Exploring our future home: Vancouver! Bye Bye NZ..for now!

Time has come to say say good bye to New Zealand..at least for a while. Charlie and I have been talking about moving to Vancouver for three years and we are finally making the move. Since I have become a kiwi at heart (and in the passport), I feel very attached to the land of the Long White Cloud, Aotearoa. It is a stunning country with amazingly friendly people and we can't wait to come back in 5-10 years time.


We made a move to Canada possible by lots of hard work: spamming different companies, hassling friends of friends for work contacts, checking job ads every night, etc. It all paid off. When we travelled to UK/Sweden in August, we took the opportunity to visit Vancouver and its surrounds to A) make sure it was the kind of place we wanted to live in, and B) meet with companies and secure jobs for at least one of us. A visa would only be granted for us if we had one job offer between us.

We were welcomed by a massive fire work display. I wonder if this happens to all visitors? :-) It was very impressive. Although this was an holiday, it was madly busy. We had many companies to speak to and friends (or more accurate: friends of friends at the time) to meet. We were very kindly offered to stay at Rob and Margot's place since they were away to get married. A fact to note is that neither Charlie nor I knew them from before. I got Margot's email in a roundabout way through friends, but we only ended up meeting Rob for 5 minutes in the streets of Vancouver. He handed over the key to their condo and asked "How do we know you again?" Of course they didn't want any money and I hope they liked chocolate since we bought them a lot of that.

I was impressed about how trust worthy they were of us to simply hand over the key without really knowing us. I hope it is a trait that is common amongst people in British Colombia. From what we saw, they were super friendly, welcoming, relaxed and they were noticeably slow and calm drivers (everyone is compared to the aggro Kiwis).
Vancouver showed is its best side. The weather was beautiful and we never saw any of the infamous rain which apparently is very common, mostly in winter of course.

The city is an attractive place to live as they are taking sustainability seriously (at least compared to many other places). It aspires to become one of the greenest city in the world. Public transport was easy to use, cheap and didn't have the Looser Cruiser-stamp that is has in NZ. The use of electric cars is actively encouraged: Biking was easy throughout the city and having a car was more a hassle than an enabler.

Totally by chance, a Swedish friend of mine, Anna, who I studied with at uni, happened to be in Vancouver with a marine research ship. She was sampling the ocean to find out how much plastic residuals there are. Very interesting. We caught up, had a few beers and laughed about old memories. After a few full-on days with many interviews, we were ready for a weekend of BC top quality mountainbiking. Charlie had met a guy from BC named Jeremy when they were riding in the Port Hills a year earlier. We got in contact and Jeremy showed us the very best trails of Squamish. Jeremy had a perfect set up for shuttling. It is a bit lazy (and unsustainable of course), but it was perfect on this day!

Jeremy was a kick-arse rider who was hitting some major jumps and gnarly down hill trails with a relatively cross country bike. It was impressive to see. After a whole day of riding, I was very pleased with our wedding day. We continued further north of Squamish to Pemberton, which is a pretty hick town. For the Winter Olympics 2010, it had a polish up and Charlie had problems recognising some parts of the town. Pemberton Valley has an extensive network of exciting mountain bike trails. Many of which are mainly made up of granite rock slabs. I was a bit intimidated at first, but when I learned how grippy it was, I was loving it. I am running out of time to write more. In short, Charlie managed to score a great job and we have secured a visa for both of us. I am expecting a job offer in the next day or so. All in all, it worked out really well!

We now have two intensive days in front of us to pack our belongings, clean the house and move out.

The Grand Plan:
Before we are moving to Vancouver, we are cycle touring through Chile and Argentina for 3.5 months! I can't wait. We'll mostly focus on the southern part of Chile, south of Temuco:

In the last two months we have spent lots of time preparing for the trip. Charlie has spent many late nights in the man cave (i.e. garage) building our bikes. We are now ready to take off. I hope to update you all on a regular basis either through my blog or through Picasa. More details to follow...

PS. I am so excited, I am bursting into flames!