Jane, Simon, Josh and Rowan lived in Vancouver from 16 May 2004 to 15 January 2005. These are our blog entries from then.
It's 2005! Where does all the time go?
We went into town last night to join in with the 'First Night Vancouver 05' celebrations. This was a family event and therefore it was alcohol free in true Canadian style. This was a bit different from our celebrations in the past - in more ways than one ;-)
The first show we went to see was entitled 'Kung Haggis Fat Chow' which was a joining of the Scottish and Chinese cultures. The main character was a short Chinese man dressed in a kilt playing an accordion. The mixture of Scottish and Chinese players and singers performed various traditional songs from both cultures with funny bits for the kids such as 'My chow mein lies over the ocean....'. It was quite a bizarre show, but really indicative of the vast mixture of cultures here.
Well they don't do things by half around here. We are going to see the Polar Express 3D Experience tomorrow and I spent last night phoning them (automated machine - boring story) to see if we needed to book before going. It turns out that we need to be there 2 hours before to be sure of getting tickets and then 1 1/2 hours before to line up to make sure we get good seats - you know if you don't get good seats in an Imax your neck really hurts when you come out and you miss half of what's going on on screen.....
When we first arrived here we thought everything was so civilized and we never had to share a mall or bus with more than half a dozen people but now it seems to have gone mad - line ups everywhere for everything, must be the time of year. The cinema (sorry Theatre) we have chosen is about an hours ride away from us in Langley and is built like a space ship - we have promised the boys that we will take them at some point so we have to go really.....
Came across this post about gas prices by somebody local. I thought it was just us that couldn't understand the logic of the gas prices, but it seems we're not the only ones.
The prices seem to go up and down at random - one price in the morning and another in the afternoon? And sometimes 10c different on opposite sides of the road. When we've been driving visitors around we start saying things like '72.9', '81.5', etc - they think we're talking about the temperature but we're really reading out the gas prices.
[There, remembered to call it gas so maybe I'm becoming a local after all].
Coming home yesterday the sign on the front of the bus alternated between the destination and 'Merry Xmas'. It's just one of those totally trivial and ultimately meaningless little touches that makes Vancouver such an enjoyable place to be.
In Sheffield it would probably say 'if you have to but haven't you got somewhere better to go'.