It all started when Laura was over here on her Contiki.
She loved the place so much she wanted to move - but obviously didn't want to do it alone.
Me; being 25 at the time and nothing exciting going on in my life, decided why the hell not.
So after a brief discussion with Mom and Dad about it, it was decided that I too was going to move to Canada.
Kieran joined in on the plan a couple months later.
Fast track to a year and few months later and here I am sitting in an apartment in downtown Vancouver, wondering how I've finally managed to live my teenage dream of living in the city.
It is currently Day 3 and technically our last - tomorrow morning we fly out to LA.
Wednesday 25th April 2018 felt like the longest day in existence.
1). It probably had to do with the fact that I was up at 6am for the ANZAC dawn service and
2). It probably had a lot to do with the fact that we left NZ at 8.05PM on Wednesday night and landed in Vancouver at 2.05PM on Wednesday Afternoon.
The flight was as uneventful as any 13 hour flight could be.
A few patches of turbulence, 2 bathroom breaks, Dinner, Breakfast, Annabelle: The Creation and a few F.R.I.E.N.D.S episodes later we were at our destination.
I did manage to fit about 5 hours of nap time in there too.
Getting to our apartment that afternoon was probably the most stressful part of our entire journey.
The taxi dropped us off at the 7Eleven a couple blocks down to grab the key for the apartment - and in hindsight we probably should have asked the driver to wait and just drop us off right outside the building but it was only meant to be a 3 minute walk.
3 minutes turned into 10 then 15. I was carrying far too many things & my bags were far too heavy and unstable. I dropped my phone about 3 times (thankfully nothing is cracked) and my bags found the pull of gravity to be stronger a couple more times than that (once in the middle of the road with oncoming traffic)(But also thankfully, nothing broken).
We FINALLY found our apartment and settled in.
Our first port of call was a shower and then food.
We wandered around the neighbourhood looking for something to eat until we finally settled on a Subway - because I was getting hangry. After, we popped into the 7Eleven for snacks and I got myself my first ever SLURPEE - which essentially is just like a Slushy or Frozen coke but still. Once home we settled in for the night and as much as we tried to keep ourselves awake we passed out at 9.30pm.
Thursday found me waking up at 11.30am. I hated it because I felt like we'd wasted the best parts of the day but the sun only seems to set here at about 8PM so we had quite a long day to go. We decided to head to Pacific Centre Mall to look for a new hair dryer for Kieran and a new laptop charger for me. By NZ standards this mall is HUGE. 6 stories high and across 2 blocks - granted most if it is super upmarket department stores so it was worth the wander around pretending we even carried that type of cash.
After getting lost about 10 times we FINALLY found the Tim Horton's for some food and sat down for a our first meal of the day. Mine was a BLT and Kieran's was a caeser salad (classic Kieran).
After that we headed back through the mall and across the street to Best Buy so Kieran could buy a Canadian plug adapter and so I could get a new laptop charger - something you don't even think about but Voltage in other countries are different! By this point it was about 4PM so we headed back home to rest for a bit.
Kieran pulled out his new plug adapter so he could start charing his phone.
"What the hell!" He says from behind me. I turn to look and the adapter he's holding looks nothing like the Canadian plug.
He looks on the box and goes, "Oh my God. It's European!" So here I am crying my eyes out because 1). He bought the wrong plug and 2). he didn't keep the receipt.
Can I just interject though to say that I really hope I've lost some damn weight with all this walking we've been doing. Don't get me wrong - I love a good stroll around the city but since we don't have transport we've been walking everywhere.
After resting for about an hour we decided to head into Stanley Park for a bit of a walk (again). We had to catch a bus this time as it was too far to walk all the way. So once we figured out what bus we needed to catch we made sure Kieran had cash and headed out yet again, just a quick stroll for a couple blocks and we were at the bus stop.
We got to the bus stop just as the bus was pulling up. We got on and proceeded to try pay with the $20 note Kieran had. Alas - the bus only takes coins OR a prepaid bus card. Clearly we're tourists AF so the bus driver was nice enough to let us on for free as long as we promised that next time we'd have the coins.
Stanley park was lovely. We walked along the sea wall, crossed the park through the totem pole area and through to the other side (the whole park is about 14KM to walk around so we definitely weren't planning on doing that). Naturally we got a bit lost trying to find our way back to a bus stop - and we still hadn't found a place to exchange our notes for coins. So we wandered back in towards the city (we stopped a few times so I could rest my feet - walking in chucks is not as comfortable as it should be), found a convenience store to change our note into coins and headed to the bus stop.
I felt like all we'd eaten so far was snacks and sandwiches so was after something a little more substantial. Once we arrived home (around 8ish) we got changed and headed to dinner at Doolins, the Irish pub up the road - where I ordered Poutine & Chicken wings and Kieran ordered... a Caesar salad, classic.
We had somehow managed to contain a fair amount of enegry (it probably had something to do with our 14 hour sleep) so when we got home (just after 10ish) we decided to watch a movie on Netflix. 1 movie turned into a couple episodes of "Don't trust the B**CH in Apartment 23" and all of a sudden it was 2am and time for sleep.
This morning I woke up at a more reasonable time of 9.30am. Decided there was no time for dawdling and jumped in the shower.
Interjection here once again - so if you don't know me in real life you won't know that my hair is dyed Indigo blue - which isn't really too much of an issue but it was the first wash since I'd dyed it and it stains literally EVERYTHING Blue. And of course everything in the bathroom is white. So here I am trying frantically not to get blue on absolutely everything and hoping it will come out after a couple of washes.
Even the damn towels are white - so I didn't use those for my hair at all. Kieran was still asleep at this point. But I think all my shuffling around the apartment (all very noisy might I add - sorry Kieran)definitely woke him up. I grabbed the keys and went downstairs to get coffee from Starbucks - 2 x Grande Vanilla Latte's.
By the time I was back Kieran was getting ready for the shower and I just pottered around - reheated my poutine for breakfast - and got ready for our day.
Today we headed into town again - popped in at the driver licencing place to see if Kieran could convert his NZ licence (which he couldn't because we're not staying in BC so we're going to have to do it while we're in Alberta) and headed back into the mall again for lunch and to find another carry on bag for Kieran.
Currently, it's 4.48PM on our last evening here in Vancouver.
We're pottering around getting things ready for tomorrow (packing bags, cleaning up etc). We haven't really decided what we're going to do for the rest of the night. But in all honesty I think we're both just a bit tuckered out from all the walking. Tomorrow we head off to LA relatively early. I'm excited for the next leg of our journey and to finally be with some family.
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