VanAussie Daily

6 months after we got home

Author: Jared

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’?”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 4th, 2011 at 3:36 pm and is filed under Downtown Vancouver, Going to miss, travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.