Vancouver, baby. City of walking A LOT

So, we’ve been in Vancouver now for FIVE whole days and to be honest, it’s a bit of a shock coming from small town Fernie. We’re both used to living in a big city, but it just seems like everything is over-complicated in the big smoke!

We booked in to the HI Hostel on Granville Street which is a very popular hostel with a lot of backpackers as it’s slap bang in the middle of Downtown, in fact, it’s directly opposite the SameSun Hostel which is another hugely popular traveller destination. I think they have the better deal to be honest, as they don’t have a nightclub next door. At 10pm on the dot, without fail, the beat starts thumping its way up through the building. Our room is on the second floor, and last night we were listening to Salt n’ Pepper mixed with a little Aerosmith.

Believe it or not, we are not suffering from it at all, in fact we hardly notice it… That’s a lie, it is very loud, but after a long day walking around the streets of Vancouver we’re both extremely tired. We haven’t been awake much after 10.30pm in the last week. Even the little brown mouse that shares our room (and our supply of crackers!) seems to not mind the music. Alex has spotted it doing the ‘Hula’ in the middle of the floor to the melodic thud from downstairs! We’ve decided to call him Archie…


Archie looking for his hula hoop!

Apparently, if your hostel room doesn’t have a pet rodent sharing your space the staff seem to consider you to be unlucky (ie: they don’t seem to care much about the problem!)

Over the last couple of days we’ve switched our attention from trying to land the perfect job to trying to find a place to stay. This is proving to be quite interesting.
When looking for somewhere to live in London we are quite fortunate to have a reasonable knowledge or understanding of the areas that we want to live.

At the moment we have a blank canvas to with which to work. It’s a ‘hit n’ hope’ kind of thing, we don’t know what to expect until we get there. We’ve been on the internet, looking through papers and even exploring roads to find somewhere to live.

Yesterday we must have walked the best part of 15km around the streets of Southern Vancouver looking for places to live. As the turnover of tenants in this city is so fast, landlords often don’t bother with advertising in newspapers or on the internet as things can go in an instant. Instead, building management firms that have a spare room or suite available for rent in their buildings tend to hang a sign out the front. We’ve been told by several people that the best way to find a place to live is to just ‘hit the streets’. The novelty of this exercise is beginning to wear a little thin, as are the soles of our feet!


One of the many tree-lined avenues in the suburbs of Vancouver.

Hello – Alex here taking over while Jethro has some food:

They all want twelve month contracts, they laugh in our faces if we dare so much as ask for some basic furnishings, etc… We did come up with the genius idea of posting a message on a site called Craigslist Vancouver to state that we were looking for temporary furnished accommodation and that we were very, very nice people. This has had a pretty good response rate, but all the apartments or rooms are waaaaaaay out in the middle of nowhere. We looked at two today and they were both in Burnaby, which is south of downtown Vancouver. One was a possible as it’s a great one bedroom self-contained unit under a house, beautifully renovated, but with nowt in it. We explained our situation to the man above, James, and he said that he might be able to put some furniture in it for us – he only wants temporary tenants so our situation suits him down to the ground. The upside is that it’s 15 minutes by Skytrain (Vancouver’s version of the tube, but nicer) to the middle of downtown and the rent is super cheap, so we’re keeping it as a possible.


Alex gets friendly with the locals around Downtown.

We’re veering from buying a Greyhound ticket back to Fernie one minute, to getting all excited about living in such a great city in the next minute! It’s all very confusing! But we promised ourselves that we would stick at it for at least a month, so we shall keep our pledge.


One thing that's keeping us here; The sunsets at the beach on English Bay.

On a lighter note, we met my friend Sarah at Granville Island food market today for lunch and that was LOVELY. So it’s not all doom and gloom!


Standing on Granville Bridge; Looking down on Granville Island, the harbour and Burradr Bridge in the background. Follow the water under Burrard Bridge takes you out into English Bay and the Burrard Inlet beyond.