Living in Vancouver

Hello everyone, and sorry for the long gap between posts. This one will be brief, unfortunately, mainly just for me to post my big bit of news: after searching for almost a week I have found a place to live for the three months I will be in Vancouver! This is super exciting for me, not only because it means I get to move out of the hostel and start my 'real life' here (as opposed to constantly being a tourist) but also because it's the first time I've ever lived anywhere other than my parents' house in South Oakleigh.

I'm moving into the West End neighborhood which, if you know Vancouver at all, is not far from the city area, between Downtown and the gorgeous Stanley Park. It's a pretty competitive area to get housing - I was wandering through the streets the other day admiring all the nice houses and thinking "I'll never be able to afford this area!" But I got lucky and found a room in a shared apartment with a lovely woman called Donna. The place is small, but it's nice and light and reasonably modern, and nowhere near as cramped as some of the places I've looked at. It's hard to find places that are both nice inside and in nice areas; a lot of them are one or the other but not both! So I move in tonight - in fact, when my last 6 minutes of prepaid internet time run out I'll be heading down to my new home.

So that's my latest. The job comes next (but I have several leads to follow up from people so it shouldn't be too hard). I figured it was much harder to house-hunt once you start working, so the place to live was my first priority. Will keep you posted with any other news that comes up, and I'll try to get pictures of my trip to the Rocky Mountains up soon.

In the meantime, for anyone who is on Facebook, you can add me as a friend and then see the couple of albums I've uploaded there, of San Francisco pics and also Highway 1 along the California Coastline.