Winning the battle against Canada

Moving to a new city or town is a bit like a race against yourself. You’ve got to get yourself a house, job and life quickly. For me, it had to be all done within a few days to avoid those inevitable questions: what the hell am I doing here?, why have I left awesome friends/job/town/life to sit in a scungy hostel with no money to even have a beer?

So the first few days I was on a massive race. I reckon I ran a couple of marathons getting the whole house/phone/bank account/job (x2) sorted. Managed to squeeze in a free John Butler Trio gig in Whistler with a few of my flatmates too, so it wasn’t all running.

Strange things I’ve noticed about Vancouver so far.

1. Buses stop to change drivers on dodgy back streets where they just sit for 14 minutes (record thus far) waiting for the next person to rock up.
2. The lovely house I live in (with 17 other people) looks exactly like it belongs on one of those ‘small town middle America’ sitcoms. Maybe I could play an extra on that show. Could be my claim to fame.
3. It snowed. In late April. Big fat snowflakes that stayed on the ground for a whole day.
4. You have to pay for incoming calls on your mobile. That sucks. But mobiles have a ‘home zone’ – so you can call a mobile from home for a local call. Kind of defeats the purpose of ‘mobile’ communication, but I guess that’s why they call them cell phones over here.
5. It’s quicker to walk to work than take the bus. Even though my ‘day’ job is about 7km from my house. Sometimes I really miss London!
6. Kits, the area I live, is like a carbon copy of Chapel St in Melbourne. It’d be more eerie though if there weren’t snow capped mountains in the background.

So now for the ‘real world’. I guess after months on the road it was always going to be hard when the reality of ‘no money’ hit. My schedule is a little insane right now – basically involving getting up at 5:30, going to the gym, then 2 jobs, and getting home about 11:30. Sat/Sun is nice bc I’ll prob have half or a whole day off. So in reality, my body is probably going to start yelling at me soon (but I’m living with a dietician, who’s telling me what to eat so hopefully I can put off the whole ‘collapse into a coma’ until I’ve at least earned enough money to pay for hospital!).

Anyway – I guess this is a little depressing, so I’ll end it here, and will write again when I have a life!