Week Two

Hey all :)

Just a quick update on week two... so while I've been up to a lot, it's mainly been more exploring. Have been cycling around town to learn the ropes, find the cool places to eat, the fun things to do... also Danielle and I have been on the missino to kit out the flat, it's been fun :)

The flat is excellent, but it's a fairly big space to fill, I'll upload photos of it once we have a few more things. So I guess not too much to report, events of note:

1) Sushi! Vancouver is obsessed with the stuff, and it is cheap as well, we began our mission to explore all local sushi restaurants with the one 2 minutes away from our flat, it was really good - Danielle is still on the mission to convince me it's a good form of food in general, but I'm getting there, enjoying "starter sushi" anyway (which basically involves... crab and avacado in rice rolls as far as I can tell.

2) Thanksgiving dinner! Our friends Tiff and Winston, along with Tiff's dad Yoshi (who helped Danielle by kitting out our place with a lot of great stuff) invited us over to have a delayed thanksgiving - it was fantastic, huge turkeys, lots of stuffing cranberry sauce, and then the different Canadian things:
-Creamed sweetcorn, what is that about? Well it was delicious, they have it instead of bread sauce I think
-Mashed Yam with... wait for it... marshmellow on top... for the main course... yup it was weird, but weirdly tasty
-Pumpkin pie - the classic, and it is pretty great.

Winston had some Remy Martin to close out the whole affair, good time was had by all

3) Sailing Club!
Headed out west along the sea wall to find the community of Jericho and the sailing club there, standard Canadian friendliness, fantastic club with loads of opportunities for dinghy sailing with clubs as well as information on where to sign up as crew on yacht racing on wednesday afternoons... all kicks off in April so for now I wait...

4) More adventures around the city - been taking every opportunity to go for walks and cycles around and have taken a few more pictures, Autumn continues to be stunning in Vancouver - Mainly been exploring the coatline:

The Beach by our house leads around to the city:


Once you get around to the city you can go up over the Burrard bridge and see the view back out to the Pacific:



Oh and while I remember - this is a link to a big panarama I took of Kitsalano (our area) beach at sunset, it's fairly huge, but it gives you a sense of the area, its been my reading spot this week :) You can also see (if you zoom) all the tankers heading out to sea from the industrial side of town:
http://i.imgur.com/15lOn.jpg

On the way back we found a beach dedicated to people with dogs - they were all very happy! It's a good place to hang out if you can't have a pet cause they all come and play with you ^^


Danielle hanging out on her walk to school one day


The only other thing I've been up to which wont really interest most readers of this blog is going on a sort of series of sidequests around the city to collect componenets to build my new PC. Craigslist (North American gumtree... not as good as Gumtree >:( ) lets me arrange meets with people and today I managed to get my graphics card (Asus Radeon HD6850) from a guy who turned out to be a Korean and thus an amazing stracraft player (friend aquired +1)


I also have my case and PSU, a few key pieces of that puzzle remaining though... oh yes which finally reminds me the other thing I've been spending lots of time doing - money admin - opening up bank accounts and arranging transfers, hopefully sending them across tonight, although it turns out that the EU crisis meetings has caused the pound to slump so now I'm watching the little currency charts live, like I'm some kind of trader... I'll update next week with tales of Halloween in Vancouver, and further adventures.