In a move away from my usual travelogue, this is something a little different, which has been sparked by interest in pop-culture.
Hunter S Thompson and Sandra Dee both passed away this week. Here's an article I liked from Melbourne daily paper, The Age.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/02/25/1109180099471.html
Saturday, February 26, 2005
Friday, February 25, 2005
it's all starting to come together nicely
I've moved into a nice, warm, confortable, fully furnished 2 bedroom basement apartment with an English guy from Portsmouth named Ceri. I've landed a pretty central location, as it's about 15minutes by train to the city centre - and about the same by bike (i love my new bike). It's $400 per month, which is equivalently more expensive than other places i've lived in at home or abroad (but i've been incredibly lucky with amazing cheap rent deals in the past) - but this price is about mid-range for Vancouver. The kicker is that when i leave the house and walk out the back gate, i'm faced with a HUGE park and Trout Lake smack bang in the middle of it!
It also a 10 minute walk down to one of the funkiest districts in all Vancouver - Commercial Drive. To make a comparison, it's very similar to Brunswick or Smith Streets in Fitzroy/Collingwood area. It's full of great cafe's, clothing shops, insanely awesome record stores, organic fruit and veg shops, international flavour restaurants, and a serenely cool relaxed vibe in the street populated by uber-cool hippy bohemian-type student/artist folks strolling by with nary a care in the world. There seems to be a bit of an activist scene in Vancouver which kinda centres around this area as well. Just my scene. I like it!!!
My housemate Ceri is a 30 year old Oxford graduate who works as a designer/A.I. programmer for computer game company Radical. He's a bit of a sophisticated, intellectual type, and really interesting to talk to - lots of fascinating conversations and ideas to think about and mull over with this guy. He has a very eclectic cdee collection too - lots of stuff i've never heard of, but is rather appealing to my ears.
I've been working for the past 2 weeks for a small boutique property management company, as a receptionist of all things!! It's $13 per hour, and it was initially a 3 week contract and so was due to finish up next Friday March 4th, but the boss called me into her office yesterday and asked me if i'd stay on til the end of the month. it's a pretty cruisy position with not a whole lot to do, and i have a lot of spare time on my hands, but i manage to make myself look busy, and when i'm given something specific to work on, i can get it finished pretty quickly, all the while exuding my Aussie charm on the guys and girls there!!
I was initially contemplating a long-weekend trip down to Seattle when this contract finished, taking the weekend plus the next monday and tuesday, making it a nice 4 day trip away, so when i was offered the contract extension, i mentioned this to my boss. she was like 'go ahead, take them'....so it looks like i'm going to Seattle!!
I've been talking about going to Seattle for about the last 6 years, and when i say i'm gonna do something, i usually do....it might take quite a while for it to happen, but it does - Canada was about 4 years in the making, but i'm here now! The fact that my good American mate Jennifer from my time in Edinburgh is from there makes it even better! I can't wait!!!
I've also got plans to head up to Whistler and the snow for a wee bit before the ski season finishes. It would be criminal of me to be here in Vancouver and not spend some time at one of North America's premier ski-snowboarding locations. I've pretty much nixx-ed the idea of spending the remainder of the season up there, and trying to get work. A spanner was thrown in the works of that plan when i arrived 3 weeks ago and there was NO snow at Whistler. But i reckon i can afford a couple of weeks before the end of April.
talk soon,
anthony
It also a 10 minute walk down to one of the funkiest districts in all Vancouver - Commercial Drive. To make a comparison, it's very similar to Brunswick or Smith Streets in Fitzroy/Collingwood area. It's full of great cafe's, clothing shops, insanely awesome record stores, organic fruit and veg shops, international flavour restaurants, and a serenely cool relaxed vibe in the street populated by uber-cool hippy bohemian-type student/artist folks strolling by with nary a care in the world. There seems to be a bit of an activist scene in Vancouver which kinda centres around this area as well. Just my scene. I like it!!!
My housemate Ceri is a 30 year old Oxford graduate who works as a designer/A.I. programmer for computer game company Radical. He's a bit of a sophisticated, intellectual type, and really interesting to talk to - lots of fascinating conversations and ideas to think about and mull over with this guy. He has a very eclectic cdee collection too - lots of stuff i've never heard of, but is rather appealing to my ears.
I've been working for the past 2 weeks for a small boutique property management company, as a receptionist of all things!! It's $13 per hour, and it was initially a 3 week contract and so was due to finish up next Friday March 4th, but the boss called me into her office yesterday and asked me if i'd stay on til the end of the month. it's a pretty cruisy position with not a whole lot to do, and i have a lot of spare time on my hands, but i manage to make myself look busy, and when i'm given something specific to work on, i can get it finished pretty quickly, all the while exuding my Aussie charm on the guys and girls there!!
I was initially contemplating a long-weekend trip down to Seattle when this contract finished, taking the weekend plus the next monday and tuesday, making it a nice 4 day trip away, so when i was offered the contract extension, i mentioned this to my boss. she was like 'go ahead, take them'....so it looks like i'm going to Seattle!!
I've been talking about going to Seattle for about the last 6 years, and when i say i'm gonna do something, i usually do....it might take quite a while for it to happen, but it does - Canada was about 4 years in the making, but i'm here now! The fact that my good American mate Jennifer from my time in Edinburgh is from there makes it even better! I can't wait!!!
I've also got plans to head up to Whistler and the snow for a wee bit before the ski season finishes. It would be criminal of me to be here in Vancouver and not spend some time at one of North America's premier ski-snowboarding locations. I've pretty much nixx-ed the idea of spending the remainder of the season up there, and trying to get work. A spanner was thrown in the works of that plan when i arrived 3 weeks ago and there was NO snow at Whistler. But i reckon i can afford a couple of weeks before the end of April.
talk soon,
anthony
Monday, February 21, 2005
Vancouver - my first few weeks - part 2
hi again,
y'see, Derek is only 21, and he is living next door to one of the supervisors, Anne, a 21 year old sweety, from his/my market research job. between the two ofthem, my lifestyle has changed in quite a mad mad way!
Never mind the daily pot-pipes (which ruin me like i haven't been ruined in a number of years - so i've learnt to say No quite a bit), the first weekend they took me out, it was to a fetish party called Sin City. A bit (lot) like the old Hellfire Club back in Melbourne (for those of you who know it), really. In order to get in to this club, you have to conform to adress code like no other...suits and the usual nightclub attire is a no-no. However, leather, PVC,rubber, lingerie, uniforms/costumes and the like are the go. So......what was i going to wear?
Derek had the perfect solution. He took me to a Christian store to buy.......a Priest shirt and collar!!! He has the exact same outfit, and so it was on! Needless to say, there was copious amounts of flesh on display and folks from all walks of life/ages/sizes were there, wearing the most amazing/strange outfits. The Dungeon was quite a sight- a full-on spanking/bondage set up with dungeon-masters giving the works with whips to guys and girls who had been bad bad boys and girls and needed to be punished!
The 'e' tab i took (first one in a long long while) kicked in after a while, and i was invited to have a kissing lesson with 2 girls (i scored an 8 and a 1/2), and then hitting the dance floor i hooked up with a couple more scantily clad chickies for a bit of bump-and-grind.....nice! the Aussie accent apparently was quite a hit! But, these things must come to an end tho, and we headed home....alone.
check out the website for a little look-see!
http://www.gothic.bc.ca/event/Sin+City
my new job started the following Monday...better money ($13 per hour - as good as i can expect here), a 3-week contract as......a Receptionist! - for a Property Management company, and while i have to commute on 2 buses and a train (45minutes), it's ages better than the Market Research gig.
I mentioned before about some dramas in my time here...well, this is both very painful and very funny (in retrospect) at the same time. I'd just returned back to the apartment after house hunting after work, and emptied my pockets of all the crap that builds up in them, when Derek suggests visiting Anne next door. So we're there for about an hour, and Derek remembers he'd left something back next door...
"Tony, do you have your keys with you?"
"No, i just dumped all my stuff on the couch...don'tyou?"
"No, i thought you had them"........
we'd locked ourselves out of the apartment!
After trying everything to get in, including unscrewing the bars of the windows, we finally conceded we have to call a locksmith out. By this time, it was past Midnight, and only 1 of the 1/2-dozen companies in the Yellow Pages had 24-Hour on-call service...and would be about an hour away!
SO, while Anne went to bed, we had to sit in the hallway waiting for our locksmith to arrive and let us in.....and paid $195 ($120 call out fee, $60 service, then tax) for the 5 minutes work he did!! D'oh!! I really didn't need to be dropping nearly $100 righ tnow, that's for sure!! Oh well, that's life.
The Friday night just gone, we went out again, to see Tommy Chong....he of Cheech and Chong fame from the 80's movies, doing his comedy show 'The Marijuana-Logues' at the Orpheum Theatre down on Granville St. Of course, in order to see Tommy Chong,you need to get a little baked beforehand, and for some reason, the hit i had affected me more than even it usually did.....i was sooooooo stoned. Granville is pretty mad at night usually, with lots of people around, and bright neon lights, and late-night buskers, and vagrants, but with my perception altered a little more than usual, it was quite a sight...i loved it. Combined with the fact that Anne was hyped-to-the-max about seeing her hero in the flesh, it was hyper-reality on overload for me. I had left my camera at home by mistake tho - i would've loved to have captured that night on digi-film!! It was a mad, mad night, with two mad, mad people, but i'm loving hanging with these guys.
Vancouver has the most amazing skyline as well. The Downtown area is almost an island, surrounded on 3 sides by water (False Creek River, and Burrard Inlet), and a tiny bit of land connecting it to the mainland. In order to get anywhere in the burbs, you have to cross one of about 6 bridges, and travelling by bus across one of these bridges, especially at night is a truly sensational visual feast for the eyes! Not to mention that Vancouver has as its backdrop, not one, not two, but THREE mountain tops covered up to the snowline with evergreen forest, which makes for one of the best looking city-scapes in the world (in my humble opinion). Oh, and with the pollution levels being practically zero, when the sun is out and sky is blue (which has been quite a regular occurrence recently!), the air is so crisp and clean as if it's coming directly off the mountains not so far away!
During the week i bought a mountain-bike....surprise surprise!! $120 for a 5-month old Carrera Impulse 21-speed with front shocks, and D-Lock included!!!
I took it out for a good spin yesterday, taking a route along the harbour on one side of False Creek River, with all the rich-folks yachts in the foreground of my photos of aforementioned skyline. Then over that little spit of land to Downtown, past Scienceworld (a huge futuristic looking golf-ball shaped building)
and BC Place (sports stadium with an inverted parachute looking roof) and along the other bank of the river, out to Stanley Park following the sea-wall right around, and back to the southside of Downtown, back up thru Granville Street and home. A good 30Km, and a good 4 hours, and a good 100-odd piccies!!! What a great day!
And, to top it all off - i move into a new apartment tonight, just 15-minutes out of town in East Vancouver, with an English bloke, Ceri. Now, this place is sweet, with the backyard literally being a large-ish park with a lake, Trout Lake in the middle of it. Slightly more than i hoped to be paying for rent - $400 per month, but worth every penny. Anyway, hope that wasn't too much - i had a bit to catch up on.
talk soon,
tony
y'see, Derek is only 21, and he is living next door to one of the supervisors, Anne, a 21 year old sweety, from his/my market research job. between the two ofthem, my lifestyle has changed in quite a mad mad way!
Never mind the daily pot-pipes (which ruin me like i haven't been ruined in a number of years - so i've learnt to say No quite a bit), the first weekend they took me out, it was to a fetish party called Sin City. A bit (lot) like the old Hellfire Club back in Melbourne (for those of you who know it), really. In order to get in to this club, you have to conform to adress code like no other...suits and the usual nightclub attire is a no-no. However, leather, PVC,rubber, lingerie, uniforms/costumes and the like are the go. So......what was i going to wear?
Derek had the perfect solution. He took me to a Christian store to buy.......a Priest shirt and collar!!! He has the exact same outfit, and so it was on! Needless to say, there was copious amounts of flesh on display and folks from all walks of life/ages/sizes were there, wearing the most amazing/strange outfits. The Dungeon was quite a sight- a full-on spanking/bondage set up with dungeon-masters giving the works with whips to guys and girls who had been bad bad boys and girls and needed to be punished!
The 'e' tab i took (first one in a long long while) kicked in after a while, and i was invited to have a kissing lesson with 2 girls (i scored an 8 and a 1/2), and then hitting the dance floor i hooked up with a couple more scantily clad chickies for a bit of bump-and-grind.....nice! the Aussie accent apparently was quite a hit! But, these things must come to an end tho, and we headed home....alone.
check out the website for a little look-see!
http://www.gothic.bc.ca/event/Sin+City
my new job started the following Monday...better money ($13 per hour - as good as i can expect here), a 3-week contract as......a Receptionist! - for a Property Management company, and while i have to commute on 2 buses and a train (45minutes), it's ages better than the Market Research gig.
I mentioned before about some dramas in my time here...well, this is both very painful and very funny (in retrospect) at the same time. I'd just returned back to the apartment after house hunting after work, and emptied my pockets of all the crap that builds up in them, when Derek suggests visiting Anne next door. So we're there for about an hour, and Derek remembers he'd left something back next door...
"Tony, do you have your keys with you?"
"No, i just dumped all my stuff on the couch...don'tyou?"
"No, i thought you had them"........
we'd locked ourselves out of the apartment!
After trying everything to get in, including unscrewing the bars of the windows, we finally conceded we have to call a locksmith out. By this time, it was past Midnight, and only 1 of the 1/2-dozen companies in the Yellow Pages had 24-Hour on-call service...and would be about an hour away!
SO, while Anne went to bed, we had to sit in the hallway waiting for our locksmith to arrive and let us in.....and paid $195 ($120 call out fee, $60 service, then tax) for the 5 minutes work he did!! D'oh!! I really didn't need to be dropping nearly $100 righ tnow, that's for sure!! Oh well, that's life.
The Friday night just gone, we went out again, to see Tommy Chong....he of Cheech and Chong fame from the 80's movies, doing his comedy show 'The Marijuana-Logues' at the Orpheum Theatre down on Granville St. Of course, in order to see Tommy Chong,you need to get a little baked beforehand, and for some reason, the hit i had affected me more than even it usually did.....i was sooooooo stoned. Granville is pretty mad at night usually, with lots of people around, and bright neon lights, and late-night buskers, and vagrants, but with my perception altered a little more than usual, it was quite a sight...i loved it. Combined with the fact that Anne was hyped-to-the-max about seeing her hero in the flesh, it was hyper-reality on overload for me. I had left my camera at home by mistake tho - i would've loved to have captured that night on digi-film!! It was a mad, mad night, with two mad, mad people, but i'm loving hanging with these guys.
Vancouver has the most amazing skyline as well. The Downtown area is almost an island, surrounded on 3 sides by water (False Creek River, and Burrard Inlet), and a tiny bit of land connecting it to the mainland. In order to get anywhere in the burbs, you have to cross one of about 6 bridges, and travelling by bus across one of these bridges, especially at night is a truly sensational visual feast for the eyes! Not to mention that Vancouver has as its backdrop, not one, not two, but THREE mountain tops covered up to the snowline with evergreen forest, which makes for one of the best looking city-scapes in the world (in my humble opinion). Oh, and with the pollution levels being practically zero, when the sun is out and sky is blue (which has been quite a regular occurrence recently!), the air is so crisp and clean as if it's coming directly off the mountains not so far away!
During the week i bought a mountain-bike....surprise surprise!! $120 for a 5-month old Carrera Impulse 21-speed with front shocks, and D-Lock included!!!
I took it out for a good spin yesterday, taking a route along the harbour on one side of False Creek River, with all the rich-folks yachts in the foreground of my photos of aforementioned skyline. Then over that little spit of land to Downtown, past Scienceworld (a huge futuristic looking golf-ball shaped building)
and BC Place (sports stadium with an inverted parachute looking roof) and along the other bank of the river, out to Stanley Park following the sea-wall right around, and back to the southside of Downtown, back up thru Granville Street and home. A good 30Km, and a good 4 hours, and a good 100-odd piccies!!! What a great day!
And, to top it all off - i move into a new apartment tonight, just 15-minutes out of town in East Vancouver, with an English bloke, Ceri. Now, this place is sweet, with the backyard literally being a large-ish park with a lake, Trout Lake in the middle of it. Slightly more than i hoped to be paying for rent - $400 per month, but worth every penny. Anyway, hope that wasn't too much - i had a bit to catch up on.
talk soon,
tony
Vancouver - my first few weeks - part 1
Hi,
i know i've been a bit incommunicado recently - somefolks have emailed me asking if i'm alright coz they hadn't heard anything from me in a bit!! (how nice!!)
well, to cut to the chase, i'm working, and i'm moving into a new place tonight, so on that front it's all good. i have to say tho, it's not been as smooth aride here as it was in dublin or edinburgh in terms of getting settled, but i'm pretty much sorted out now.
my original plan was to hit the ski slopes at Whistler as soon as i arrived, try and get a job etc, but its pretty much been one of the worst seasons in recent history and therefore virtually no snow there at all.Bummer.
i've managed to make a coupla good friends here, and they've taken me on a ride into vancouver's seedy underbelly which has been interesting (and fun!) to say the least. i've had one or two dramas along the way as well (it wouldn't be right if there wasn't - you guys are fully aware of my travelling mis-haps!)
when i first arrived i checked into a backpackerhostel for two nights on granville street, which is Downtown's main party/theatre/club/cinema district, altho i was suffering the effects of 4 days solid travelling and jet-lag , and so never really explored much (my first saturday night in town i was in bed by 7pm! - knackered).
my good mate Travis and his girlfriend Michelle (met while travelling in Asia) then offered me a weeks free accommodation on the floor of his swanky apartment while i looked for permanent digs and a job. travis was in between jobs and had a week off, so he also offered his services as a tour guide around town, so that first week was pretty sweet.
in between doing the rounds of the temp agencies(first time in a shirt& tie in god knows how long!),and scouting about for my own place, i was taken to see some of the sights.
Granville Island market is a sweet spot with loads of arts and crafty shops, where local artists and indigenous community can ply their wares, as well as the usual touristy paraphernalia - a good spot to kill a few hours. went for a few beers at a roadhose-styled bar called Carlos 'n' Buds as well, to sample the locally produced Granville Brewery beers.
He also took me to Capilano Suspension Bridge, an awesome attraction literally 15-minutes drive from the city centre, and you feel like ur in the middle of a wilderness forest area. it's a relic from the days of logging in the 19th-early 20th century, and is essentially a cable bridge linking two sides of a valley over a wild river, with an amazing view to Grouse Mountain. A new addition to the site is a "Treetop Walkway" with boardwalks thru the canopy of the forest - so pretty and so well designed to blendin with the surroundings.
The following weekend, a few of his buddies came over from Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. I had brought 3 bottles of liquor over from the Middle East and Prague that needed to be consumed, and Travis knew just the lads to help! Sitting on his balcony on the 17th floor, overlooking False Creek River, and in between Absinthe shots, and Turkish and Jordanian moonshine shots, we were sinking copious numbers of beers, to the point that we were rather hammered.
Then one of the lads thought it'd be a great idea to go out on the town and initiate me fully into Vancouver life - by taking me to 'Penthouse' - one of the numerous strip joint tittie bars in town. How could i refuse!!
Needless to say we all felt a little worse for wear the next morning, but a good-ol' fashioned fry-up at The Elbow Room cafe would soon sort that out. This place is famous for its breakfasts with queues forming out the door. Its also famous for its unique brand of service - a little coarse to say the least. they have signs up on the walls saying things like 'you wanna coffee re-fill? - Get it ur f***ing self!!' it's all in good fun of course, and you can give as good as you get if the waitress gives you lip. Great brekky by theway!
At this point, my free week was up, and Trav took his job in neighboring province Alberta, (by the way, thanks a million Trav and Michelle) and i had to check back into the hostel - i still hadn't found anything nice to stay in....a couple of dumps, but not much more. I had found a job tho - just a 2 week contract, but it was doing Market Research, and it was $9 per hour.....way way way below my usual. the last time i worked for $9 was about 6 or 7 years ago.
so i was in a bit of a fix - expensive hostel, crappy paying crap job, and still no permanent place to live. this did however, turn out to be a blessing in disguise of sorts - i met this guy Derek who was earning the same as me, but paying farrrr too much rent for his place, so i suggested a temporary solution. i'd stay on his lounge room floor and split his rent in 1/2 for the time i was there. i'd save about 1/2 on what i was paying at the hostel, and he'd be $65 a week better off. he agreed - it was all sweet.
this is where my life got interesting! see part 2 (coming soon) for more!
i know i've been a bit incommunicado recently - somefolks have emailed me asking if i'm alright coz they hadn't heard anything from me in a bit!! (how nice!!)
well, to cut to the chase, i'm working, and i'm moving into a new place tonight, so on that front it's all good. i have to say tho, it's not been as smooth aride here as it was in dublin or edinburgh in terms of getting settled, but i'm pretty much sorted out now.
my original plan was to hit the ski slopes at Whistler as soon as i arrived, try and get a job etc, but its pretty much been one of the worst seasons in recent history and therefore virtually no snow there at all.Bummer.
i've managed to make a coupla good friends here, and they've taken me on a ride into vancouver's seedy underbelly which has been interesting (and fun!) to say the least. i've had one or two dramas along the way as well (it wouldn't be right if there wasn't - you guys are fully aware of my travelling mis-haps!)
when i first arrived i checked into a backpackerhostel for two nights on granville street, which is Downtown's main party/theatre/club/cinema district, altho i was suffering the effects of 4 days solid travelling and jet-lag , and so never really explored much (my first saturday night in town i was in bed by 7pm! - knackered).
my good mate Travis and his girlfriend Michelle (met while travelling in Asia) then offered me a weeks free accommodation on the floor of his swanky apartment while i looked for permanent digs and a job. travis was in between jobs and had a week off, so he also offered his services as a tour guide around town, so that first week was pretty sweet.
in between doing the rounds of the temp agencies(first time in a shirt& tie in god knows how long!),and scouting about for my own place, i was taken to see some of the sights.
Granville Island market is a sweet spot with loads of arts and crafty shops, where local artists and indigenous community can ply their wares, as well as the usual touristy paraphernalia - a good spot to kill a few hours. went for a few beers at a roadhose-styled bar called Carlos 'n' Buds as well, to sample the locally produced Granville Brewery beers.
He also took me to Capilano Suspension Bridge, an awesome attraction literally 15-minutes drive from the city centre, and you feel like ur in the middle of a wilderness forest area. it's a relic from the days of logging in the 19th-early 20th century, and is essentially a cable bridge linking two sides of a valley over a wild river, with an amazing view to Grouse Mountain. A new addition to the site is a "Treetop Walkway" with boardwalks thru the canopy of the forest - so pretty and so well designed to blendin with the surroundings.
The following weekend, a few of his buddies came over from Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. I had brought 3 bottles of liquor over from the Middle East and Prague that needed to be consumed, and Travis knew just the lads to help! Sitting on his balcony on the 17th floor, overlooking False Creek River, and in between Absinthe shots, and Turkish and Jordanian moonshine shots, we were sinking copious numbers of beers, to the point that we were rather hammered.
Then one of the lads thought it'd be a great idea to go out on the town and initiate me fully into Vancouver life - by taking me to 'Penthouse' - one of the numerous strip joint tittie bars in town. How could i refuse!!
Needless to say we all felt a little worse for wear the next morning, but a good-ol' fashioned fry-up at The Elbow Room cafe would soon sort that out. This place is famous for its breakfasts with queues forming out the door. Its also famous for its unique brand of service - a little coarse to say the least. they have signs up on the walls saying things like 'you wanna coffee re-fill? - Get it ur f***ing self!!' it's all in good fun of course, and you can give as good as you get if the waitress gives you lip. Great brekky by theway!
At this point, my free week was up, and Trav took his job in neighboring province Alberta, (by the way, thanks a million Trav and Michelle) and i had to check back into the hostel - i still hadn't found anything nice to stay in....a couple of dumps, but not much more. I had found a job tho - just a 2 week contract, but it was doing Market Research, and it was $9 per hour.....way way way below my usual. the last time i worked for $9 was about 6 or 7 years ago.
so i was in a bit of a fix - expensive hostel, crappy paying crap job, and still no permanent place to live. this did however, turn out to be a blessing in disguise of sorts - i met this guy Derek who was earning the same as me, but paying farrrr too much rent for his place, so i suggested a temporary solution. i'd stay on his lounge room floor and split his rent in 1/2 for the time i was there. i'd save about 1/2 on what i was paying at the hostel, and he'd be $65 a week better off. he agreed - it was all sweet.
this is where my life got interesting! see part 2 (coming soon) for more!
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