BC day, Apartment searching and new people - 03/08/09-09/08/09

Another public holiday in Canada, I think its great the way they have done it here, there is a public holiday pretty much every month except for 3 months. It just so happened that I had this one off as well. We didn't do too much this day just thought we would take it easy. Apparently there is a world police and fire games which happens every 2 years that happens all around the world. There are about 50-70 countries competing depending on what site you read. Basically it is police and fire people, correction officers and customs officers that compete in many events such as: athletics, ice hockey, rugby, shooting, swimming and many other sports. All events are free, we decided to head to Burnaby (a city within the greater Vancouver area) to watch the track and field athletics. The main events we could see were long jump, running, and high jump. We mainly watched long jump, some of these people could jump really far, in the 18-25 group one guy jumped 6.98 m, considering they don't do this for a living that's pretty far considering in the Olympics they get to mostly 7.5m some up to nearly 9m. I thought they were pretty good.

After this we decided to head to the Night market at Richmond. It was a bit frustrating really, we had heard the night market was great and that they were looking at moving the venue, so we have been looking at the official website for the last 2 months which keeps saying check back for the new location of the night market. However the night market has been going since May yet the website continues to tell us its not on, turns out you don't look for the official website you go to a completely different one, ah annoying. Any who we decided to go, it just so happened the bus that runs to the market from where we were happened to be was full when it arrived, and the next bus was 1 hour away. With Cam having a dead battery on his phone we had to wing it, we walked to another bus stop. One bus trip, one train trip and then 3 more different buses later and about an hour or 2 in time, we arrived at the market. The funny thing was that the people that had obviously waited for the next bus to arrive where we started from, were walking out of the market as we walked in, should've waited. Oh well it was a good trip and wow we can't believe how helpful bus drivers are, we even had one which stopped past the bus stop to get us further.

Anyway the night markets were ok, I'm sure I have seen better, maybe being a public holiday it wasn't as busy as normal, perhaps we will have to go back once the website tells us it is open hehe. They did have some nice different foods, Cam had a nice squid and prawn skewers and I had chicken skewers and some curly potato with seasoning (these were yummo!!). However it was quite expensive. They did have some really cheap things at the stalls though, we did resist a few things.

Tuesday and Wednesday we didn't really get up to much, back to work for me so I'm usually pretty tired, and only get home at 8pm ish.

So we thought hard about our living situation. It appears that our lease agreement actually said that if we wanted to extend our lease past 31st August then we had to do this by June 30th. As it was now the start of August and we had not extended it we though we better look at new apartments. I'm sure if we wanted to stay where we are we probably could, but decided we have had enough of collecting other peoples mail, getting calls all the time for someone else, never being able to get hold of the landlord and living in complete clutter. We checked out Craig's list, like trade me and discovered that all of a sudden there were heaps of apartments for rent that were furnished, turned out to be perfect. So Thursday, Friday and Saturday were spent looking at apartments, in 3 days we looked at about 8 different places. We did have difficulty trying to decide on one as we actually found about 3 really nice places. One would only lease for up to 3 months which was not great for us as that would bring us up to just before the Olympics so that crossed that one off and the other was subletting, which he wasn't allowed to do so another cross, which left us with the one we have accepted. It means we will be moving in to town, first time to be moving by public transport which should be fun. We move September 1st ad will be there for 11 months.

Friday night we went out for drinks at the winking judge pub in town. One of the girls from work who started at the same time as me has just arrived from London and doesn't know anyone over here, so we invited her out for the evening. Just had a quiet few drinks, it was a great evening. We'll have new friends in no time.

Saturday night I rung home for the first time, it was Dads birthday in New Zealand but the day before for us. It was great timing as I got to talk to Mum, Dad and Vanessa. Was great to catch up on all the gossip and hear some familiar voices. Yes we were home on a Saturday evening, but I had to work the next morning at 7am and it was my first day at work on my own.

As I just said Sunday was my first official day at work, I was all on my own. They were really nice to me and I got an easy patient load, still makes me laugh that I only get 3 patients and very occasionally get 4 depending on the patients. Turns out 2 of the patients were what I have cared for in the past so that was good also. Only thing was that everything that I haven't experienced on my orientation days happened to pop up, Murphy's law I guess. For a first day though I must say it was pretty good, it happened to be more quiet that usual and everyone was very helpful. You just have to share the questions around different people hehe, so they don't get sick of you. I think once I get used to the hospital system and policies I will really enjoy it.

This evening we went to our new apartment to sign the lease. Our new landlord is very nice and friendly, also she lives in the building so at least we won't have a problem getting a hold of her. We'll post some photos when we have some.