Friday, September 8, 2006
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.
Sunday, September 3, 2006
Amy and the Pinata, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.
This seems to becoming a bit of a local tradition. I had a pinata at my own thirtieth, which we beat like a misbehaving mule.
Also filed in
|
|
buy Gabapentin canada
Seeing Cat Power is an experience. If for some reason you don’t know her, Cat Power is Chan Marshall, famously neurotic singer-songwriter behind some of the most soulful and beautiful Southern-gothic-flavored indie ballads of the past decade.
She played a long, spare solo set without a backing band or opening act, accompanying herself on guitar or piano or sometimes just singing a capella. She stopped in the middle of songs to complain about the sound or tell jokes or take cigarette breaks, she forgot the words to some of her own songs, and one time just walked off stage (she came back, though I’ve heard sometimes she doesn’t). Turns out when you can sing with such an achingly beautiful voice, people will put up with a lot of eccentricities.
Whew. It took almost two weeks, but I’m almost done uploading pictures from my visit to New Zealand. This is the route I took, starting in Dunedin, and ending in Auckland 16 days later.
As an extra added bonus, you can click on many of the place names on the map and go to my photos of said place. Isn’t that neat?
Yes, yes, you’re welcome.
Link (to larger, but non-clickable version of the map).
Or, skip this whole clickymap thing and go straight to my New Zealand photoset, or all my New Zealand blog posts.
A mosaic of the New Zealand pics I’ve posted on Flickr. It was quite a bit of work whittling down the hundreds I took. And I have several panorama to post as well, should I manage to get some stitching software up and running.
Links to photoset, slideshow.