Been a while, I can't claim that I've been too busy to write recently, I've had time, but a certain density of perceived activity my end needs to be had before I feel I can justify a post. When I think about what I have to write about today, I've been doing a lot, but life has certainly begun to settle down to a daily pace of sorts.
Last time I wrote was just before Halloween, so I'll go by what I've been up to.
Halloween
Was a lot of fun! We all know North American's hit this "holiday" way harder than at home, even though we clearly invented it :P, everyone goes nuts for it! Cuteness factor of the excellent costumes all the kids wear is pretty high, my favourite was seeing a small girl dressed as a companion cube :D
For my part I went to three Halloween parties - naturally, getting good use out of Mine and Danielle's last minute panic costume solution of "walk into the second hand store, grab first costume available".
I went as Kermit the frog
Danielle as a Unicorn.
the costumes were admittedly designed for a 5 year old but that's nothing that a little determination and scissors couldn't sort out, my 3 Halloween parties were:
1)Skytrain party! Dancing on the metro line with a bunch of other random Vancouverites, before hitting bars in the town lots of fun - here's a short video of the happs:
Watch for the entertaining moment where the train heads off from yet another stop causing everyone to scream
Some photos of the night :D
2) Exploring the exciting world of the "walk of lost souls" an entire area of the town given overt to converting backyards and streets into spootakular displays of things, everyone dressed up and walks around exploring! Very cool:
We Went to See Cirque du soleil do "Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour"
This was INNNCREDIBLE. THe dancing was just out of this world... I essentailyl can't possibly convey it in words, it was just awesome, it was also in the epic ice hockey arena which was fun to see!
If you have any chance to see this show though it is all kinds of incredible!
Ok!
So on with adventures, November 11th - remembrance day is a larger holiday here as well, taken as a day off by everyone in the US and Canada, so it being a long weekend, our friends Tiff and Winston were headed to Seattle for a short explore and shopping. Being in dire end of new pants and socks Danielle and I decided this seemed like a justifiable reason to cross over to Uncle Sam land, it was excellent to visit, however: pro tip - never attempt to cross the Vancouver Seattle Border on a Holiday weekend, we queued for 6 hours. It was actually ranked among the more difficult border crossings I have experienced, only marginally beaten down to third place by the time I had to hitch a ride in the back of a sheep van to find a man who could stamp me across the Bolivian border.
Once we were there though - fun times were had :D We visited markets where fish were thrown:
and found the original starbucks (I was far too non plussed by the EPIC CROWD OF PEOPLE that had also found the original starbucks, I took a photo anyway)
Briony - an entire shop dedicated to speciality toffee apples, I thought of you!
Found some excellent little drinkeries - played some Pictionary while sipping whisky before heading to a live music bar:
You guys would accept extension cable for extension cord right!?
Got a bit drunk - I put on Winston's hat and immediately became 19% more street
Whisky Tasting!
This was an excellent night where Winston Tiff and I went to a night where you paid £13 to drink as much high class whisky as you could and eat fancy nibbles. It all started off very civilized... it ended with me yelling numbers randomly at a man to win myself a bottle of 10 year old Macallan. Fantastic.
Board Games!
Faced with an exciting lack of demands on my time, I set out to the "meetups" website to find what was going on in Vancouver that I could crash - well, it turns out there is a boardgames meet up group just down the road from me in lovely Kitsilano, I've been to one session and got destroyed at settlers of Catan, I'll be back!
Skiing!
Made it to the hill for the first time, thanks to Tiff, who dropped me a text saying that she was headed to the hill and I should go! Well I agreed, I should, so we went!! It. Was. Awesome. a 40 minute drive, and bam cypress hill - the site of the recent Olympics, and as much fresh powder as you could shake a stick at, glorious.
Don't know if you can see it in this iphone photo - but the carpet of mountains that lay beyond this point was ultra lovely.
So - Less of the photos, more of the Job hunting.
Saying that, here is a photo Danielle took of me on the job hunting prowl one morning - it should be noted that I found a super cheap Vietnamese woman to cut my hair, and have ended up looking like a 1996 member of nsync :( but I found a really nice suit for super cheap also so swings and roundabouts
The bulk of my time in the weekdays in the last 5 weeks has been job hunting. I began with a vengeance and applied to many places and many jobs.
After a fortnight, no one had got back to me and I was quite sad, so I went to check that I was applying correctly. I was not, in anyway, applying correctly. The extent to which job hunting is different here is... extensive. In fact I found an entire website devoted to "applying for a job in Canada when you are British".
Long story short, I made some changes, and started again. My savings last until year end 2011, so I had until then to secure gainful employment... 2 weeks into the new process - success! I had job interviews with a few different people, but I wasn't feeling terribly excited by anything I'd found yet - then entered a new possibility, on a day where I decided to adjust my usual strategy, I wrote to a small tech start up, they develop web and smartphone applications which help people track the origins of their food. This was extra exciting to me because
1)I think food, its origins and the lack of information the consumers have (especially here) is very interesting, so if I could work with it I knew I'd be happy
2) It's a techy company so they are all excellently geeky
3) It's a start up and so you get to be an individual
Hurrah! Not that they actually had a job opening... I wrote to them anyway, and was surprised when they asked me to an informal coffee interview, one interview lead to another, which lead to a fun day working on open data sourcing for the food industry (part of the international open data day), which finally last Friday lead to me chatting to the CEO of the company about what things I could do with them. Well it seems they'd like me to work with them to come and do exactly what it is I want to do (public outreach, marketing and promotional writing)! A small hitch: they can't technically pay me for a while, so I'm going to work with them for free for a while and depending on how they move forward the plan is that they might be able to give me a full time position in 2 months.
Now it's a bit of a risky strategy, especially in light of the fact that a far more regular 9-5 well paying but less exciting job seems to be available for me... do I take the risk, bet on my ideal job and ideal workplace by working for free so I am well placed to take the job in 2 months if it comes to pass? Or do I go the stable road of guaranteed pay checks.
Well it's not even a question really is it? :D To the lands of financial uncertainty I go!
The plan? Work part time with them for free for two months, use my "Technical Consultancy" work with UNICEF, and possibly another part time job here to support myself and take the chance to upgrade to full time and paid if I can!
This is clearly the right choice because all the best stories of career success start something like this, besides if I didn't risk it I'd always wonder if it might have been awesome.
So next week I will start there! The office is in amazing China town which will be fun to work in!
Special thanks goes out to my friend Mike who is teaching me a lot about how to do my current part time job without whom I don't think I would be able to generate income and feed myself.
So - that's the plan.
Danielle's course
...continues to go well, she's just completed her Finals for this semester, and although she is reluctant to ever say it is the best in her class, or top 3 at least, scoring between 95% - 100% on all her tests thus far, although we are still waiting to hear about anatomy which was the hardest of them.
She gets treatment from practitioners in her school if she wants it - here is a photo of her back after a recent session of cupping and Guashu - she wanted me to emphasise how it didn't hurt at all! And felt really good as they were doing it, sort of like a massage that gets inside the muscles. I said it looked like she had been in some kind of terrible accident, but the marks were all but gone by the next day.
As for Vancouver
it remains fun and beautiful and I remain happy - had a stroll yesterday and took these pics of how things have been... nothing will ever stop the people here paddle boarding it seems :)
Take the risk! Life is fun on the edge.
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