VanAussie Daily

Freeze line

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!

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Dog friendly

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…

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Posted in Different things in Canada, Downtown Vancouver, Going to miss, In and around BC, Musings | No Comments »

The seawall & bright clear winter days

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!

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Less than three months

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.

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