Hollywood lives

They film quite a few things up here in British Columbia.  In fact, here's a handy list of 300+, and while the locations of Air Bud: Golden Receiver may not inspire a pilgrimage in the way the sites around San Francisco where Hitchcock shot Vertigo do, there are many notable titles here.  Like Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed.

Anyway, it's the generous tax breaks the local government gives to people who make the drive from LA, so you can imagine how excited I was when two film shoots were scheduled in and around the Westin Hotel, which you can see from one side of our apartment.

Disappointingly, the first seemed to be an advert for Westin Hotels, so no point in getting my paparazzi lens out.  But today they were filming for the telly series Rogue.  You've never heard of it?  Well, it's about Grace, a morally and emotionally-conflicted undercover detective, who is tormented by the possibility that her own actions contributed to her son's mysterious death.  As Grace struggles to become the wife and mother her family now needs, her life is further complicated by a forbidden relationship with crime boss Jimmy Laszlo. In order to stay alive, Grace needs to help Jimmy find the traitor in his midst, while knowing he may have played a part in her tragedy.  Thank you Google.

Aside from war and cricket, film making involves the most standing around of any profession.  That was obviously said by someone who knew nothing about cricket, but watching large numbers of people hang about in pouring rain, outside a hotel that was still trying to operate as a hotel, did not seem as glamorous as a red carpet at the Oscars had led me to believe.

Did I see anyone famous?  I'm not sure.  Thandie Newton, star of Mission: Impossible II and The Chronicles of Riddick is meant to be in it, as is Marton Csokas and he was in The Lord of the Rings.  Actually Ian Hart, one of my favourite British actors ever, was in a few episodes, but watching everyone wait around for a few moments of action - an actor pulling a suitcase up to the hotel doors - and seeing that repeated several times got boring surprisingly quickly.  Maybe when they make Scooby-Doo 3 things will be more impressive.



LA or Vancouver?  Hmmm.

Lights, camera...hang on...wait...hang on...

Possibly a famous actor.  He was the one pulling the case.

More people sitting.

Is that Thandie Newton?  Probably not.

Extras.

Another camera filming something.

And that's what Pete thinks of it all.

Local park

We have the Internets again!  Which means I can tell you about our walk around Stanley Park, our local bit of green space.  You can see its trees from our window.

We decided to stroll around the seawall, something of a local landmark itself - a trail that leads all around the outside of the park with the sea on your right the whole way (or the left, if you're going in the other direction).  Unfortunately it quickly became apparent that Stanley Park is 1,000 acres in size, so after walking for quite a while and getting nowhere we turned around.

But what we saw on the way was pretty good.  There's evidence of 3,000 years of human habitation in the park by Canadian First Nations and a great selection of totem poles to commemorate this.  There are also cricket and rugby pitches, a rowing club, an aquarium, and a naval base that fires a gun at 9pm each evening (it has its own Twitter account).  And that's just our corner!  Plenty of exploring to do, mostly in the rain.

Back home I decided it was time to hang pictures on the walls.  We're still wading through packing debris but at least we have something nice to look at while we trip over.

Sunday morning snooze with Mummy.  Daddy was up unpacking and tidying things.

Boats, and the rowing club.

Is that a smile?  Is someone getting to love his snow suit?  (Hint: no).

Doing a very Vancouverite thing: the Sunday seawalk stroll.

Chevron owns most of what you're looking at.  And me.

Totem poles!  They're cool, that's just understood.

A few more blazing autumn colours.

Where does it all come from?

We're in our new flat.  But we don't have the Internet yet!  I'm...finding it hard...to breathe.  Things should return to normal on Tuesday, but until then I'm doing this via my phone.  Luckily my typing is even slower than the upload speed, so there shouldn't be any problems.

We left maid service behind when we checked out of the hotel on Friday (or, as Hannah puts it, her usual maid has been called back into service) and then a truck and some men arrived and filled our pristine new apartment with stuff.  Our stuff, which looks shabbier with every move.  Our poor dining table was designed in Sweden, made in China, bought in Newcastle, and has now travelled to California and on to Vancouver.  That's some serious food miles.

The team brought everything up in the lift and unboxed it, while I had the important and tiring task of ticking off numbers on a list to make sure everything had arrived.  There were some casualties, including a dining chair (an Ikea sibling of the table) and, heart-breakingly, the piano, which has a huge corner dent and two now-non-working keys.  But they're just possessions - it's not like they're important, like people.  And yet my piano has never screamed at me or expected me to feed it and change its pooey nappies...my feelings are so confused right now!

Have you been good enough to earn your things back?

Yes you have!  Here they come.

Enjoying the view.

First breakage.

Nobody puts baby in a corner!  Except us, when we need to get things done and keep him safely out of the way.

Toaster, kettle, espresso machine.  You can leave the rest of the stuff on the truck.

And, finally, happily reunited with one of his favourites.

Singing in the rain

Well, one of us was.  Another was complaining loudly, mostly in screams, that this doesn't happen in California.  Luckily it was the baby and not Hannah, but I think she shared his sentiments.

Yes, Vancouver finally delivered on its promise of heavy precipitation, but there's something bred across countless sodden generations that leads the British to stoically ignore anything wet.  It's like rabies, but not French.  We donned jackets, kept dry and carried on, as did all this fine city's other inhabitants.

The first order of the day was to clear customs - another queuing, form-filling ritual.  Except mercifully there was no queue, and the official who dealt with us was more interested in talking about Johnny Cash than grilling us (he'd seen him in concert five times, but the last time was really just a cash-grab by June Carter Cash, because Johnny wasn't up to performing, and his son's not great although his daughter has some good songs).  Which should mean that all our furniture gets delivered tomorrow!

Activities for the rest of the day included buying shower curtains for the new apartment and making sure that the ice maker in the fridge works.  A man's got to have his G&T!  We also visited Urban Fare, like Whole Foods but just that little bit more expensive.  Ben and Jerry's is $8 a pot!!  Although that is for a half-litre rather than a US pint.  Metric, French, like rabies.

 

 

Instructions for the incredible robot toilet in our new flat, so that clears everything up.  Hannah tried it.  Her judgement: "chilly".

 

 

Among the fall colours.

 

 

This is our building!  We're the second balcony up on the right of the curved bit.

 

 

I've given up on speciality coffee places.  Here are two Pumpkin Spice Lattes (PSLs) from Blenz Coffee (local Starbucks-a-like).  They were pretty good...and my coffee machine should arrive tomorrow.

 

 

Pete, starting the day as he means to go on: unimpressed.

 

 

Pretzel and Peanut Butter Cadbury's Dairy Milk.  This would not go down well back in the mother country.

 

What a glorious feeling, I'm happy again!

Hello goodbye

And then it happened.  I'm typing from a hotel room in Vancouver, where the outside temperature is enough above freezing to allow rain to fall.  It's slightly chillier than at 5am when we bid goodbye to Walnut Creek and scooted down to the airport, aided by no BART strike.

The flight was half empty, meaning we could leave the baby at the back while we sat at the front, and immigration was friendly and straightforward again although Hannah was not allowed back to see her smuggler friends (if you haven't watched Border Security Canada it's highly recommended).  A quick ride in a large taxi and we returned to the Residence Inn - we're here until our furniture catches up with us.

Hannah was desperate to get to the office, of course, so we walked there via the bank, where the usual tortuous hour finally led to a joint account and a credit card application.  We then wandered down to our new neighbourhood.

It was a revelation!  The best Korean barbecue restaurant ever, where we ate two-nights-running when we visited five years ago, is right there!  So is Whole Foods, and what I will admit is a pretty decent coffee place.  Suddenly the grey clouds and drizzle didn't matter, and California was already a half-forgotten dream, like in The Wizard of Oz, although Pete, newly rebundled in snow suit and frowning like the munchkin he is, may beg to differ.

 

 

Last pumpkin spice latte from Peet's for a while.

 

 

Our Pete is as enamoured with air travel as ever.

 

 

Like the pilgrims of old we stare at the vessel that will take us to a new land, except we shouldn't have problems with lice and scurvy.

 

 

Rushing over the threshold!

 

 

The snow suit: better or worse than air travel?

 

 

WE Coffee Roasters, our local, and despite the abstract artwork on top it was nicely textured and well balanced.  Not quite there, but not bad.

 

Grey skies, constant drizzle, and a pot of tea.  It reminds me of somewhere...

Goodbye party

It was time to wish farewell to all the amazing people we've met in and around Berkeley and Walnut Creek over the last five years.  What's most scary is how many now have babies, although more tears were shed by those out of nappies than in.  Today is also Hannah's birthday, a fact that allowed Santi to arrive with the most decadent sea-salt-caramel-chocolate-cream-cake the world has ever seen.

What can I say?  Spending an evening having to say goodbye (or 'see you soon', as I prefer to think of it) to everyone from first Californian baby Logan through to the wonderful friends Hannah has made post-MBA at Chevron...I thought I was going to miss Lottie's ice cream most of all but now I know that's not true.  If I wasn't British I might allow myself to feel rather emotional...

 

 

Where it's all happening!  We're just a few years late.

 

 

Getting in the brewskis.

 

 

Ready for the rink.

 

 

Enculturation.

 

 

That cake.

 

 

Happy birthday Hannah!  Three today.

 

 

Ah, the Walnut Hill clubhouse, site of much revelry.

 

 

Elliot sizes up Pete for Invisalign sometime in his future.

 

 

Hannah and newest Californian - Genevieve.

 

 

It's nice to be part of a large Jewish family.

  

 

Sasha says goodbye to her wedding baby.

 

And Hannah got this balloon from the Schwimmers.  "So you remember that everything in the USA is bigger," Evan told us.  We will.

Empty nest syndrome

Are we defined by the things we own?  Can we ever break the bars of this confining consumerist cage and set ourselves free from material possessions?  What do we require to be happy?

I pondered these questions as men came to my house and took away EVERYTHING.  The MI Group arrived ("Relocation Solutions - Bridging Continents and Cultures") and proceeded to wrap things in brown paper and parcel tape and stuff them into a van.  It took them about 12 hours and resulted in 209 boxes that will shortly be making their way up the West Coast and over the border to arrive - in theory - at the end of next week.

It was an interesting experience, seeing each item pulled from its dusty hiding place before being boxed and catalogued.  Did the packers judge me from my impressive selection of graphic novels (I saw "Comics" written on the side of one box)?  Did they wonder why anyone would need seventeen different types of tea and four teapots?  Did they find my tasteful selection of nude self-portraits hidden between the pages of my Oxford English Dictionary?

At the end there was nothing left, and we transported ourselves to a nearby hotel until our flights on Tuesday.  I looked at the scant things I'd been able to pack into a small suitcase and thought: what does any of us really need?  A place to lay our head, and a loving family by our side.  And a nice mobile phone.  And a laptop with high-speed Internet access.  And a dishwasher.  And an espresso machine.  And maid service.

 

 

Florin popped over to check on us.  He's going to miss my coffee machine more than anyone.

 

 

Tools of the trade.

 

 

It's cheaper than buying him an airline ticket.

 

 

Hannah's doing some cleaning!  I took a photo of this unique event.

 

You'll get it back when you learn to behave.