Canadia: Vancouver

And so part 2 of my adventure begins. On Wed Jan 31st myself, Glen and Jamie flew from Toronto to Vancouver. Getting to the airport was a bit of a struggle as i've bought quite a few things since getting to Canada so carrying it all by myself was.... fun. No major problems though so we flew to Vancouver in approx 4.5 hours. There's a three hour time difference between Toronto and Van, which means i'm now 8 hours behind all ye folk back in the emerald isle.

So, my first impressions of Vancouver: I absolutely love it. In fact, i've decided to stay here instead of heading to Whistler. I've been talking with a lot of people who've been to Whistler and they say accommodation is near impossible to get. I didn't expect to love it so much here so it has made may decision far easier. It's a completely different city to Toronto. Toronto feels like an American city whereas Van is far more European. It's still a really big city but not half as big as Toronto. It has far fewer sky scrapers and the city is more spread out. But more importantly it's far cleaner and the people are super nice and cool here. It's nowhere near as multi-cultural here, but there are a load of Irish, Asians and Australians.

The thing that really made me fall in love with Van is the amount of things you can do here. There's just so much to do, both in Winter and Summer. There are three ski/snow-boarding slopes right outside the city to keep me occupied for the next few months. Then in the summer there's loads of hiking, mountain biking, canoing, sky diving, pretty much anything you could want. The only problem is being able to afford it all. May need to rob a few banks.

I've been here for almost 1 week now and unfortunately have been partying far more then I should be. I'm gonna blame that one on Glen. He's a major bad influence on me. Funnily he says the exact same about me. We're staying in another hostel with a bar in it, which i'm starting to think is a bad idea. We're right downtown surrounded by a lot of pubs/clubs. We've had quite a few great nights out already. On Fri night we met up with a Canadian friend of Jamie's (Clint). He picked us up in his massive pickup. There were 7 of us piled into it with plenty of room for more. It was a hilarious night as they were a bunch of dumbass American jocks. The whole night was like something out of an American Pie movie. Classic night.

Another brilliant day/night was super bowl Sunday. It's a pretty big deal in Canada too and all of the bar's had special promotions on. Myself and Glen headed to our local Irish bar (Doolins) at around 2pm to have a couple of warm up drinks before the 3 o'clock kick off. There was great craic throughout the day with lots of drinks promotions and games going on all day. The Indianapolis Colts ended up beating the Chicago Bears and myself and Glen celebrated their victory by going on a pub crawl. We did a nice mix of Irish and Canadian bars. Pretty much everyone we met on our travels were smashed.

In between all the partying i've been busy looking for work. I've applied to quite a few games companies and been contacting recruitment agencies too for any old crappy office work. There's an unbelievable amount of construction in the city at the moment too, in preparation for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Whistler, so if all else fails, I may even look into getting a job in construction. For now, i'm just looking for work and will look for accommodation after I get a job sorted. I've been down in the SWAP office a lot and they've been really helpful down there. Funnily enough, Kat, the girl working in the Toronto office just happened to come over here the same time as us so it was good to see her here too. She was telling us how it has hit -30 degrees in Toronto since we left. To say we've been lucky with the weather since getting here would be a major understatement. It's actually pretty warm in Van at the moment too.

So the plan for the next few days is to find a job asap. The two lads are off to Whistler for two nights on Wed and will be back for the weekend but then on Mon they'll be heading off on a two month trip around the U.S. so looks like i'll have to find some new drinking buddies. Well as soon as I have some news i'll update all of ye good folks.