hollowsolid: C eh? N eh? D eh?

East Van has Nice Cars

It's been a pretty crazy couple of weeks round Vancouver way. For a start it's been snowing pretty heavily, which was beautiful, festive, snowmantic and snowmantastic for the first couple of days until it turned into black, frozen, dirty slush, thus turning our (my) short daily commute to Blenz into a hazardous, uphill, icy, obstacle course. But the mochas are so worth it and they also helpfully provide me with a very well padded wintercoat so even if I do go bun os cionn, my mocha-fed bodyfat cushions the fall perfectly. Ahhh sweet mochas where have all my teeth gone? But it was definitely an experience to watch a snowstorm from the 15th floor - fat, slowly falling snowflakes, like trade unionised raindrops on a go-slow, taking their time to fall to ground. Vancouver is stunningly beautiful after a fresh fall of snow. So that's a record breaking November snowfall to add to our record breaking "wet months" this year. Before the snow came, it had been raining heavily and constantly since sometime in October causing a lot of landslides or mudslides out in the suburbs. The buzzword on the frozen streets of Vancouver was "turbidity" (–adjective 1. not clear or transparent because of stirred-up sediment or the like; clouded; opaque; obscured: the turbid waters near the waterfall). In this case it was the turbid waters near the city reservoirs. So there was nice shade of Perestroika Brown water coming out of our taps, caused by aforementioned stirred up sediment. And the toilet bowl was already full with brown water even before I got to it in the mornings which kind of left me feeling useless and existentially bankrupt. There was a boil water warning on all tap water for around 10 days, cue all bottled water selling out in Safeway / Capers (you all know about Capers at this stage). Canadians will use any excuse to queue. I actually think they enjoy lineups because it gives them rich pickings of static, defenceless PCTs (potential conversation targets). "So it's snowing pretty bad eh? You here to get some water?" "Yr bottle shoor has a pretty spout...." etc derogatorily etc.

The start of the snowfall - Stanley Park

Speaking of Capers, they had a Customer Appreciation day there last week with 10% off everything so we stocked up on Tofurkey just in case this snow keeps falling and reaches the 15th floor. OK the likliehood of that happening is far more remote than the likliehood of us really liking Tofurkey. Strange name though. They should rebrand it to something less ridiculous sounding. "Nearlymeat" or something.

Our freezer earlier today

My birthday went well - thank you all for the good wishes. We went for a supposedly fancy dinner at a new trendy Japanese place on Denman. However we never did our homework and it ended up being a very vegetarian hostile place with zero veggie mains on the menu - which is very unusual for a Japanese restaurant. To console myself I did treat myself to a long overdue purchase of a lovely HH super hi tech raincoat. I'd been eyeing up the jacket for weeks and I finally took the plunge the day before my birthday. As luck would have it there was a really nice Irish girl working in the shop and I was chatting away with her when she said there was an unofficial 20% Irish discount which saved me about $100. I passed my old raincoat onto our local homeless trolley pusher (M has christened him Denis even though he's very obviously Chinese) and I've tragically spotted him a couple of times asleep in doorways soaked to the skin in this incessant rain and snow despite my oversized semi waterproof gift.

M (dressed as me) and M, Stanley Park

We both gave in our notice in work on the same day last week. We were expecting mine to be the most bloody but as it turned out they offered me a job in the UK or Malaysia. Completely unexpected and to be honest completely impractical from my perspective but it was nice of them. M's resignation experience wasn't nearly as pleasant. she's a part time contract worker so you'd expect a relatively straightforward separation. but her boss is a crazy power hungry workaholic Chinese woman who has basically built specialised courses around M's excellent teaching/childcare skills and has added no end to the reputation of her school purely from the feedback and referrals she's received from the parents of the kids M teaches. So impressed were a couple of parents with their children's progress under M that they had requested lucrative personal one-to-one tuition for their children outside of Hokus (which would unfortunately be a breach of contract) and failing that they wanted to be informed if ever M moved to a new school so they could enroll their kids there. So when M told her she was leaving the boss got very panicked. The reason M gave for leaving was that I had been refused my visa extension (an extension I hadn't even applied for) and we therefore had no choice but to return home. Janet then, worryingly, announced that she had a very close friend in immigration and that she would *wink wink* try and work something out. She then started grilling M on the precise details of the reasons for the visa extension refusal etc. Poor M, who wouldn't be the most convincing of bare faced liars, "nearly weed on" herself. We got a very strange phonecall the next day asking was this the K residence.....yes...... is Lynne K there?.......no. We reckon it was Jeanette's friend in immigration grasping at straws trying to locate our non existent application. Scary psycho-hosebeast-chinese-opus-dei-catholic-mafia stuff. M was genuinely scared that the lovely Janet would rumble the fabricated story and actually sue her. Which we could, like, totally do without :) But she's settled down a bit now thank god and seems resigned to gracefully allowing M to leave.

**Source Required

We both felt really bad for the Ks when we heard about your hellish return journey. And even worse when we heard that our brazen orange luggage was the only piece of luggage to survive. It's unbelievable that luggage could be lost on both legs of the journey. I can only imagine the brain melt filling out the missing luggage forms must have been in your jetlagged stressed state. So rather than apologising, I suppose all I can do is thank you all again for going to such unbelievable bother and expense just to come visit us. That applies to everyone who came to visit us during our stay. It genuinely made the adventure alot more interesting and a hell of a lot more fun. Hopefully the experience was worth the hassle. Lost baggage and delayed flight horror stories don't bode well for our 3 stop flight (over Christmas) to Buenos Aires via Mexico City and Lima though. We really can't afford to lose our beloved tent.

More East Van Automotive Oddities

And to top it all it's probably been more chaotic for me in work than it has been in the real world where we're currently up to our ears extricating ourselves from our adopted home. Selling furniture and bikes (we love craigslist), booking accommodation and flights, trying to jump through all the hoops to ensure we get our security deposit back, trying to fit in a couple of trips / experiences that we can't leave without experiencing (a weekend trip to Seattle and or Saltspring Island being the most pressing). So it's chaotic. I suppose it's better to get all that crap out of the way now rather than running around like a headless Tofurkey on Christmas week (cough).

M "Chocatini Dupree" B

We've also had M sometimes staying with us. He's a really nice almost native Vancouverite who was born here, lived in Vancouver until he was 5, moved home to Kildare, where his mam taught me how to swim, then back here for 8 years at 16 before finally moving back to Galway where he now resides on top of Taylors Hill. See how I slipped in an irrelevant reference to my athleticism into his heavily abridged biography? I'm a hoor for that. Sorry M. So he's been staying with us on and off (when he's not having his pipes cleaned :) and introducing us to all his old school friends and getting us drunk in bars and clubs we've never even heard of and making us lose focus from all our mini crises - which is probably a good thing. We went dancing for the first time during the week aswell. 11 months in - how unfunky (old) are we? In a town where you have to bring your passport to go dancing, youthful spontanaeity doesn't come into it. It was a Tuesday night, pelting snow and I got drunk and pulled some muscles in my chest by dancing too "avant gardely". Then we had a snowball fight outside which turned into a row, with a hangover and NO CHIPS!! following closely behind. Good night though even though Wednesday was a write off for me in work. They don't invite me to meetings in there anymore so it's fine. I'm like, totally over them. Oh and thanks to M for the "how do you spell Canada?" joke used in the title of the post. He also gave me a much appreciated, albeit too little too late, grounding in the rules and the heritage of hockey over pints in the Dover Arms where we were watching the hapless Canucks getting beaten. He's a bit of a hockey nerd even getting up in the middle of the night back home to watch games. He also graciously agreed to act as my international musical mule - but you'll all hear more about that later. But it was great to see him and get a chance to hang out with him for a while in the city he disappeared to after I learned to swim. Oh... and he drinks Baileys from a shoe.