take back that thing about them all being on Granville Island, they're equally divided, Granville Island/Gastown).

I'll let you read the explanation of how it works for your self (in the plaque above, which will enlarge if you click on it). Steam from underground makes balls move around ,which makes the clock go... or something.

You can see the mechanism on the left - with as little reflection as i could manage. And on the right, if you look closely you can see the stream coming out the top.




Besides the clock Gastown is quite pleasant, and it's 'old' buildings do make a change from the shiny new-ness of the rest of downtown, but moreorless every shop is a tourist shop, and between those are a few expensive restaurants.

One thing I found surprising about Gastown is that it is soooo easy to wander straight in to Vancouver's dodgy area. It literally takes half a block's wander in the wrong direction to realise that maybe you might not want to hang around for too long. At the time I thought this was unusual, having not just an affluent area, but a properly touristy area right next to one of the most destitute. There's a block in San Francisco where this is sort of true, but the area there is affluent, not especially touristy. However, it has just occurred to me that Hollywood is precisely like that - one of the most touristy areas in North America, but in actual fact really not a nice neighbourhood. Weird the way the world works.

That said, wandering out of said dodgy bit, I did find some very nice graffiti (unfortunately it's been graffitied over, such is the irony of the art form...):


*the next bit is me getting excited about a crane, feel free to skip it... *

[cranes]

So, cranes. I've never really considered them to be particularly exciting. What's more there's this huuge red contraption that sits on the Vancouver waterfront ruining the view:


However, it turns out it's quite cool. I saw it working the other day, and it's used to put shipping containers on the huge cargo ships that go through here. It's so big it makes it look like a simple process of stacking a Jenga tower (hopefully without the ultimate collapse - although I do think that playing Jenga with shipping containers and a crane like that might be rather alot of fun). Genuinely very like giant Mecchano... Anyway, the upshot is that i no longer resent it ruining my view quite as much because it has cool points...

[/cranes]

The view (North Van) from beside the big red thing:


I live between the two main roads you can see running up the slope.


Besides sight-seeing, I've also spent a couple of evenings skating - or helping some of the other Bunacers to not fall over, is probably a more accurate description. Then yesterday I tried my hand at roller blading for the first time in about 10 years (well, bar one night in 3rd year, but i don't think that would count ). Hannah and Tabitha hadn't gone around Stanley Park yet, so yesterday we headed out there. Hannah and Shima stuck to bikes, but since I'd already gone on a bike, me and Tabitha tried out hands at skating. Turns out that I can skate just fine, but turning sharp corners and stopping were both something of an issue... I think i've got far too used to just leaning and going in a direction but that doesn't work very well off ice. I did escape any injury though and over the nearly 6 miles gave my thighs a proper good workout!


Close of the day was spent sat on the beach watching the sun go down - as in yesterday's blog picture. Another one of the pretty sunset across the beach.


There have of course been a few days where we haven't got up to much (well, except I joined the local gym, so i've been gym-ing when not doing anything else), but I guess there's no harm in catching up with yourself abit after a couple of weeks properly on the go in a new city.

We are in a bit of a weird limbo at the moment though since I and my flatmates all have jobs lined up, are being trained as I type, but don't know exactly when in the next couple of weeks we'll be starting. So at the moment we've got plenty of spare time but are relunctant to spend much money until we have an actual income. I guess I might go an explore some more of the (free) trails and paths the North Shore has to offer. When I do have an income, the world will be more of an oyster and I plan to make the most of my location to visit Victoria (on Vancouver Island), Whistler and Seattle at some point, but that will have to wait for now.

I am exploring various agencies with more enthusiam right now, to see if I can get some casual work both before the season starts and to top up hours in the season, as and when I have time. I got the main step out of the way a couple of days ago, which is to get a 'Serving it Right' certificate, so that I can legally serve alcohol in BC (basically a requirement to be a waitress ('server') any time alcohol is involved. In summery, they want you to know that servers and estabilishments have a duty of care, so if some drunk guy goes and injures people (or worse) on his way home, you can be sued. That, and that high fat foods slow down the absorbtion of alcohol the most. I do slightly resent that I have to pay $35 to have that repeatedly drilled in to me though. Still, it's probably a good investment in the long run.

Exciting Adventures around Hallowe'en Time and Unseasonably Lovely Weather on a Beach

So, I've been a bit rubbish about updating this week. This is partly because for the first few days it rained, which rather discouraged us from venturing much further than the 7/11 at the end of the street. When it rains here, more often than not, it does rain Properly. Although, fortunately for us it has mainly done that at night. It reminds me a bit of that holiday in France when I was 7...

In other rainy news, all those doom mongerers who keep telling me that it rains non-stop here: it doesn't (only at night) and in fact today (November, I might remind you) was so warm that I stripped down to a T-Shirt and sat on a beach. And watched a glorious sunset (which didn't actually look quite like this picture of it does (it's all camera trickery...) but isn't it a nice picture?).



Anywayz, where had I got to? I think I last updated sometime before Hallowe'en, so I shall start with all things ghostly.

The Canadians go a bit nuts about Hallowe'en - I would say nearly as much as the Americans, but I would definitely be guessing. On the 31st itself Tabitha and Hannah (my flatmates) went to Metrotown - a huge 470 shop mall which I have yet to grace with my presence - and reported that not only were loads of the kids dressed up but that they were more or less trick or treating shop-to-shop as the stores were all giving out free 'candy'! Besides that, there were some pretty impressively dressed up houses in the Westend (although, they were unfortunately difficult to photograph without a tripod :( In any case, they looked like Christmas houses but with ghosts, pumpkins and spiders instead of elves and reindeer. V cool. All through the weekend, wondering around Downtown Vancouver, all sorts of creatures and characters could be seen, donned by people of all ages - some of them had made a very impressive effort.

I failed to persuade my flatmates that if you can't beat 'em, you should join 'em, so sadly no dressing up was to be had last weekend. We did celebrate Hallowe'en with a visit to a creepified theme park though :) Five of the people off the flight went, along with a bunch of other BUNACers/Swappers. Between us we very much divided into two groups. Those of us who thought that big rides were scary and/or not worth feeling ill for, and those who thought that the haunted houses were absolutely the most terrifying things they'd ever been through. Those of us in the former group spent most of the evening finding the latter group's hysteria absolutely hilarious - it wouldn't have been the same without them ;) And the haunted houses were pretty good too - you came out of the variously themed houses to have a brief respite before being instantly chased around by characters themed to match the house... Just when you think all the freaky clowns are over, you turn around and their right behind you. Awesome. All in all an excellent night.


What other things I have I got around to? Well earlier in the week we decided to make a start exploring some of the parks in North Vancouver. Being cheap, we didn't want to pay to see the Capilano suspension bridge (one of the Top Things to do/see by most accounts - looks suspiciously like a tourist trap to me (especially since the main attraction is 'a big suspension bridge through rainforest', which is something I've done in the past through more interesting rainforest), but i might get there eventually). Instead, we opted for it's smaller sibling in Lynn Valley Park.

A shortish bus ride there and we headed into the park. Well, that is, after we'd pressed all the buttons and lit up all the lights in the ecology centre displays (designed for 6 year olds, i'm sure, but satisfying nonetheless), and learned what to do if we found a bear; basically, don't panic, reason with it, and don't run lest you instigate 'exit persuaded by a bear', or something... Although, as it happened, when we came to a sign pointing out we were entering an areas of bear activity, we decided that we had no wish to even contemplate reasoning with a bear and promptly headed in the opposite direction...

Anywayz, after a large amount of faffing and 'learning' (about endangered super flying squirrals, amongst other things :D ) in the ecology centre, we finally made our way to the bridge, which is quite cool, and claims to have been built by Scouts, but since it's still here 80 years later, I remain unconvinced.

On the right hand side I made a collage of photos, so you can see what you see from looking down and then gradually looking up the creek. It was a very pretty waterfall, and while it's cliche, it really did look much bigger in reality, the photo does it no justice... Still, gives you an idea.

Then rather than appreciate the nature and explore the trails we spent a good half an hour having what i can only describe as a photo shoot on and around the bridge. But fair play, it was a cool bridge...


And when we did finally make it into the woods proper, the light amongst the trees was pretty stunning (as were the trees incidently, although, i think Canada needs to branch out (hah!) a bit from just having fir trees *everywhere*. Some perspective as to their size though:


Well, ok, not perspective maybe, but it does make them look a lot bigger than they do in the waterfall picture...

And there was pretty light coming through them:



I promise that future blog posts will contain fewer pictures of trees, I just couldn't resist...

In order to keep this blog in some sort of orderly fashion, I shall break here before moving on to more recent explorations tomorrow morning (which also conveniently means i can go to bed...). Exciting Adventures around Hallowe'en Time #2 shall follow shortly. Promise. And I hope this post has made up for my previous lack of pictures.

I leave you with the view that we returned to that evening, on our way back from the park. Downtown Vancouver from the end of my block (I apologise profusely to the photographically minded of you that I don't possess a tripod, but it's still a pretty cool view):



Hope you're all well back home!