Krasnoyarsk 
Five years ago today, having quit my job in Toronto and been accepted to UBC, I stepped onto a plane with a couple of bags full of CDs and clothes, and moved to Vancouver.
I know Vancouver isn’t perfect, and there are certainly things that annoy me, but I love it regardless. Of all the places I’ve lived, Vancouver is the only one that really feels like home to me. Which is kind of strange, since I didn’t even visit Vancouver until I was in my mid-twenties. I mostly grew up in Regina, and I lived in Toronto for years after that, but I didn’t feel I was living in the right place until I came here. Toronto always felt kind of vast and impersonal, even though I came to enjoy living there. And it was pretty clear since high school that Regina didn’t have much use for me. I may not be the world’s most ambitious geek, but my aspirations are higher than a job debugging COBOL code for a crown corporation.
Vancouver, on the other hand, is the baby bear’s porridge. Not too big, not too small, not at the center of things or too isolated, not too anonymous, not too in-your-face (I like my social boundaries.)
And really, Vancouver is amazingly beautiful. Saskatchewan is beautiful too (Regina not so much), but it’s a stark, alien beauty that continually reminds you that human beings weren’t meant to live there. A couple of decades living on a barren and inhospitable prairie hundreds of kilometers from any ocean, mountain or forest primed me to appreciate British Columbia’s landscapes and, above all, its temperate climate — even if that means 40 weeks of the year are rather on the grey and drizzly side.
- Link>> to some pictures of my adopted home.