The not-so-daily ramblings of an Aussie in Vancouver
Tuesday, October 4th, 2011
So it’s been 6 months since we left the land of maple syrup, mountains, moose and a variety of other things starting with M.
It was so odd leaving Canada after spending three years living in Vancouver. Living in a city as vibrant and fun as it could be, with events happening pretty much every weekend of the year, no matter the weather. Living in a city where, downtown, glass towers are all around you, then the water, then mountains and suburbs.
Arriving back in Launceston, Tasmania, after a long flight with two 8 month olds (or thereabouts) was quite strange. It felt like we’d stepped back in time, with no real tall buildings, lots of old familiar sights, and a regular daily struggle to find good coffee.
Not that it’s all bad, of course! Here almost everyone has a house with 2 or 3 bedrooms. Almost everyone has a driveway, and a garage, and a car or two that are available when necessary. It’s that sort of space that you appreciate when you’ve just come from living in a 600 square foot apartment with a parking spot downstairs and no storage, and you land in a house of almost 2000 square feet. We actually felt like we rattled around in that giant house! Apart from the fact that it was occupied by the mother-in-law too…
We also spent a fair bit of time (4 months) living at the south end of the state in a spot where there’s literally 20+ white beaches within 30 minutes drive, which is quite the change from the half a day it takes to get to Tofino on Vancouver Island from Vancouver for the nearest ocean beach… the beaches in Vancouver, while nice, don’t quite cut it to those standards.
One of the things I miss most is the vibrancy of Vancouver and the inhabitants of that city. If we stepped outside our door we’d be enveloped in the culture and spirit of whatever was going on, and it was easy to get to anything that was happening – the market, the parks, the stores, the mountains etc.
Folks have been asking me as to what’s going to happen to CanAussie.com. It’s going nowhere! It’s a great resource for travelling Australians in Canada, and there’s all sorts of things that I’ve got planned to make it a more user based website and less static. As usual though, posts in the forums will get answers, and the articles will be updated as needed. Post your experiences up in the forum, let us know how you get on!
I’ll be leaving this blog up for posterity and because there’s a fair bit of info in the previous posts that folks might find useful or interesting. Particularly the one about Milo in Canada, it seems 
For now, I’ll leave you with the one comment that jarred me into the realisation that we were back in Australia, in Launceston. It was the day after we landed, and I’d just rolled up to the cash register at Kmart (as you do) and the cashier said in that real nasal northern suburbs Tasmanian accent:
“How yah goin’, darl’?”
Sunday, March 13th, 2011
I thought I’d bring you guys with me on my trip to work, starting with the view from our patio and ending with the trip on the skytrain from Waterfront station all the way down to Riverrock Casino. My trip from there on is pretty uneventful, so this is all you get 
Saturday, February 26th, 2011
One of the nice things about being in Vancouver during the winter is waking up and seeing the north shore mountains absolutely covered with snow, all the way down to a certain point. This is the freeze line, and it’s such an obvious cut off most of the time that it is quite remarkable to see it cut across the faces of all the mountains almost straight as a die.
The lights of North Vancouver seem to shine more brightly and the place just seems so much prettier when the freeze line is low. I think so anyway!
Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011
I put together a quick timelapse of our trip up to Cypress the other day to go skiing. Was a great fun day, found a new run that was a lot of fun (trees then open with jumps to play on), got stuck on an intense run that was made up of 2ft by 2ft chunks of ice from where everyone had been carving up the powder the day before – sucks to arrive a day late!
Anyhoo, here’s the vid:
Music is “Dr Yang” by Ben Folds
Friday, February 18th, 2011
One thing I’m certainly going to miss is just how dog friendly everybody and everywhere is over her in Vancouver and BC in general. Around town folks take their dogs with them everywhere, like for instance I saw someone last night taking their rather large dog into the bottle shop opposite our apartment.
The other cool thing is how comfortable folks are sharing their apartments with pooches. To an Aussie, if your going to have a dog then you HAVE to have a back yard with tall fences and a discreet corner you can try to train them to poop in. In Vancouver it’s the done thing to have dogs in apartments, many as small as 400 or 500 square feet with one bedroom or less.
In our previous building there was a Great Dane that lived there too. You know, the giant dog that you can almost walk under? Yep, one of them. Actually, there’s another one in the building just up from our current pad. There’s just something funny/weird about seeing a dog in an elevator. Sure, they’re acting all casual as if no dog anywhere else would ever get freaked out about it and it’s just the “done thing”, right?
When we first got here we were shocked, as we applied our Australian ideals to the Vancouver setting. That’s not right though, and if folks over here thought that they had to have a yard to have a dog then only a fraction of folks would be able to experience the company of a canine.
It would be an interesting life though, having a dog in an apartment, and quite possibly more social as you would be taking them out to water and run at the local park multiple times a day, running into other folks, talking dog, talking community, talking politics, talking whatever.
This is something that we wanted to try, having a dog in an apartment that is, but maybe it’s something we’ll have to try next time…
Friday, February 11th, 2011
What a great day this was! We had a BBQ to celebrate Australia day on the Saturday following Australia Day, out in Stanley Park under Ceperley Pavillion near 2nd beach. Now, this may sound like a great place to host an event during summer when it’s warm, but during the winter when it’s cold and miserable outside you really have to wonder…
Still, what’s Australia Day without a BBQ? We had around 25 hardy souls turn up with ages ranging from under 20 to well over 65, and multiple countries too, not just Australian and Canadian!
Of course it rained for much of the day, so we weren’t able to have the usual game of football or cricket, but it was great hanging out with a bunch of other Aussies for the day. We also managed to raise over $100 that has already been donated towards the Queensland flood appeal. A big shout out goes to all those who do donated and the Clancy’s Meat franchisee in Nordel who donated a bunch of snags and patties to keep the BBQ cooking. A big thanks also goes to Brooke who baked 30 lamingtons, all of which disappeared within minutes of the covers being pulled off.
Here’s some happy snaps, courtesy of Anna and Ben,
Some of the crew earlier on – there was up to 25 or so later on:
Yours truly manning the BBQ, with Brooke and Richard monitoring quality control
And some pictures courtesy of Brooke:
Thursday, February 3rd, 2011
One thing we’re going to miss for sure is the Seawall. This is the bike and walking path that skirts Vancouver for kilometers, stretching from the western corner of kits all the way to Science World on False Creek, then back out and around Stanley Park.
At the moment it’s great, as we live less than five minutes walk from the section that skirts the southern side of the downtown peninsula, so we can duck out there whenever we want for a stroll.
While it can be a little chilly in the winter, I think that part of the seawall is almost one of the sunburst parts if Vancouver on the really crisp, cold blue sky days that sporadically pop up amongst the dreary drizzly snowy gray days that we get otherwise.
We took advantage of one such day last Sunday, going for a stroll on the seawall, and even though the temperature would have been maximum 3 degrees c, lots of other Vancouverites joined us too.
I’m going to miss having such a wonderful, long, flat easy stroll so close to us. Every city should have something like the Vancouver Seawall!
Thursday, January 27th, 2011
It’s now almost two months till we’re on an airplane and heading back to Australia. Permanently. How crazy is that?
Like I’ve said before, this brings mixed feelings, as there’s some things I’m looking forward to doing at home, but there’s others that I’m going to miss from Vancouver. So seeing as I haven’t really got anything big that we’re doing right now to write about, I thought I’d do a few quick little posts when it springs to mind about things that I am and am not going to miss about Vancouver.
First thing? Something I’ll miss: The Skytrain. Generally clean, reliable and with a good amount of stops, it really brings this city together, you know? Like a good rug. As a matter of fact, I’m on it now, and have been catching it regularly to work for about the last 8 months or so.
Thursday, December 23rd, 2010
Last night we were lucky enough to be invited to go on the last evening horse and carriage ride around Stanley Park for the season… For free!
We started off near the rose garden (for those who know the park), which is sort of central north east. We then did a circuit around the eastern and northern side of the park, which took more than an hour. It’s a very cool way to see the park, as it’s quite a slow trip – some joggers left us in their dust at one stage – and you also by grand views if the north shore with Lions Gate Bridge perched between the park and the shore beautiful as always. Grouse mountain was looming in the background, and all you could see in the darkness was the lights from the ski hill lighting up the sparse cloud surrounding it like a halo.
Upon returning, and suffering a case of “numb bum” from the wooden seats, we decided to go check out Bright Nights, which is a Christmas light show put on by firefighters in Stanley Park every year as a fundraising appeal. It’s huge! Lots n lots of lights, stalls for snacks and last night it was absolutely stacked with people, half of whom seemed to be waiting to go on the train ride they have as part of the show.
It’s fun to see though, and the last time we went was two years ago in the depths of the snow dump we had. That meant that there was over a foot of snow on the ground and the lights looked amazing! Proper white Christmas stuff
Here’s some happy snaps:
Friday, December 17th, 2010
Last weekend we took the family Christmas tree shopping. Now, in north america the whole Christmas tree shopping thing seems to be waaaaaay bigger than I ever considered Australia. I think thats because they’ve got it worked out over here – at Christmas time it’s dark, cold, and there’s nothing else to focus upon apart from Christmas and drinking brandy based products.
Still, you have a choice here. You can pick up Christmas trees from your local gas station, nurseries, and there’s also charity places that spring up around the place, typically in church yards, that’ll sell you a tree too. We bought from one of them a couple of years ago and the needles were mostly brown by Christmas day, so we learnt our lesson there.
This year we decided to go to another, more traditional, method of getting ourselves a Christmas tree – visit a Christmas tree farm
These farms vary in what they offer, but the one that we went to was all the way out in Fort Langley, and it’s actually part of a farming group that my brother worked at all the way back in 1995. I visited him then when I was only 14 and as we started approaching the farm all the memories started flooding back – fun times!
These guys have got a great Christmas set up. Not only do you get to select and cut your own tree from a field of Christmas trees with multiple types of tree (we ended up with a Grand Fir), but they also have a petting zoo where kids of all ages can say hello to animals, hay rides around the farm, open fires to warm yourselves by, plus visits from Santa with gifts for the kids. It’s lots of fun, probably more so if you’ve got kids but I think anyone could get into it – hell, a baby goat was born while we were hanging out in the petting zoo!
I also have to say that Christmas trees over here totally kick the ass of trees in Australia. These ones LOOK like Christmas trees should. They almost don’t need decorations…
Nat and the boys out in the Christmas Tree field
Hmmm, you think the needles will stay on for the 50k trip home?
Hi boys!
Hanging out near the fire
Petting zoo
"Aaaaaaaaaagh!"
Our Christmas tree, home and decorated
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