Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Summer Heat

It's hot in this town and I think I'm the only one enjoying it! A lot of people have been coming into the store complaining about the heat, after what felt like eternal rain this is what I've been waiting for!

In Vancouver no matter how hot it gets the shade is always pleasant and the Ocean breeze freshens the air constantly so it's never thick and sticking to you like it does in Toronto.

Photo's are on the way, just not today. I have a lot a great pictures...just not the patience to upload them.

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

David Emanuel Everyone!

Good news everyone! David Emanuel is doing a television show called 'Shop Around the World' and the crew is going to stop at the store for their Vancouver segment.

Saturday, July 15, 2006

More On Driving in Vancouver

I forgot to mention the 'by the way I'm turning left' and the also popular 'I'm turning left sometime in the future'.

The first is when you are going along just dandy like, and all of a sudden the jerk in front of you decides that they want to go left and stops with no warning. So if you are new to driving in Vancouver keep some space between yourself and the driver in front of you.

The latter is the exact opposite. This driver will have their turning signal going for a couple of blocks leaving you wondering if you'll be going 30 km/hr forever.

Like in New Jersey (check out New York Hack)people here don't often use turn signals so you may find yourself in a collision. If you do use your signals to change lanes you'll find that if there is a car behind you in that lane they will speed up so that you either can't get into the lane or they will do the 'speed up, cut you off then slow to a crawl' as mentioned in my last entry. This is by far the most aggravating driving technique I have ever experienced anywhere in the world; I challenge you to find one more frustrating. It reminds me of being in kindergarten or grade one when being first was really important for no real reason.


Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Vancouver Driving

This is a quick one though this subject definitely deserves a lot more attention.

Last night while I was waiting for Dane to pick me up for a game of tennis I noticed a great license plate. It was simply: AAARGH, now I can't even begin to explain why this is so particularly appropriate for Vancouver....but I'll try. Here is a short break down of Vancouver driving ineptitude.

1) The famous and regularly implemented 'speed up, cut you off then slow to a crawl'. An example of this was when we were headed home from our tennis game last night and a car sped out of a side street totally cutting us off then slowed to about 30km/hr...on a main road so main that it's actually called Main Street. That was not enough for this person, when we tried to move into the lane next to us to escape that car it cut us off again! Twice in under 3 minutes and all we wanted was to actually go the speed limit.

2) Relates to 1. The speed limit. Just about every driver here ignores it...but not to go faster as one would think people in a city would have places to go and people to see....but they usualy go (and this is no exaggeration) 10-20 km/hr BELOW the speed limit. (People from Texas are worse then locals though...Seriously at 20km/hr just get out and walk)

That's all I have time for now. I will have more to share as driving is more aggravating then walking (see: red rover red rover.......post, link on right side list) which will lead us to the rules of bike riding.

Friday, July 07, 2006

V is for Vacation!

These are crabs that are tearing apart a muscle. I have a video of them going at the poor thing and it looks like it's sped up they are moving so fast. What amazes me about the little crabs on Qualicum beach is that they come in all kinds of colours from bright green to deep red. Some of them have a really big left pincher and others are symmetrical.

When the sun is setting and the tide is coming back in if you stand very still on the rocky part of the beach you can hear them scuttling around the rocks. It's such an eerie sound because you can hear thousands of them moving around and if they had a collective consciousness they would probably attack and eat you!


Jelly fish!
Arrrgh! Monster shadows.
I don't usually do the Bavarian Farmer girl thing, but because my bangs stood straight up I decided to pay homage to my roots. I can't even begin to describe how amazing the air smells here.


And the Ferry ride home...sigh. V is for Very sad to go home so soon.

V is for Vancouver Island!

As many of you know Dane and I never close the store. We work seven days a week and that's just the way it is.

We closed the shop for two days over the Canada Day long weekend and went to Vancouver Island and it was magnificent! We were in Qualicum which is about 40 minutes North of Nanaimo. The beach there is fairly isolated so you can really get a lot of relaxing done.


This is a photo of the inside of a dead crab that I have a portrait of below. It's weird how the photo's on this thing don't post in sequence of how you upload them. Dane found this crab on the beach and left it in a small tide pool to see what would happen and we learned that crabs are cannibals. The inside of this crab was full of what ever crabs are full of and when I took this photo the tiny crabs (also pictured below) had eaten half of it's insides!
This is Dane going out to sea.


This is the dead crab that we fed to the smaller crabs.


This is a little crab. It's like a live National Geographic show on that beach. In Ontario you'd never get to get so close to wild sea creatures. It's pretty amazing how close to nature you really are out here.

Sunday, July 02, 2006

Friends

I wasn't going to post this one, but with Claudia's request for more I thought I'd post it even though it was written last week and I have all kinds of photo's to share.



I recently had a great conversation with my friend Andie. She helped me out with a fantastic new haircut on Thursday and a new realization. One of my biggest complaints about Vancouver has been that it is generally an unfriendly city. People are superficially very friendly, but forming friendships here is difficult.

Hard core Vancouverites (remember the ones that Lughhhhhhve Vancouver) will dispute this fact and say that it's the new comers that aren't trying hard enough to make friends. I will say as someone who has been here for three years that my first year here was really fucking hard, and that no matter how outgoing I was no one wanted to know me, and finding work was like trying to find a snowball in Mexico.

What Andie made me realize is that it's o.k to not be friendly. Thanks Andie!