This is a reanimation of the Vicaribus blog as lived by Miro Kazakoff and Ehren Foss in 2004 and 2005. The photos may be spotty.

Downtown Canada

Posted by ehren

We have yet to adapt to the long days. In Squamish you could sense dusk -- a navy blue just over the eastern mountains, edging the black -- until 10:30 or 11pm. Official sunset is now well after 9pm. Until June 18th or so, when we turn south into Jasper, the days will only get longer. We will probably enjoy more than 18 hours of day around the 20th. Sounds lovely, and allows for so much activity in the evening, but it's really started to screw with our heads. I'm not really sure when to get hungry for dinner, and when we expected yesterday to leave the climbing wall around 3, in actuality the time was past 6.

I've heard some positively mellifluous accents in British Columbia. Americans (myself included) invoke "Eh" "Aboot" and other Strange Brewisms that don't come close to fully capturing the lilt and sway of this sleepy mix of American, Australian, and English English. The French influence is harder to find (for me).

Canadians are fantastically nice. Everything seems to work. As Miro put it (paraphrased and edited for brevity) "You pay your %20 taxes and live a good life. It's easier in Canada." People seem a little duller, as well, but a slow Southern drawl brings the same incorrect assumptions. People seem not to understand what I'm asking at first, but I think my distinctly non-Canadian word-choice and phrasings are to blame.

I rounded out the afternoon at Brazza, a gilatto/ice-cream/coffee place in North Vancouver; I had basically given up trying to find a solid, free connection. Either some kind of port filtering was afoot or the massive (compared to the internet-backbone luxuries I'm used to) latency would knock out SSH/SCP and a few other protocols, but strangely FTP and HTTP seemed to be unaffected. I think I got all our Squamish pictures online, but I couldn't stay connected via SSH long enough to see my picture-resizing script finish, so who knows. I didn't even attempt to use CVS, lest I cause aborted transfers to totally fux the branch.

I attempted to renew my jobsearch today. It's going to be tricky. I barely have enough internet time to maintain the travelogue, catch up with friends, and communicate with SPECTRE. A proper (and hopefully successful) jobsearch, even though the market seems to be piping hot at the moment, will require a level of persistence and follow-through that is difficult to muster when connected for less than an hour a day. I'm trying to solve that problem with organization: Rigorous bookkeeping of leads and communiques. That way maybe I can respond to e-mails and write specific resumes/cover letters (and print, address, and stamp them) without needing to look stuff up. And, just so everybody knows, I'm totally not opposed to nepotism when it comes to my job search. It's just bad when everybody else does it.

I have yet to shower in Canada, and intend to do so tomorrow. I could just go outside because IT'S RAINING AGAIN YAAAAYYYYYYYY!!! I watched "Jackie Brown" once we parked for the night. Good flick.

In the morning I woke up around 8, stuffed my backpack for some urban camping, and booked a room at the downtown Hostel. I was starting to get some of the cabin fever, and I figured that the price of the hostel was well worth the time and money spent on getting from North Vancouver to Vancouver everyday. I took the "SeaBus" (a medium-sized passenger ferry) and walked up Granville St. The hostel is large and well run, more expensive than those I've visited in Europe. I signed up for a dinnertime "beer and bowling" trip, and also saw that "Meat Beat Manifesto" is playing tonight. I definitely remember Stan's room shaking to Mr. Manifesto's electronica after he bought his new subwoofer.

I went to Chinatown for lunch, bought a lunch combination special, and my sinuses are clear. They don't mess around with spice in Chinatown.