Hello everyone,

A slightly odd assortment of pics of Vancouver so far but have been a mix of restarting normal life here and some sightseeing.

Our first job was to get a car, as the city is huge (roughly the size of Eastbourne to Brighton!) but only has 1 overland railline and 2 skytrain lines (like tube lines) so it becomes pretty vital. So Chris is now the proud owner of his lovely-but-not-so-new wagon, that can fit work kit in, camping stuff and in the not to distant future skiing and snowboarding stuff in, and if all else fails we can also live in.

We also got here just in time for my birthday and went camping up at one of the lovely lakes for it but as is always the case when you go camping it decided to rain for most of it, however it stopped raining while I got surprised with a birthday lemon meringue pie, so I was happy with that!

Other than that we've been busy getting our bearings with the city and doing a lot of admin, buying a Canadian mobile & car, getting work visas sorted, bank accounts set up and trying to find somewhere to live and work.

Chris has been working for the last 10 days now on a timber framing site. There is so much construction going on over here for the Winter Olympics that its hard to walk 5 blocks with out coming across a site but most of it is concreate form work for high rises and he's not keen on doing that but is finding it interesting learning how to build timber frame houses, although also thinks he'll have mastered in a few more weeks as it seems quite straight forward.

I'm busy applying for jobs but so far have found it a little fustrating, as most companies don't like the fact I only have a 1 yr work visa and I'm having to explain every term I've used on my CV sorry "resume" out here as they do seem to label everything differently but I'm getting better at "Canadian speak" so hopefully something will come up soon.

We're currently subletting a small flat on the edge of downtown to see what its like nearer the city but as we found the other night when we thought we would take a wonder to the beach just down our road... it was 4 and a half miles later that we finally got there - even thou it was still the same road! Like a lot of North American cities the car becomes an extra limb as they have so much space that everything is far more stretched out than it looks on the map! but we did get to see some very posh houses along the way and it also meant we justified the ice-cream when we got there! so all was good in the end.

We've also had a roomy for the past couple of weeks, in the form of Benny the Japaness cat, hes extremely friendly but also has a really loud mieow and regulary tries to sleep on our heads which neither of us are fans of, so then the rest of the night is the battle of throwing him out versus sleeping through his mewing, so far I would say Benny is winning the war but we'll keep you posted.

Hope everyone is well. xxx