Here we are

So here I am, up at 5 am sitting here writing this and trying to figure out where to start.

I figure if you are reading, you already know that Jeff got his long awaited job offer from EA just a little over two weeks ago. You know that we had to pack up our lives as best we could in two weeks' time and that we got to Vancouver on Saturday. You know that we have taken a big leap of faith to come here - neither of us has so much as come here on vacation before, and we don't have a home yet, only four weeks of paid temporary accomodation in a furnished apartment. We don't have family or friends here, just a few acquaintances that we will be relying on to help us make this huge transition.

We had our first full day in Vancouver yesterday. In spite of a long, very tiring day on Saturday -- getting up early, going over to our old house to let the movers in and try to clean the place up a bit, making frantic last minute arrangements to bring our cat with us on the plane and then the long flight and journey to our hotel -- we all woke up pretty early yesterday thanks to our wacky internal clocks that think it is three hours later than it really is.

We had no food other than the snacks we had bought for plane/airport consumption so the first order of business was to find some groceries. We figured since we were planning to look at moving to Burnaby, we'd just drive out there and find whatever local store sold Loblaws stuff. Someone had mentioned to me once that there's a place called "Superstore" out here that sells PC products so I decided to start there. We got into our horrible huge honking SUV rental car (the guy at the airport car rental place thought he was doing us a favor giving us a "free upgrade" to this tank?!?) and figured out how to get where we were going.

The drive out to Burnaby didn't take too long since it was a Sunday morning and we eventually found the Superstore place. I think I am going to miss Loblaws a lot - this store was like a freaking barn, it's attached to a humongous shopping mall and there was a guy at the door who tried to tell me that I couldn't bring my backpack into the store even when I protested that this was like my purse - would he tell a lady with a big purse that she can't bring that into the store? Then he compounded my disgust by telling me that I was allowed to bring it in if I had "feeding bottles" for my 3 year old son in the bag. Eventually I agreed with him that there was stuff for Calum in the backpack and he let me in. They didn't have a "natural foods" section and I got the feeling that they would have looked at me like I had two heads if I had asked for spelt bread and rice pasta, so we had to stop at the Capers market near our hotel when we got back downtown. Capers is owned by Wild Oats, the health food supermarket that I used to work at in St Louis, and it looked a lot like a Wild Oats but alas! They did not seem to sell Birdland bread there and they also don't stock Brown Cow Cream On Top yogurt.

The hotel where we are staying is pretty nice and not as fancy as I had expected, which is a relief. There is a health club and concierge but we never have to see them because we just go right up in the elevator from the parking garage, my blood pressure slowly going back to normal after the harrowing experience of trying to slot the Ford Explorer into the seemingly tiny parking space with a huge concrete pillar next to it that we have been assigned. The security in this place is really something. When you check in they give you this little black plastic thing that fits into the palm of your hand, and there's a button on it that you have to press to do just about everything. Stick your hand in your pocket, press on this button and you can make doors open and elevators work.

We are on the ninth floor of a high rise that fills up the space between Georgia, Bute and Alberni Sts. Across from me there's an HSBC office tower with a sign on the curb that looks like a giant stick of deodorant. On the opposite corner is another office building with a twenty four hour fitness club up on the second floor. At any time of day or night we can look out and watch the never-ending succession of people exercising on the equipment in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows. The best view, though, is from the bedroom windows where we can look out on Coal Harbour and the mountains rising up behind it. Sometimes when the clouds or fog lift for a while we can see the snow up at the top of the mountain that is centered between the tall buildings that frame our view. I guess some day soon we will learn the name of that mountain.

We took a walk out yesterday afternoon when I woke up from a long, groggy nap and found Calum driving everyone bonkers with his restless energy. At first we thought we would walk all the way out to Stanley Park which is supposedly a ten minute walk from here. Then we realized that the ten minute estimate assumes you are not taking a three year old with you who refuses to hold anyone's hand but is likely to dash out into the street at any time. Our walk was much abbreviated in distance but lengthened in time and frustration. There's no word to describe the suspicious and slightly hostile stares we get from perfect strangers when we are walking along carrying a violently struggling child who is yelling "LET GO OF ME!" Luckily Megan suggested going a different way home and we discovered the playground at the Coal Harbour community centre.

I'm not sure if it's jet lag, or just the sense of being an outsider here but I had this sense of separateness all day, like I am not really part of what I am seeing and doing. The backpack incident didn't help but overall each time we leave the sanctuary of our little furnished suite I feel like I am immersing myself in some foreign culture where there might be unwritten rules that we don't know. When people look at us during our walk I wonder if there is some taboo we have broken here. Do Vancouver residents not go out with struggling three year olds? Each time I speak to someone I fully expect to get a blank stare of incomprehension. I wonder when this will pass and I will start to feel normal here. I guess it'll probably happen gradually. It's weird because I have travelled a bit and don't usually feel this way in North American cities that I haven't visited before.

Calum just came out here and commented, "It's raining again. We'd better put our coats on and get our little hoods up." Better get used to it, kid.

Today we have a full agenda. We've got an appointment to tour and visit the school we'd like to send Megan to this fall. The woman I've spoken to twice now about our visit has repeatedly invited us to spend as much time as we like at the school over the next couple of weeks until the school closes for the summer, so I guess we will try and do that. Then this evening we have an interview at a housing co-op that has a vacancy for August 1st. We drove past it yesterday and noticed that it was very close to Jeff's new office but the surrounding neighborhood is a little bit run down - there is the back of a shopping plaza across the street from the co-op and there are some houses that could use a bit of paint just down the road. Still we are going to keep an open mind and do a bit more driving around before we judge whether this is a place we would want to live. In the meantime I want to see about getting a PO Box out in Burnaby somewhere so that all the people reading this can start sending me mail :-)