I guess it must be the Trade Union Rep coming out in me but I really cringe at Labour laws in Canada.  In fact North America as a whole are far from getting “work-life balance” right. The first thing that really hit me when working in a full time job in Canada was the lack [...]

Don was lucky enough to get free tickets to the Olympic Medal Ceremony tonight held at BC Place.  There were 5 medal ceremonies include Gold for the Canadian and US teams [source: Vancouver Sun].  After the ceremony was a small concert by Alberta country singer Paul Brandt (who we had never heard of before!!). Click [...]

As much as I am interested in the festivities of the Olympics its worth finding out why people are protesting it too.  Protesting the Olympics here, as we have seen in London, are a good opportunity to publicize the cause and to also motivate its followers.  So what are they protesting about? The main organization [...]

Today was the official opening of the Winter Olympics here in Vancouver.  The craziness that everyone expected to see I didn’t experience, everyone was in great spirits with people talking to strangers, taking pictures of just about everyone & everyone and generally having fun.  The public transport was kind of crazy but not in a [...]

After being here over a year now I’ve had quite a bit of experience of Canadian Customer Service to write another review, I have already done one for Canada and a previous one for the UK a while back so I have been inspired to do like an annual report on my most memorable experiences, [...]

I seem to have a thing for writing about mass transit right now, here is my report on behaviour of some passengers I have encountered! I have experienced traveling on mass transit in quite a few countries now including London, Paris, New York, Denver, Vancouver and so on. There are common behaviors in people from [...]

On 4th September we celebrated our 1st anniversary in Vancouver. It’s been a lovely year especially to put all the stresses of London behind us.  It doesn’t seem so long ago that we were completely beside ourselves due to how awful it was to live in our last property in Camden. Our crazy neighbours made [...]

This week marks the anniversary of being in Vancouver for 6 months. I am extremely pleased to be here, after all the crap we had to endure in the UK, and have achieved more than I thought we would to date despite the economy. Work: I was so pleased and relieved to find work so [...]

London would definitely not be able to cope with the levels of snow we’ve had in Vancouver.  Between 10 to 20cm would just shut down the city.  Front page of the free giveaway newspaper 24 Hours, left. Things that have amazed me: The buses have turned up exactly on time despite the conditions The Skytrain [...]

Been absolutely ages since I blogged so I thought I would get back into this by sharing our experiences in Canada to date. Lingo Just like everywhere else in the world Canada has funny phrases they use in conversations.  Here are just some of them: Awesome Totally Keeping you in the ‘radar’ All sentences end [...]

Finally…the day has come that we moved to Vancouver and I am so happy to have arrived. Today was a very long day but looking back at it now it was all worth it.  We got up at around 7am UK time and left the hotel as early as we could – the breakfasts there [...]

Today was our medical for our Canadian Immigration application. It was at a private clinic and cost us 500 pounds for the both of us. Quite expensive but at least we were treated far better than the NHS. It was kind of bizarre how many things the immigration people wanted to know…but I guess we [...]