We had The Police playing at our local pub last night.
Or rather, we've just moved to our new apartment which is across the road from GM Place - the stadium where the Vancouver Canucks ice hockey team play their home games and sometime music venue for touring bands.
They have reformed for a world tour of which this was the first date, and looking out the kitchen window we could see plenty of limo's taking the estemed audience home afterwards.
To be honest I'd forgotten they were playing in Vancouver as it was a while ago the date was announced, and it wasn't until I looked at the BBC News website the next morning I realised what had been on.
Initially I was confused why a two-year old story about how highly Vancouver is rated as a city was in the list of the top five most read stories. But then I realised that it must have been The Police's presence in the city that had drawn attention to it.
We went to see Jarvis Cocker last night. We had to really as he's also originally from Sheffield....
He was in Vancouver as part of a short tour to promote his recent solo album, co-incidentally also named Jarvis, which was released here about a month ago.
It was great to hear some music
Or at least absent from mainstream radio/TV
Any pointers from Vancouver locals welcome.....
It did make me a bit homesick
As Pulp are on my list of local bands that I've never seen, this slightly made up for it.
We went to our first ice hockey game, the Vancouver Canucks v. Minnesota Wild, for Rowan's birthday. Luckily the Canucks won after extra-time and a shoot-out, thanks to some good saves by his hero Robert Luongo, the goal-keeper.
I'm only just getting the hang of knowing which team is playing better, who is likely to score and whether a goal was due to good attacking or bad defensive play. It's coming though.
Compared to UK football (soccer) matches the music is better, but I was a bit thrown by the national anthem played before the game as it was only a league match. It was against a US team though.
There's more shoving and pushing on the pitch. Although some of it seems a bit ritualistic and half-hearted, referees do not intervene until somebody falls down. As a friend of mine made out, he once went to a boxing match and a game of ice hockey broke out half-way through.
Took the kids to school on the bus/seabus again today.
Tickets are valid for 90 minutes travel on buses, the skytrain (elevated light railway) or the seabus (which goes back and forward across the harbour).
For the last 4 days in a row the time stamped on my ticket has been 9:24. It's getting slightly predictable - I almost wish it would be late one morning just for variety. But then it's timed to get to the seabus on time so if it more than 2 minutes late we'd miss it.
We went to open an account with a Canadian bank today.
It wasn't exactly like 'Bowling for Columbine' where Michael Moore gets given a free gun for opening an account, but the background music that they had on while we were there included 'Armed and Extremely Dangerous' by The Three Degrees.
The main difference between the banking systems is that here banks charge by the number of transactions, and there is a fee for drawing money out of bank machines that belong to other banks.