Taxi Day
. . . So named, because the doorman guy (Akira, though he hasn't destroyed humankind yet) at my hotel claims this has been the worst day for trying to catch a cab in his 2 year hotel-worker experience.
I experienced this firsthand, because, after having by mid-afternoon taken care of most of the pressing chores I had weighing on me this week (more on those later), and having decided it was time for some entertainment, I wound up standing on Granville Island in the rain for over a half an hour waiting for a cab.
"And why, Matt," you might ask, "were you standing in the rain for a half an hour? And why didn't you just call a cab?"
Well, I did. But it never showed. This was after I had long since lost patience standing near the back of a long line of people waiting in front of a restaurant called the Sand Bar taking any cabs which happened to pull by, at the rate of about one every eight minutes or so. I called my hotel, on my prohibitively expensive US cell phone (at this point any time I have to use it for something like this it just makes me cringe, especially since I'll have my own very special Vancouver cellphone in only three days) to ask if they could have someone send a cab for me. As luck would have it, that's when I stood in the rain for about 20 minutes, with no cab for me, and a sudden onslaught of cabs which picked up all the people in the line. At first my sense of cab ethics prevented me from abandoning the spot where I'd asked them to have the cab meet me, but after everyone was gone from the other area, and a cab was sitting there waiting for a fare, my sense of soggy ass led me to ditch my sense of cab ethics.
I have to admit, I was pretty bitter about the fact that when you're on an island and need to get home cheaply, you can't exactly walk. I just thought the rain was wet and cold, but I bet it's nothing compared to a swim in False Creek at night (which is not a creek at all, by the way, hence the term "false" I guess, but even if a creek were indeed false, that still doesn't imply that it's a whole inlet or harbor sort of thing like this is — I'm used to anything called a creek being a little trickly thing you can jump over).
But, even with things being as they were, my initial justification for being on Granville Island was still worth it — a play called Sexy Laundry at the Artsclub Theatre. I laughed so hard I cried. And then, since the engines were already warmed up, at the sad parts I cried. And I was just a soggy mess in general. It was really great, and the audience gave a standing ovation. Most of us. And the other 40% stayed sitting. And that was really weird. Anyway, if you're in the neighborhood, I highly recommend going to see it. After you've stopped by to say hi to me of course.
The theatre offers discount vouchers — instead of your sort of run of the mill kind of season tickets, instead you can buy sets of 4 theatre vouchers at a big discount. They're good for any play, and as many at a time as you want, and for whatever showing you want. So, you could skip the first play of the season if it doesn't interest you, then take a date to the second, and then go by yourself to two others, or however you want to do it. It's a great idea, because it solves that single person One Set of Season Tickets or Two quandary.
Previous activities of the day included waking up, checking my email, getting a call from my apartment hunter dude to come check out an apartment in Yaletown in 30 minutes, hiking down to the apartment and checking it out, then agreeing to meet one of his associates who was showing another apartment in Gas Town in less than an hour, and booking it up there (within about 90 minutes I had walked 5 or 6 km — it was a long distance day).
I had some terrific falafel at a place called El Caravan. I'm guessing this is Arabic "God" El, and not Spanish definite article El, otherwise there would have been a lot less pictures of camels, and a lot more mustached guys in ponchos hanging around. At any rate, decent Mediterranean food has now been identified, because, sorry hard-working run-the-whole-place-all-by-yourself dude, but Falafel Town was just not all that. Falafel shack maybe, but it definitely didn't qualify for chick-pea township.
I was actually looking for a place I'd seen on my marathon run up Seymour toward the Gas Town loft — a Korean fast food place called Kim Bob. Again, that's Kim Bob the Korean sushi roll with crab and radish and stuff — not Kim Bob the gender-ambiguous illegitimate redneck child. If anyone out there is named Kim Bob, I'm really sorry, and not just because I may have offended you. Kill your parents, now, before they accidentally name anyone else. Anyway, on my return trip back down Seymour, the Korean place seemed to have vanished, and El Caravan appeared. Not too many complaints from me. Another Kim Bob, another day.
After that I bought some laundry detergent (for bathtub laundry — laundry service here costs too much, and I can't find a coin laundry close enough to the hotel to make it seem worthwhile to drag all my clothes to) and some homo milk for my coffee in my room (the creamer things they give me here suck, and there's only enough for a single cup of coffee — nobody in this town drinks only a single cup of coffee a day), and on the way back to my hotel to put the homo milk in the minibar fridge, I stopped by a board shop to check things out.
I had decided, when researching whether to move here, that if I did come up here, having 3 ski areas within the city proper, and one of the best ski parks in the world (see "Winter Olympics, 2010") within an hour, that not learning to snowboard would be a crime. Venturing into a snowboarding shop seemed the best way to get a good introductory course on the topic, and I indeed got some good info. The ski season here lasts from late November through June (!), so a season pass to at least one of the parks seems like a good investment. I also got an idea how much equipment costs, and had to agree with the guy that if I plan to go more than even two or three times per season, the cost of buying is justified over renting, especially when taking quality into consideration. So, yeah, I'm actually kind of excited about that. I don't have the money now, with all my moving stuff going on, but the idea of having a big cool artistic-looking snowboard on my apartment wall in a couple of months makes me happy. Call it what you will.
I also got my tax information from the accounting guy at work, and it looks like I won't be quite as poor as the bartender at the hotel had led me to believe. That's a relief, because I'd suddenly worried that I couldn't afford rent downtown, and that made me sad. I'll have some US taxes to pay in addition to Canadian taxes, and people keep making that out to be a big deal, but the way I see it, my withholding rate for the first half of the year was based on the assumption of my earning that salary all year long, whereas it was only through May, so I should be in a lower tax bracket. Should be.
Anyway, long story short, I'm far less worried about taxes, but now I'm worried about car insurance instead. Car insurance is nationalized here, so everyone goes to the same place for it, and the approximate rate (according to my cab driver tonight anyway) for my car's value will be around $4000 a year. Ouch. He did say that if I can get a letter from my existing insurance carrier indicating that I have a clean driving record for accidents and tickets, I'm eligible for up to a 43% discount, which would bring things back into a reasonable range. The conversation was a strange one, though, initially, because he had no idea how car insurance worked in the states, and the idea of private insurance carriers whose rates are all over the map boggled his mind.
Alright, time to kind of wrap things up here. I haven't heard back from the owner of my favorite of the apartments all day today, and I've pretty much decided that I'll take that one if it's still available. I just have a good gut feeling about it, and my apartment locator guy lives in the same building, and it's his highest recommendation as well. If the apartment has already gone to someone else, I'll be heartbroken. I'm so anxious already to get a permanent address. It's amazingly difficult to take care of certain things when people don't know where you live. It's also amazingly difficult to reserve money for the things you want to do when everything costs about 8 times what it should (a.k.a. hotel).
* * *
Oh by the way, I've posted more pictures, and have resorted to using Shutterfly again, instead of posting them here. Gallery was acting wacky (deleting people's comments and things), and since I'm taking more pictures than I thought, I didn't want to worry about space. Go see them here:
http://share.shutterfly.com/osi.jsp?i=EeEs3DZy3bPYg
I experienced this firsthand, because, after having by mid-afternoon taken care of most of the pressing chores I had weighing on me this week (more on those later), and having decided it was time for some entertainment, I wound up standing on Granville Island in the rain for over a half an hour waiting for a cab.
"And why, Matt," you might ask, "were you standing in the rain for a half an hour? And why didn't you just call a cab?"
Well, I did. But it never showed. This was after I had long since lost patience standing near the back of a long line of people waiting in front of a restaurant called the Sand Bar taking any cabs which happened to pull by, at the rate of about one every eight minutes or so. I called my hotel, on my prohibitively expensive US cell phone (at this point any time I have to use it for something like this it just makes me cringe, especially since I'll have my own very special Vancouver cellphone in only three days) to ask if they could have someone send a cab for me. As luck would have it, that's when I stood in the rain for about 20 minutes, with no cab for me, and a sudden onslaught of cabs which picked up all the people in the line. At first my sense of cab ethics prevented me from abandoning the spot where I'd asked them to have the cab meet me, but after everyone was gone from the other area, and a cab was sitting there waiting for a fare, my sense of soggy ass led me to ditch my sense of cab ethics.
I have to admit, I was pretty bitter about the fact that when you're on an island and need to get home cheaply, you can't exactly walk. I just thought the rain was wet and cold, but I bet it's nothing compared to a swim in False Creek at night (which is not a creek at all, by the way, hence the term "false" I guess, but even if a creek were indeed false, that still doesn't imply that it's a whole inlet or harbor sort of thing like this is — I'm used to anything called a creek being a little trickly thing you can jump over).
But, even with things being as they were, my initial justification for being on Granville Island was still worth it — a play called Sexy Laundry at the Artsclub Theatre. I laughed so hard I cried. And then, since the engines were already warmed up, at the sad parts I cried. And I was just a soggy mess in general. It was really great, and the audience gave a standing ovation. Most of us. And the other 40% stayed sitting. And that was really weird. Anyway, if you're in the neighborhood, I highly recommend going to see it. After you've stopped by to say hi to me of course.
The theatre offers discount vouchers — instead of your sort of run of the mill kind of season tickets, instead you can buy sets of 4 theatre vouchers at a big discount. They're good for any play, and as many at a time as you want, and for whatever showing you want. So, you could skip the first play of the season if it doesn't interest you, then take a date to the second, and then go by yourself to two others, or however you want to do it. It's a great idea, because it solves that single person One Set of Season Tickets or Two quandary.
Previous activities of the day included waking up, checking my email, getting a call from my apartment hunter dude to come check out an apartment in Yaletown in 30 minutes, hiking down to the apartment and checking it out, then agreeing to meet one of his associates who was showing another apartment in Gas Town in less than an hour, and booking it up there (within about 90 minutes I had walked 5 or 6 km — it was a long distance day).
I had some terrific falafel at a place called El Caravan. I'm guessing this is Arabic "God" El, and not Spanish definite article El, otherwise there would have been a lot less pictures of camels, and a lot more mustached guys in ponchos hanging around. At any rate, decent Mediterranean food has now been identified, because, sorry hard-working run-the-whole-place-all-by-yourself dude, but Falafel Town was just not all that. Falafel shack maybe, but it definitely didn't qualify for chick-pea township.
I was actually looking for a place I'd seen on my marathon run up Seymour toward the Gas Town loft — a Korean fast food place called Kim Bob. Again, that's Kim Bob the Korean sushi roll with crab and radish and stuff — not Kim Bob the gender-ambiguous illegitimate redneck child. If anyone out there is named Kim Bob, I'm really sorry, and not just because I may have offended you. Kill your parents, now, before they accidentally name anyone else. Anyway, on my return trip back down Seymour, the Korean place seemed to have vanished, and El Caravan appeared. Not too many complaints from me. Another Kim Bob, another day.
After that I bought some laundry detergent (for bathtub laundry — laundry service here costs too much, and I can't find a coin laundry close enough to the hotel to make it seem worthwhile to drag all my clothes to) and some homo milk for my coffee in my room (the creamer things they give me here suck, and there's only enough for a single cup of coffee — nobody in this town drinks only a single cup of coffee a day), and on the way back to my hotel to put the homo milk in the minibar fridge, I stopped by a board shop to check things out.
I had decided, when researching whether to move here, that if I did come up here, having 3 ski areas within the city proper, and one of the best ski parks in the world (see "Winter Olympics, 2010") within an hour, that not learning to snowboard would be a crime. Venturing into a snowboarding shop seemed the best way to get a good introductory course on the topic, and I indeed got some good info. The ski season here lasts from late November through June (!), so a season pass to at least one of the parks seems like a good investment. I also got an idea how much equipment costs, and had to agree with the guy that if I plan to go more than even two or three times per season, the cost of buying is justified over renting, especially when taking quality into consideration. So, yeah, I'm actually kind of excited about that. I don't have the money now, with all my moving stuff going on, but the idea of having a big cool artistic-looking snowboard on my apartment wall in a couple of months makes me happy. Call it what you will.
I also got my tax information from the accounting guy at work, and it looks like I won't be quite as poor as the bartender at the hotel had led me to believe. That's a relief, because I'd suddenly worried that I couldn't afford rent downtown, and that made me sad. I'll have some US taxes to pay in addition to Canadian taxes, and people keep making that out to be a big deal, but the way I see it, my withholding rate for the first half of the year was based on the assumption of my earning that salary all year long, whereas it was only through May, so I should be in a lower tax bracket. Should be.
Anyway, long story short, I'm far less worried about taxes, but now I'm worried about car insurance instead. Car insurance is nationalized here, so everyone goes to the same place for it, and the approximate rate (according to my cab driver tonight anyway) for my car's value will be around $4000 a year. Ouch. He did say that if I can get a letter from my existing insurance carrier indicating that I have a clean driving record for accidents and tickets, I'm eligible for up to a 43% discount, which would bring things back into a reasonable range. The conversation was a strange one, though, initially, because he had no idea how car insurance worked in the states, and the idea of private insurance carriers whose rates are all over the map boggled his mind.
Alright, time to kind of wrap things up here. I haven't heard back from the owner of my favorite of the apartments all day today, and I've pretty much decided that I'll take that one if it's still available. I just have a good gut feeling about it, and my apartment locator guy lives in the same building, and it's his highest recommendation as well. If the apartment has already gone to someone else, I'll be heartbroken. I'm so anxious already to get a permanent address. It's amazingly difficult to take care of certain things when people don't know where you live. It's also amazingly difficult to reserve money for the things you want to do when everything costs about 8 times what it should (a.k.a. hotel).
* * *
Oh by the way, I've posted more pictures, and have resorted to using Shutterfly again, instead of posting them here. Gallery was acting wacky (deleting people's comments and things), and since I'm taking more pictures than I thought, I didn't want to worry about space. Go see them here:
http://share.shutterfly.com/osi.jsp?i=EeEs3DZy3bPYg