Sharon Kong! (Thursday March 22 2007)

This'll be another kaleidoscope, I'm afraid... the downside with "expressing myself spontaneously" (aka not taking notes on what we do) is that it means my opening paragraphs are depressingly shapeless. You don't always notice that because I rewrite. It's as a kindness to all that I keep my first drafts on a leash, and usually indoors.

I turned 37 on Tuesday, March 20. Great love to everyone who called, emailed, or carded me then or thenabouts. Particular love to my Posse back home, who bought me...



... an inflatable Dalek! Genius!






It's adorable! It looks like it has ears. It took one hell of a lot of inflating, though. Excellently, on the side of the base it says "This is not a lifesaving device". Of course it isn't! It's a Dalek! It's the epitome of death-dealing devices! You don't see Doctor Who calling out "Hold on, Rose, I'll save you from drowning!" and a moment later there's an enormous splash, a very unhappy electronic squawk, and some loud sparking noises. (Although who can tell what will happen, these days.)

For my birthday we went to see 300. This is based on the graphic novel of the same name by Frank Miller. Which was good at the time, ten years or so ago, but which isn't really comparable to, say, Gates Of Fire by Stephen Pressfield. The big problems with the film are: with the ending pretty much common knowledge, there's not even the Dirty Dozen / Magnificent Seven feeling of "which of these poor bastards will die, and when?" (only one even faintly recognisable character dies before the final slaughter, which is over in seconds)... and as a film it sucks, with narration recapitulating action, and some of the most variable special effects around (Sparta is made out of cardboard in the long shots, and the sets in general are rubbish). The special effects at their best are pretty impressive, but the film is empty, and offensively unoriginal in many ways. "Look, I have cornfields and a microtonal female vocal just like Gladiator - love me!" To conclude, this was one of the most spectacular-and-yet-still-shit movies we've seen in a while. So we mocked it a bit over food at Kalypso, and then came home. Thus Panda birthday.

So: we have a new apartment, at 1060 Alberni Street. We've signed, paid, obtained the keys, used the facilities, and had our first delivery. But we still don't live there; there's no furniture. We need to sort this out by the end of the month, when we leave Nelson Street. We trogged down to Richmond at the weekend to check out Ikea, where we bought a lot of useful bits and pieces, and some other furniture places, where we noted a table & chairs set and a futon, to be ordered this weekend. The bed we want will take a while to arrive, so we need a temporary solution which can persist as useful furniture in the absence of guests. Whether we can survive even one night on a futon, I'm not sure. If not then it's to the cheap bed shop, beezees!

The facilities at Alberni are great. The pool is about thirty metres and Sarah has been getting back into the swim of things... ahhh yes, I'm knocking 'em out of the park tonight... while I've introduced myself to the joys of spending a while in the sauna and then having a cold shower. Rinse (while freezing) and repeat. Whoever it was who told me this is the way to do it was having a laugh! However, if it adds a spectacular sheen of health (or at least wideawakefulness) to my complexion then I'll grin and bear it. While screaming.

The solitary delivery to Alberni has been Sarah's new keyboard. While we're a little concerned that some of the keys rattle, it seems basically quite good. It was furnished by Tom Lee Music on Granville after a lengthy umming-and-ahhing session by the bunny, but fair enough, it's a big decision. Obviously, even without the rattling-keys issue, it's not the same as our piano. I hope it's getting some usage in Brenda's house. Hello Justine's mum! (Yeah, you heard, your absolute mum!)

When you live in an apartment many things are strange, and one of the strangest is access to your apartment for strangers. You get a buzzer code - which is unrelated to your apartment number, for obvious reasons - which enables people to use the entryphone to call your apartment phone. Pressing 6 or sometimes 9 lets them in and turns on your floor as a valid destination for the elevator for a couple of minutes. (Normally the elevators require you to swipe your electronic fob-key to get access to your floor, or to common privileged areas such as the facilities or the basement car-park.) This is how it works for delivered food, anyway. For parcels, they tend to just leave a sticker on the front doors of the block, saying which apartment is due a package. And for regular mail - that gets delivered alright, but is sorted (not sure by whom, probably some minwag) and placed in small lockers, one per apartment, to which you have key access.

Clear?

Well, all your junk mail goes in that little box too, unless you put in a sticker to skip it. Why anyone wouldn't, I'm not sure. Because you get a *ton* of junk mail. Here's what we got in three days at Alberni:

- 28-page Sears clothing catalogue (Sears is basically Debenhams)
- ad for Primus broadband
- 8-page catalogue for Shoppers Drug Mart (basically Superdrug)
- ad for new apartments on 2nd and Main
- 24-page catalogue for Best Buy (basically Dixons)
- 28-page catalogue for London Drug (basically Boots)
- 32-page Sears general catalogue
- 24-page Future Shop catalogue (basically PC World)
- 12-page Loomis Art Store catalogue (an art supplies shop can afford this kind of crap!)
- another 32-page Sears general catalogue (getting bored of Sears now, and it doesn't help that their logo reminds me of Sega)
- 24-page Canadian Tire catalogue (eh, bikes and tyres, that's TYRES, people, and stuff)
- badly-printed-and-folded A4 leaflet for a private tax consultant
- ad for Variety Lottery
- ad for Linda Woo, realtor
- ad for Panago fast food
- the first 28-page Sears clothing catalogue, again
- the Primus broadband thing, again
- the Best Buy thing, again
- the Shoppers Drug Mart thing, again
- apartments at 2nd and Main, again
- Future Shop, again
- Loomis Art Store, again
- Sears again
- Canadian Tire again
- London Drugs again
- the third Sears one again
- Variety Lottery, again
- the tax guy, again

The pile weighs in at about 2lb. I'll be charitable and assume that with the number of duplicates, we got two separate deliveries of junk mail. Perhaps they happen every other day. But that still means a pound, by weight, of junk. Per apartment, most likely, so that's 150lb of junk mail in our block, or something like half a ton - in a fortnight. For one apartment block. From where I'm sitting I can see thirty of them, and that's just the tall ones.

The environmental lifestyle here is very grass-roots - it would have to be, seeing as how companies clearly don't give a good goddamn about it. BC Hydro, the electricity company, has a green power certificates system whereby you can pay more for your power and they'll ensure that more renewable energy enters the grid... I think. I have some vague recollection that British Gas has a similar green power thing. It all seems a bit pointless to me now I think about it. Another case of how what we need to do is not pay extra money to existing companies for 'greenification', but to do something dramatic, like banning cars, or shooting realtors.

I mention realtors (estate agents) in particular because I find it interesting that out here, and in America, realty is a very personal, trust-based thing. Agencies sell themselves on a single very marketable face (or sometimes two). The epitome of pushy realty must be Sharon Kong, who managed to stuff half a dozen of her glossy leaflets into our Nelson Street mailbox in the brief gap between the last tenant leaving and us moving in. Her site beggars belief for anyone used to the self-effacement of crusty English property businesses. But they're all like that. Trustworthy-looking, trustworthiness-radiating, trusty realtors grin confidently from the pages of all the real estate magazines. Obviously this one person cannot possibly do all the work; he or she probably has a staff of minwags and maxwags to take care of the grubby details, and also I get the impression that these people work for bigger companies but are able (or possibly obliged) to do their own advertising in order to earn their commissions. I haven't seen Glengarry Glen Ross; that would probably clarify things for me. But the sell, from my point of view, is all about this solitary expert, who has worked in the area for however many years (perhaps as a maxwag at someone else's company, but don't spoil the effect) and who is subtly pushing a subtext along the lines of "It's you and me against big business, good people - c'mon, let's work together". It's pernicious, it's marketing, and it's how it's done here. I just find it interesting that in England, even if there is a charismatic person at an estate agents', or even if the agency is named after one or two key people (which they usually are) they wouldn't dare actually stand in front of the camera and strike a trustworthy pose for the print ads. Also, in England most estate agencies tend to get swallowed up into chains. I don't think they have those here. Pretty much everyone's a member of the same trade association, and all their rental and purchase properties get posted on a single massive website called the MLS - although there's generally a bit of a delay while the selling agent pushes some private buttons. It's useful and technically impressive.

But the main thing I want you to think about, now we've reached the end of that brief discourse on realtors, is the brilliance of the name "Sharon Kong". Say it with me one more time. Sharon Kong. Superb. Like an absolute Kong.

Choir continues. We're singing songs in about seven languages. I still don't like this, xenophobic as I am (or at least as I'm turning out to be now I've come here). Some of them are tolerable. Sarah continues to dazzle, exhibiting excellent Bunny Self-Confidence in attempting to find something she can't sight-read in one go. Still no luck. I've introduced my fellow tenor James (artist in glass and director of a chamber choir) to the mandatory concept of singing like a god. He seems reasonably taken with it but I sense it's very new to him. But really, a spot of good old-fashioned arrogance is good for any singer (provided they're any good).

More computer games. Sarah has been playing Fairy Godmother Tycoon, and I've been playing the Mystery Case Files games. The MCF games are essentially Where's Wally with objects instead of Wally and his extended family. With the clock ticking, you're presented with a beautiful picture of a room, filled with things of all descriptions... and asked to find a handful of specific objects. And you have to look hard. Real hard. Here's an example:



Can you find all the objects it lists down the side? Nice and smooth - well, it is the first room. In later rooms I found myself announcing with disturbing regularity, "You are clearly having a giraffe..." - in fact in one room you do have to find a giraffe. The problem is, objects might be present in their literal form, or reduced in size for no good reason, or they might be toys, or pictures, or part of the wallpaper, or blended in with something else which disguises their shape, or half off screen, or recoloured, or... god, it's a nightmare. It's one of the best games I've ever played. And there's three of them! Woohoo! Off to Big Fish Games you go to try them.

I must also say that the CSI: Crime Scene Investigation game I tried last weekend was pretty good. I have Law & Order games to play too. Who knew you could make games out of this kind of television?

Pictures!

They have big rainbows here.



And cute pandas on soy sauce packets.



This is the church where we sing on Wednesdays.



This is the world's crappiest sofa bed. It looks like the sofa bed equivalent of the car that comes off worse at the end of a Herbie movie. I do not foresee us - or anyone else - buying this shameful item from Ikea...



These, on the other hand, are two great cushions from the futon shop. Even though we couldn't make up our minds about which futon to get, we knew we needed these. Thirty quid the pair.



Highlights from the St Patrick's Day parade on Granville Street, courtesy of a bunny who went out to investigate it:












'Utilikilts', I ask you.

Poetic and pithy engravings around a tree somewhere in midtown:



My attitude in a nutshell - outside the big stadium:



Yes! Because this really sells it to me!



Outside the BC Hydro building:



Shiny! I have no idea where this is, though. Sarah clearly went marauding without me in the daytime.



That big-ass rainbow effect again:



And again:



The construction going on across from Alberni Street. Reasonably ignorable, we hope. Haven't tried sleeping through it yet, obviously.



The vertiginous view from the twentieth floor. I can't actually go near the open windows. I feel like I'm being sucked out into the open air.



And now, a bunny magic trick! Observe this box! A perfectly innocent box! A dull, ordinary box, you might think!



But! Ta-da! Actually - it's a keyboard! You can imagine the fun Sarah had assembling that...



Yo, 'm'out. Next time, eh?

There's nothing interesting about the number 37

Except that it's my age as of Tuesday March 20th. Marginally related blog posting to follow.

"We come in peace, as far as you know" (Sunday March 11 2007)

Before I start - that's a bloody stupid thing to say, isn't it? - what I mean, of course, is "now that I've started, and before anything else" - where was I? Now look what you've done. Anyway. HAPPY 40th BIRTHDAY PHIL TWINE!

This week on The Jaysmiths Hit Vancouver is "firsts" week, in which I shall recount a number of new and exciting firsts! Yes. Here comes, appropriately enough, the first one...

This week we got our first Canadian credit cards. It took a while for them to show up, and it only happened because we chased the Jeff guy from RBC and he discovered they'd been left undelivered at the local branch. Nuh. So we now have credit cards. Sarah is unhappy because, despite the cards having separate names, her card is tied to mine and mine's the primary. We applied for them at the same time as our bank account, which is set up in our joint name, so there should be no particular reason why I'm more important than her - except that I'm the man, and I mean that in a purely "that's what gender I am" way. Jokes about her being "the spouse" aside, this kind of sexist crap annoys both of us.

I forgot to mention it, but last week we had our first telesales call. A very stern-voiced man attempted to persuade Mr Smith (and remember, extra points are available for uncreatively getting my first name wrong too) that I wanted to make a donation to, I think, the BC Police Benevolent Fund. Now seeing as how no-one makes donations to my benevolent fund, I can't be having with this, and I said so - although, wary of possible outcomes involving riot police being deployed on nearby rooftops, I didn't put it in quite those terms. He grumpily tried to persuade me further but it wasn't happening and I rang off. Later that evening, after we got home from somewhere, there was a message on the answerphone, and on pushing the button we were treated to five seconds of sirens wailing on the street before the call ended. Sheer coincidence, or the first of a number of inconvenience calls designed to remind me of my civic duty as perceived by charity groups? I'll keep you posted.

Sarah finally had her first tea and toast. This is slightly embarrassing. I've been drinking green tea since we got here, but Sarah's had to go without, on account of our inability to find black tea. We'd assumed this was just a case of The Marketplace (the deli/supermarket across the way) being too upmarket to stock cheap crap tea like we all drink back in England. However, we were similarly bereft of options when we tried Sainsburys (1). It seemed the only options were green tea, various herbal teas, Earl Grey (which is disgusting), and something called "Orange Pekoe", which naturally enough looked orange and therefore likely to be gruesomely un-tea-like. Turns out, as you probably all know and didn't tell us, that "orange pekoe" is just another name for "black". Because that's what you'd call something black, isn't it? Orange. Obvious in retrospect. Anyway we've now bought some of this stuff, and sure enough it's as cheap as it gets (by Canadian grocery standards) and Sarah is now tea-enabled. The bread is kinda tasty too.

Incidentally: men! If your spouse mocks you, throw a teabag at her! She won't be expecting it. My recommendation is to use a dry one, mind you.

I found my first cheap meat pies! $1.39 for a frozen microwaveable beef pie. This plus a few vegetables and I could almost be back home! It's a bit of a relief, because until then, meat pies were looking like a delicacy, at about three pounds for something which would have been a third of that in England. This Canadian health kick is quite something. You can find pastry if you look hard enough, but they seem to tax it.

Computer time!

The first patch for Zen Of Sudoku came out on Steam, and Sarah doesn't like it. It changes how the game looks, as well as giving her heart failure over the possibility that her profile had been erroneously deleted. I grumbled to the author, who to his credit responded immediately (insisting that all the changes were improvements... bah!) and now she's playing something else too, our first (aha!) software purchase in this country. The new game is called Peggle and is a kind of cross between Puzzle Bobble, Pinball and Breakout. She likes it, as she just remarked to me, because it awards her trophies. I dunno, a cheap specular twinkle on a chrome shader and she's anyone's...

I indulged in my first mammoth gameplaying session. I bought the "Season One" package of Sam & Max from Telltale Games. These are relaxed, point-and-click adventure games, very much of the old school, but being Sam & Max, they're hysterical. Sam & Max are freelance police, unlicensed to carry big guns and solve crimes with violence and caustic wit. Sam is a big, suited dog, while Max is an insane bunny. The fourth of six episodes came out at the start of March, but I've been a bit behind, so over the weekend I finished Two, Three and Four... in the course of which, Sam won "Embarrassing Idol" by inhaling helium, a mad TV host said "Blah" a lot, the Teddy Mafia (the Orso Nostro) were tracked down to and kicked out of a theme park, Max ran for (and became) US President, and the Secret Service performed a tap routine about how war benefits everyone. I giggled profusely. Max's dialogue in particular is a lesson in genius: "We come in peace, as far as you know." Well worth a look for anyone with a computer. Telltale also publish games based on CSI and Law & Order.

Comics time!

Not for the first time, Captain America is dead. Probably. For who knows how long. It's telling that one response to Captain America #25, which shipped this week and features the apparently successful assassination of Steve Rogers aka Captain America, included the shocked words: "He's never been dead before." Comics are a strange business. Anyway, this comes at the end of the extremely successful but also spectacularly late-running Summer crossover series Civil War (that's last Summer - it only finished this February) in which the government, shocked at a superpowers-related incident in Stamford where 600 people died, pushed through a superpower registration act, which split the superhero community and essentially pitted Iron Man ("sign up, it's the law, we can work within it") against Captain America ("I'll never sign, this is wrong") with everyone else taking sides as appropriate. Spider-Man, initially on the pro-reg side and persuaded to reveal his secret identity to the world, ended up switching sides when he realised the anti-reg side had a better case, but now Aunt May has been shot and he's gone back to wearing his black costume from the late 80s - pure coincidence, obviously, and unrelated to the imminence of Spider-Man 3 in your local cinema. Anyway, let me tell you, this is all very exciting, and there's never been a better time to be totally confused by Marvel Comics. Get in there, True Believer!

Hmm, I don't really know why I mentioned all that. Oh, actually, yes I do. I was reading some old UK Hulk comics from the late 70s, and wondering why the stories were homegrown rather than the more customary reprints from the US. After a few issues the letter column answers revealed that the stories were being written in the style of the Hulk TV show, which had premiered on UK TV around then. Thanks to the awareness of the Hulk built up by this show, the comic was selling over a quarter of a million copies a week. For a black-and-white magazine with six strips running at 3-4 pages each. A quarter of a million a week! Comics these days would kill for those kind of numbers. Civil War only just managed them. Different times...

Jan (my sister) once had a letter published in a Spider-Man comic. It took a long time but I eventually trumped that - the last issue of Rachel Pollack's Doom Patrol run dedicated to me. Boom!

Music time!

Sarah had her first long look at keyboards. We went to Tom Lee on Granville, where a frankly overeager saleswoman was very enthusiastic about everything until she ran out of facts and had to ask someone else a little calmer for help. We think we've found the keyboard we want; now we just have to wait until we have our new apartment, where there'll be room to put it.

We went to our first event in New Westminister. The Stylus Music School was offering some free talks about the Canadian music business and about techniques in music production. I went to the first night with Sarah but the second didn't seem too appealing so she tackled that by herself. The first speaker on the first night was very dull, wittering on about his nonprofit organisation's grants and loans, and taking a lot longer about it than he needed to. The second guy talked about music production, DJing, and the Reason software package. We thought this was very shiny, but it was clear the rest of the people in the room - a bunch of singer-songwriters if I ever saw them - were angrily tutting under their breath in a "that's not music" kind of way.

What else? We had our first Greek food out. Well, not quite our first, we ate souvlaki at The Main after choir the week before, but based on that we decided to try a Greek restaurant (Kalypso on Robson), and then another (Characters Taverna on Davie). Both featured delicious meat, although the potatoes at Characters were a bit too lemony for me. Big, big meals. Twenty quid goes a long way in a restaurant over here.

We saw our first movie, in the Paramount Famous Players cinema, conveniently located right in our block, although we have to leave our building to reach it - there should be more passageways and catwalks in cities. Our choice was Pan's Labyrinth, which was widely-regarded as the "shoulda" movie at this year's Oscars. I'm sure that it was thoroughly out-hyped in the Oscar voting stakes, but since I don't pay attention to regular hype channels, this is the movie I've heard the most about in the last few months, so for me this was the one with a lot to live up to. Our conclusions: Sarah hated all the slimy and gruesome special effects, and I thought, "Another magical realism film, so what?" For fans of fairy tales commingling with the Spanish Civil War, I'm sure it's the best film ever. For me... just another work of art telling us that we all die. Alone. In the dirt. Great. Rich or cute you have to fight the future, I know that. Sod off, Pan's Labyrinth. Someone make a happy film next time. (I should point out that Sarah and I disagree over the meaning of the film's ending, or at least that she takes it as a happy ending, and I think that that's great if that's how they might have wanted it to be read but it's my dime.) And next time we'll just go and see 300.

No photos this time, for no particular reason - just an unphotogenic week.

Stay in touch.



1) Safeway. OK. Fine. Whatever.

First there is a mountain (Sunday March 4 2007)

I'm getting slack in my blog's old age; I didn't make notes on what we did during the week, and like a bad parent I'm going to be taking it out on you by yelling and shaking my fist and announcing that somehow it's all your fault that this entry is a bit scattershot. Hmmmm.

Part of the reason for this is that time is already starting to speed up. The shock of the new, the impetus to regard every single second of our time here as unique and memorable, has worn off, and now each day is... eh, just another day. There's still lots to do, meals to eat, shows to attend, hills to walk and (soon) an apartment to furnish, but we're not strangers in town anymore. And so time is operating at normal city speeds, and it's already a week since my last blog entry, and I don't know what happened on Monday or Tuesday, which I could have just confessed, but I'm trying to be deep here.

On Wednesday we were at the choir again. I'm starting to get into this. I still don't rate some of the songs, but it never goes amiss to hear nice things about my voice, and now that the poxy Spanish ditty El Grillo has had some of its bizarre rits removed, it bounces along with much more vigour. It's also been a doddle to learn, even in Spanish, so I can now sing it while watching Ieva our conductor. And blow me if watching the conductor isn't actually a good thing in a choir this size. Who knew? I still think you shouldn't have a choir so big that its members can't conduct themselves, because that means your choir is too big for quality purposes, not for singing-without-a-conductor purposes. But, bah.

I spent Friday night listening to the rehearsal tracks for Penny Lane and Sing, Sing, Sing. The latter is a 1930s song with a Gene Krupa beat. Funky! And also likely to be very fast. Sure enough, when we had section rehearsals this weekend, people boggled at the speed, and various assertions were made about "learning this one as opposed to reading it". Posse take note: this choir performs with books.

My random timejumps all over the week continue with Sarah starting a five-day course in buteyko down on 6th Avenue, a pleasant 15-minute steam up Main Street from the SkyTrain station. (I know this because I've gone up there to meet her a couple of evenings. It's much easier walking back down.) For those of you unaware that you can click on underlined words (my mother is excused, as she gets this as a printout), Buteyko is a method of adapting your breathing for improved health - Jacqui, are you taking notes? you could be surely only about the second practitioner in England - and after only a few days of this course, Sarah has learned how to breathe through asthma attacks which would formerly have sent her scurrying for the ventolin. She's still shockingly unhealthy - don't worry, Unhealthy Bunny fans, she isn't running a half-marathon just yet. But she could easily beat me to it at this comparative rate of health improvement. I've had a cough since before we got here.

Sarah has been signing up for courses all over the place - a true renaissance rabbit. On Saturday she went to the library for a "Song Finders' Workshop", wherein she discovered all sorts of interesting reference sources, many of which they keep behind the reference desk and only hand out on application. Some interesting potential markets for songs...

Actually we had a very busy weekend what with section rehearsals, Buteyko, and on Saturday evening, the improv concert which we heard about at that library presentation about improv music the week after we got here. This took place at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, and featured members of the Vancouver Inter-Cultural Orchestra and the NOW Orchestra. What a lot of links! Go follow some of them now. Annnnnnd...welcome back. The VECC is very funky - it reminds me of the New Vic in Bristol... a small, very informal theatre, with seats that go >boink< at the slightest provocation, and a fantastic hippy vibe. The band was unafraid in its explorations of the various songs - I'm figuring that music written for an improvising orchestra involves a number of blocks each with a theme and potential ideas for the instruments, while the conductor's job is part sound mixer, part traffic cop. The pieces in the second half weren't as interesting, but it was only $10 apiece, and they had Strongbow at the interval, so all good, really. And it's up a road with the grooviest houses you've ever seen. Photos next time - e.g. if we go to see the taiko drumming there this Saturday.

I've just remembered what we did on Monday! There was another presentation at the library. This was a movie called "A Zen Life", a biopic of D. T. Suzuki, a leading exponent of Zen and translator of numerous Buddhist works. I had sort of expected a slightly pretentious (and thus interesting) movie full of images of water droplets hitting the lake surface, and blades of grass, and that kind of thing. Sadly this was a deadly serious history of the man's life, and the first two-thirds of the film nearly put us both to sleep. It livened up a bit in the last twenty minutes as Zen was actually discussed a little. Quite why the event was being presented by the Thomas Merton Society, I'm not sure. (Merton was a Trappist Monk who is apparently considered the most influential American Catholic author of the twentieth century - didn't you know even that most basic of facts about the man?! Look at his site, it's immense! Shame on your ignorance, I say.) Sure, Merton crops up in the film a couple of times, but he doesn't say a lot. It looked a lot to us like the Society was showing the movie in order to say "Look, our founder knew this man who had completely different religious beliefs - now join us and be a good Catholic!" Which is slightly odd, considering Suzuki evidently had epic disagreements with people who believed in different variations of Buddhism, let alone in a Christian God. Never mind. Thinking about zen calms me down.

At the supermarket on Monday night the checkout girl admired my "Don't Hit Pandas" badge. This led to Sarah making the following outrageous comment: "You need me... without me, you would be unbearable... with me, everyone thinks you are cute and put-upon". Grrrr...

This week's meals out: on Thursday, the Sala Thai on Burrard, just down the road from us - perfectly nice food in great quantities, and as usual it came in at about $50 including drinks - and then on Friday and Sunday, chinese takeaways! On Friday we took the greatly courageous step of phoning for a delivery - the Tim Kee Kitchen, which supplied a fair chicken in black bean sauce for me. Sadly Sarah's food wasn't what she had expected, so she went off exploring and found the New Hong Kong Kitchen on Davie, sequestered in a little brick inlet behind a coffee shop. The woman in there was asleep when she came in. We returned on Sunday for a takeout, which again did the job - their potstickers were tasty - and this time she was on the phone, refusing to come off it when she could just as easily take our order with one hand while nodding into the phone clasped in the other. I suspect this woman may turn out to be be one of those characters you read about often in this blog...

And now this week's photos:

Bunny snow!




We've been meaning to show you this Batman-esque building in the town centre for a while:



A funky building two blocks down from us:



Awwww...



Sarah went to New Westminster (another Mad Bunny excursion at a moment's notice) and this is what it looks like in brief:




Not a lot to see there, which makes New Westminster's brochure an even hootier prospect than it already is. I'll have to remember to mock it for you all next time. "So good it'll take you more than one day to explore" is just the start of the comedy value.

And that's your lot. Goodnight from Vancouver.

"First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is" is a zen koan. Although, in Vancouver, there is always a mountain: