vancouver: glorious and lonely
Mar. 7th, 2011 04:01 pmWhat more can I say? It's still the best city I've spent any amount of time in. (A vanishingly small set, admittedly.) We arrived at the very end of the winter grey: the sky was perfectly clear the entire time except for a touch of rain/snow on Monday, and then a light snowstorm all day Satyrday. We rode buses and Skytrain and ate lots and lots of delicious food and walked around and saw things. We took very few pictures: at first the rechargeable batteries were all dead, and then it was just too cold to want to bother fumbling with gloves and camera. We found a Chinese bakery where they make buns and dumplings and bean-paste sesame balls, and sell them at prices that seem obscenely cheap.
An apartment was not forthcoming. Most places appear to require only 30 days' notice before vacating, so very few of the agencies we talked to had any idea what their stock for late May would be like. And since I've blown all my vacation on this trip plus moving, I guess I'm sending![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
uilos back out there in another month or two to look at available apartments. On the other hand, from the places we did see we got a better idea of what we're looking for (relatively large, and a "den" is Not Sufficient for an office since the "dens" we saw were smaller than my closet in the current apartment) and where. So that was helpful, if not as much as I'd hoped.
A friend of A--'s got in touch with me a week or so before we left, and we caught up with him for an hour or so on Wednesday to talk about life in Vancouver. Nothing earth-shattering, at least not that I recall. Just good conversation in a pleasant little coffeeshop / breakfast-place.
Other than that and one group of fairly welcoming gamers on Tuesday night, the human interaction was negligible. Meh. I'm slightly disheartened but only slightly.
And that snowstorm on Satyrday ("up to 5 cm" does not sound at all impressive) really made my week. There is something wonderful about walking through a snowfall in a trenchcoat and hat and sunglasses and sandals. Winter and snow are the things I'm most afraid of missing, environment-wise. Good to know that they'll still be around.
An apartment was not forthcoming. Most places appear to require only 30 days' notice before vacating, so very few of the agencies we talked to had any idea what their stock for late May would be like. And since I've blown all my vacation on this trip plus moving, I guess I'm sending
uilos back out there in another month or two to look at available apartments. On the other hand, from the places we did see we got a better idea of what we're looking for (relatively large, and a "den" is Not Sufficient for an office since the "dens" we saw were smaller than my closet in the current apartment) and where. So that was helpful, if not as much as I'd hoped.A friend of A--'s got in touch with me a week or so before we left, and we caught up with him for an hour or so on Wednesday to talk about life in Vancouver. Nothing earth-shattering, at least not that I recall. Just good conversation in a pleasant little coffeeshop / breakfast-place.
Other than that and one group of fairly welcoming gamers on Tuesday night, the human interaction was negligible. Meh. I'm slightly disheartened but only slightly.
And that snowstorm on Satyrday ("up to 5 cm" does not sound at all impressive) really made my week. There is something wonderful about walking through a snowfall in a trenchcoat and hat and sunglasses and sandals. Winter and snow are the things I'm most afraid of missing, environment-wise. Good to know that they'll still be around.