Springtime in Vancouver

Spring sneaks into Vancouver.  You’ve got your head down, and your shoulders hunched and your hood up, when you suddenly look up and realize that the sun is shining, and Spring has ARRIVED!

For the last few days I have been working downtown, and there is nothing more beautiful, in my experience, than Vancouver in Spring sunshine.  I catch the Skytrain through New Westminster, along the huge slow Fraser River, into the bustle of Metrotown and out again, beside the peaceful parks and cycle paths.  As we reach Vancouver, the sun glints off the glass towers, the new leaves and the waves out on the water.  I stare at the new Community Garden which has sprung up on an abandoned parking lot near Science World – raised beds which a month ago were barely filled with soil, now a patchwork of shades of green .  The grass and wildflower roof of the Convention Centre is dazzling and busy with the bees from the Centre’s own hives.  The snow on the mountains, which look so close on a clear day, is almost too bright to look at.

I find myself running late for meetings as I am distracted by all the new cleanness around me.  Buildings and signs and people I have ignored over the winter are suddenly too bright and interesting not to stop and watch.  This is a city where people take cherry blossom very seriously; so seriously that it is a weekend and evening pastime to go for a Japanese-style Cherry Blossom walk.

I return home and sit in my garden, chatting to neighbours we haven’t seen since October – everyone is suddenly obsessed with gardening, everyone is growing something, even if it is just a lawn, and we compare notes and growing tips.  A queue of hummingbirds at the feeders, surprisingly noisy as they get into fights; apparently queue-jumpers exist everywhere.  We cannot wait for the full summer to arrive!  Welcome to Spring!

For the love of Grannies….

Gran Nicol and Gran Howcroft circa 1966

Today would have been my Gran Nicol’s 97th Birthday.  She died in 2011, (see this post), but her influence and that of her long term friend and rival, Gran Howcroft, is with me forever.

I was truly blessed with 2 strong, loving, intelligent and occasionally eccentric grandmothers, and 3 wonderful grandfathers.  While we were children, Gran Nicol was definitely front-runner in the Best Gran Stakes.  She lived in a seaside town, with a sandy beach, ice cream stands, plastic buckets and spades and wonderful promenade lights in the summer.  The houses were large and comfortable, and near to the rest of the family – a strange collection of elderly spinster aunts ruled over by our great grandmother and great grandfather, who loved to buy us bubble mixture and challenge us to catch the bubbles, blow bigger ones, land them on our noses – wonderful, loving and fun people.  Gran once explained her expanding waistline by saying that a real grandmother should be cuddly, “not like that bony old thing over in Surrey.”

That bony old thing was Gran Howcroft – tall, strong, loud and opinionated (think Julia Child and Barbara Woodhouse combined).  She was a professional artist, avid gardener, tennis and badminton player.  Into her 80s she was a volunteer with Meals On Wheels, delivering meals to people older than herself, despite being a terror behind the wheel of her car.  Visits to her house were fraught with danger.  She kept dogs and vicious, anti-social cats, and the house was coated in pet hair.  Food was frequently out of date, so poisoning was a constant risk.  She made no concessions to small children, so there were no toys or games but we were permitted to play gently and quietly with a dolls house, and she made sure there was a new piece whenever we visited.  There were also a number of beautiful puzzle boxes – souvenirs from her travels with The Penguin (Grandad Howcroft).

As I approached teenage, Gran Nicol moved from the seaside town to our neighbourhood.  Although I missed the holidays, she was available as I transitioned to high school and became a difficult teen.  She patiently listened to my angry rants, fed me coffee cake, drove me home when I had missed the bus.  She introduced me to the therapeutic benefits of gardening, she told me I was beautiful when I was at my most awkward and she pushed me to push myself academically.  At the same time, Gran Howcroft came into her own as a guide and mentor.  She could discuss current affairs and art, challenge me to think critically and she demanded that I exceed my own expectations.

A few days ago, I was chatting to a friend who is a Grandmother.  Her grandchildren live in Munich and she was describing how she sends them letters and parcels at least once a week, misses them desperately, but visits at least once a year.  One of the most common worries we hear from new expats, and one of the reasons an emigration may not “stick” is the draw that family has; you truly may not miss them until they are out of reach.  North America is a good place to find people in a similar situation, however.  Families are often separated by thousands of miles, seeing each other once or twice a year for busy family holidays.  The Great Canadian Roadtrip is often a result of children moving away, across the whole continent, and discovering that the cheapest way of visiting Grandma and Grandad for Thanksgiving is to drive there.  I remembered that, when I moved from home to college and then onward, my Grandmothers were great letter writers.  They wrote about real issues; faith, careers, education, relationships and family.  Gran Nicol, in particular, took upon herself the responsibility of ensuring that all her grandchildren were always up to date on the news from other branches of the family; she held us together and kept the family close, even when we were scattered around the country and, eventually, the globe.  We spent much of our married life away from our close families, and our children had little opportunity to get to know their grandparents well, but they always knew who they were, even as babies.  It seems that distance does not need to affect family.  You can still be the Best Gran (or Grandad), you can still spoil your grandchildren, you can still tell them you love them through email, Skype, You Tube, Twitter, letter… Take the time to keep in touch, take an interest in their interests, and never assume that your views and opinions are not relevant.  Even the smallest contact is important when distance is involved.

“To send a letter is a good way to go somewhere without moving anything but your heart.” Phyllis Theroux

A Walk On The Not-So-Wild Side

We live very close to Burnaby Mountain, and we can walk to the trails that run all over the Mountain, all the way to Simon Fraser University if you like to go that far.  I took the dog for a walk on the trails the other day, and she wasn’t very willing to accompany me at one point.  I wondered if this was a Lassie moment.  Is she trying to tell me something?  A bear, Lassie?  A cougar? Or was she just objecting to the light drizzle, the increasing distance from her bed and the fact that if we use that trail, she’ll get her paws muddy?

I know I have mentioned before, probably very often, like a really boring guest at a dinner party, the bear that got into the compost bins the summer we moved here.  Then there were the reports of bob cats, cougar, lynx, and of course the coyotes, skunk and raccoons that constantly threaten our dustbins.  I am thrilled that we live in such a wild environment, and we have done everything to learn how to deal with meeting a bear, beating off a cougar or getting rid of skunk-stink, but the bottom line is that, although I am very happy they are there, I would rather the wild stayed over there.  Don’t get me wrong – I’m not that crazy lady from Over The Hedge, with the security lasers, alarms and Depelter 3000.  I’m not trying to keep them away, and I am excited that my parents have had a close encounter with a bear at Whistler, that we have seen wild orcas hunting in the Straits, that the seals love chasing the Dragon Boats in False Creek, and that I occasionally get a glimpse of a solemn family of raccoons, lined up by the road.  But I’m not going looking for them.  If the wild chooses to stay away from me, I’ll return the favour and leave the critters well alone, and I know it disappoints my father in law that the Wild is not lined up by the road waving little flags to welcome him to Vancouver, but I think I know why.  It’s the reason we moved here in the first place – it’s Space.  Not the vast, dark, “to boldly go where no one..” etc Space, but the huge, rolling, wonderful regions of the completely uninhabited and uninhabitable space beyond where we are.  It means that birds do not rely on my bird feeder, hanging forlornly in the garden with no customers.  It means the squirrels couldn’t give 2 squirrel-squeaks that my bird feeder is not squirrel-proof.  It means that the wild animals can choose our company, or not, and if we are careful to avoid tempting them into our garbage, they will stay safely away and I will know they are there, but not see them.  That seems fair.

Move on, Nothing to See Here…

Yesterday I was catching up with a bit of reading on the British Expats site.  This is a great website, with a lot of links to good blogs about moving to and living in Canada, and every one of them gets a reaction from me.  Yesterday, it was the turn of “10 Years And A Change Of Heart”, written by a couple who had moved in their 40s to the west coast of Vancouver Island, looking for the idyllic lifestyle of the holiday retreat.  Guess what they found?  First, there is no employment in idyllic rural retreats, unless you are a fisherman, writer or connected to the tourist industry.  Second, there is no-one to make friends with.  Third, there is nothing to do.  I guess everyone dreams of the quiet life.  We all imagine living on the land, going to back to basics, and sometimes we find ourselves in a place where we really imagine it can work, but usually we are on our holidays and reality is a little warped.  The lesson I took from this blog was, Be Careful What You Wish For.

Before emigrating to your dream retreat, consider the following:  What are you going to do for money?  What are you going to do for company?  What are you going to do for entertainment?  When I told my husband about the blog, he was speechless.  Then he said “Nothing to do? In Vancouver?”  No, not Vancouver.  Vancouver Island.  A space as large as the UK with the population of Cardiff.  A place where families travel every summer to their cabins, where they spend blissful months living the basic, uncomplicated life before returning to the bustle of real life.  One of the things we love about living here in Vancouver is that, if you want to get away from it all, you can.  A quick ferry ride to an island or a slow drive into the interior, and here are towns with a population of 1,000, where you can live for 20 years and still be the outsider, where the best excitement all year is when the local constable shot the cougar that had dragged a deer carcass under the next-door neighbour’s deck (this happened to a friend of mine, the day she moved to her new house with her new baby and her 2 year-old son, from the sophistication of Vancouver to the Wild West in one day).

Some days, like yesterday, when I have dropped off the youngest child at her Musical Theatre class and I am making a quick dash to the Art & Craft store for a gift card for the friend of the middle child, who must be dropped off at her party before I go to a jewellry party at my friend’s house, stopping to collect a friend of the eldest child who is coming to sleepover, but I can’t do any of these things because I am stuck in Saturday shopping traffic, nose to tail around the Mall, and I’m already late to collect the youngest… these are the times I wonder whether we are really any better off than if we lived in England.  But yesterday morning we were at the peak of Mount Seymour, playing in a pure white snowdrift and planning our next skiing trip, and this morning we were downtown, walking the seawall from Science World to Yaletown for coffee and pizza and seal-spotting.  The eldest and her friend took themselves off into the chaos of Chinatown to see the New Year Parade, to buy steamed pineapple buns and lemon triangle cake from the street vendors.  To get there, the two 14-year olds walked through the poorest area of Vancouver, and I did not feel a moment of worry for their safety.

We do not find ourselves outsiders, because in this multicultural melting pot, pretty much everyone is an outsider and we all enjoy our differences.  As Vancouver feels more and more like home, and the UK becomes a distant memory, we sometimes take our life here for granted and find ourselves grumbling.  The comforting thing is that we are grumbling about real life issues, because we are living life to the full.

Where do you dream of moving to, and is it a realistic dream?

The Ta-Dah List

This Saturday I woke with a sense of doom.  It was a beautiful day, the sun was streaming through the trees overlooking the rushing creek outside the window, I had slept in and now I had to write my To Do List.  What I wanted to do was drink a cup of tea in bed, phone my Mum for a chat, then phone my best friend to consult on Christmas presents for the kids, take a slow shower and walk the dog in the first sun we had seen for over a week.  But I haven’t been home at the weekend for 3 weeks and it’s the last weekend before the first in December – that’s the weekend to declutter and clean the house before the Christmas decorations clutter it up again.  Also we started decorating the girls’ bedroom weeks ago, and it had to be finished.  I knew what I would do, because it’s the same thing I do every weekend – write a long To Do List, rush through the day and then feel frustrated when I look at the list on Sunday evening and see all the unfinished jobs.

My husband came to the rescue.  “We’re not doing a To Do List,” he announced.  “We’re going to do a Ta-Dah List.”  I sat in bed and drank tea and chatted.  The whole family walked the dog and went further than we would have done if I had been rushing back to do the next thing on the list.  I pottered in the garden.  We finished the bedroom.  We cooked and ate a roast dinner, drank wine, played board games and watched silly films.  On Sunday evening Dim presented me with my Ta-Dah List – everything we had done, carefully written down with tick boxes all neatly ticked.  I felt really productive.

When Canada Sucks…

What will make today even better than yesterday?

I got a surprise this week when I went to track down a blog I was following.  I thought I had subscribed, and so should be getting updates, but then I realized The Budgie Spirit had been very quiet for a while, so I dived deep into the blogosphere to find her.

Turns out I’ve missed quite a bit.  After 4 turbulent months in our fair city, these new immigrants returned to England in 2011, and should by now be enjoying the benefits of great cheese, cheap wine and a new baby.  Their decision was hard to make, and Budgie’s writing is thoughtful and somewhat regretful.  What I particularly like (being very sensitive about my wonderful home) is the very positive way this couple left us and how happy they are “back home”, but a few of the comments about their struggles with Vancouver sounded very familiar.

Budgie talks about how hard it is to make friends in a new city.  They lived at the University of British Columbia (UBC), which is somewhat isolated, then in Kitsilano which is anything but isolated.  Although the speed of life in Vancouver is nothing compared to London, Paris or even Basingstoke, this is still a city, with city attitudes and busy people.  The only ones not busy are the panhandlers and crazies, and even some of them seem to have a packed schedule of mumbling, cussing and stumbling into the road.  We had the advantage of the Magical Introduction Makers, otherwise known as children – wherever we go, we will make friends through school, playdates, kids clubs and random people our kids attract on the beach.  Without them, we would not have moved to the complex we chose because of the large number of children living there, thus immediately making some great friends.  Without them, bless their hearts, I think we would have struggled in the same way.  Without children, try setting up some contacts before you come; expat websites like Internations, or friends of friends who might be willing to lend a supportive hand.

Another factor was the job market.  Mr Budgie (Ed) was let go from his job after only a few months, which was a devastating blow.  Emigrating is an expensive business, and when you need that job, it is no comfort to read on the ex-pat forums that it can take 6-9 months to get a paycheck.  Dim is job hunting again after his last company went under, and it’s a depressing business.  He’s been going to a few workshops and at one, they discussed the unionized environment.  Through my work in HR, he has heard enough about my opinions of Unions, but his co-searchers at the workshop were surprised that the existence of strong Unions is often the reason fresh blood can’t find a way into the company.  “But I thought Unions were supposed to help!” cried one confused jobseeker.  They are, but they help those who are currently employed, and that means a lot of internal promotion and moves, and few opportunities for those who don’t want to come in at the ground level.  The flipside of that particular coin is getting a job in a non-unionized company, and losing the stability because they can let you go too easily.  One of the statistics Dim learned was that 80% of positions are never even posted – they are filled through networking or internal moves, so make sure you make friends, join professional associations and follow up contacts.

And finally, Food.  The Budgie Spirit is written by a Frenchwoman, and if anyone appreciates good food, it is the French.  I really sympathized with her initial reaction to the Vancouver grocery scene – over-priced, over-packaged foods in silly over-large stores.  We also suffered when we realized that our new life would not include as much chicken, no orange squash, no decent cheese and no chocolate.  We couldn’t even drown our sorrows because the wine was so expensive, and why would it be expensive?  It’s made right here in BC!

Gradually we came to terms, found substitutes where we could and learned to live without where necessary.  We changed our shopping habits to find the best value and discovered many wonderful new foods and dishes.  When we returned to England last year, the younger children could not even remember orange squash.  It helped that we were not passionate foodies, in the same way that we are not passionate about pubs or football or soap operas, the other major ingredients for expat misery and homesickness.  I covered this in “What You Can’t Get”, and it’s worth considering what is really important to you before you even make the decision to emigrate.

This couple had the worst experience of emigrating, but in no way failed.  They discovered a lot of great things about Vancouver – free stuff on Craigslist, yoga, the great outdoors.  I am still convinced that a smooth emigration is 90% luck, and you can plan as much as you like, but if luck is not on your side, you may have to accept a long, hard struggle, or a short stay and a quick return.  Don’t go burning any bridges – you might find yourself heading back over them sooner than you might wish!

What I Did On My Summer Holidays…

Once I was going to write a blog about seasons, and how lovely it is to live in a country with some.  Then the weather went screwy, it rained for 6 months solid, and I thought I’d better keep quiet.  But the sun came out in July, just as the school holidays started, and we had 2 solid months of really hot sun, long days and warm nights.  The west coast is breezy and fresh, never humid, and there is always water to head to if the heat becomes too much.  Today the rain returned, for the first time since July 22nd, and I wanted to reflect on our lovely summer.  So, this is what we did during our summer holidays…

Dinner by the fire at Deception Pass, WA

Tie-dyeing teeshirts at the Township 7 Winery

Raccoon hats and strange machines at Fort Langley

A free Vancouver Symphony Orchestra concert at Deer Lake

Swimming and jumping off the dock and more swimming everywhere there was water….

Beachcombing at Porteau Cove

Sailing School at Port Moody

And enjoying our garden as it grew, and grew and grew!

What did you do this summer?