Saturday, 9 November 2013

Visa Extension

Goddamn border people.

So at the end of November it was going to be a year since I arrived in Canada. Which is kinda weird in itself, but more importantly it meant my working holiday visa was about to expire. Even though I had signed and agreed that I would not be able to renew my visa the HR people at work assured me that I could. She said I just needed to take a bunch of stuff to the border and they would renew it.

So that was my mission for Wednesday night. I left it till about 8pm so that it wasn't so busy. When I got to the border there was still a 40min wait to get to the states! Ridiculous! Luckily I was only going to the Canadian border people. Or so I thought.

When I got out of my car and was walking to the building a guy accosted me and asked me what I was doing. I told him I was here to get my visa re-newed and he told me I needed to go to the states and get a "flagpole". I said "excuse me? Did you say I need a flagpole? and he gave me a look as if I was a complete idiot and said "yes a flag pole". I have found that I find border people some of the most abrasive people on earth and it was difficult to bite my tongue not to say "that makes no bloody sense, why the hell is it called a flagpole?" but you just have to smile and nod and pretend that they are the most important people on the planet instead. He said I could drive or walk to the U.S. So dumb. As I said before, it was a 40 min wait to drive across, so I opted to walk across in the rain. What a waste of time! it was about 400m or so! There wasn't even a path for most of it so I was just walking on wet soft grass. When I got to the U.S. border I waited in line for about 30min. Then when I finally got processed it took even longer to process me than when I traveled into the U.S.! The guy trying to help me was pretty young (and a dick, but that does without saying) and kept going into the back room. I suspect he didn't know what the hell he was doing. I finally got a piece of paper with "flagpole" hand written on it (I'm not even lying!) and walked back to Canada. I didn't have to wait too long in line but I did have to wait for 30min or so while the border woman (also a dick) processed my extension. At this juncture I would like to know: why the hell does it take so long to process this stuff? Its not rocket science! Surely they could just set the system up with a screen with all the fields that they need to fill out and then submit the application. It seems like a pretty serious thing, but why does it take so damn long?!

So the woman finally came back and told me that she shouldn't be giving me an extension because my job letter of offer is so old. She said that it was good that I printed out a couple of pay stubs but I needed a current letter of offer from my employer. What the hell is up with that shit??!! There is no such thing as is a "current job offer"!!! You either have a job or not. Stupid bitch. She told me she only gave me a 1 year extension instead of 2 because of this and I would most likely have to re new my visa again before I get permanent residency. I knew that I would probably get my PR in less than 12 months so I wasn't to worried but then she started launching into how I would need to bring in a "current letter of offer" and I would need to get a new PR acceptance letter (which is apparently bullshit according to the immigration experts). I just smiled and nodded and she seemed somewhat annoyed that I wasn't getting annoyed by all this! Want I wanted to say: Whatevs bitch, I'm going home. I hope I never see you again. What I actually said: Thank you, Goodbye.

Got home about 11pm. What a wasted of time.

Moving and BCMC

1/2/3 November 2013

So I knew this was gonna happen and I did try to avoid the worst of it but still....

So I was all set to move apartments on the 2nd of November and then a couple weeks out some people from work decided that the 1st would be a good night for "team building" in town. I could see the moving day being very rough. So during the week I did my best to organised myself to minimise any thinking and physical activity so I packed up all my things into bags/boxes and chucked a couple of things in my car.

So Friday night was pretty good. We went to Yaletown Brewery and had a few, then hit up a couple of other places. I was a fairly good boy though and gorged on pizza whenever I saw it and tried to drink heaps of water during the night. Later on the others decided a strip club was a good idea. A few of us didn't think that sounded that crash hot so we went to another place and played pool and drank more beer. After that I txt my new flatmate to see if she was still out. Turned out she was still drinking at a pub so I went along to say giday and pick up my keys. I had another couple of beers there with some neighbors to be and then tried to head home. Goddamn busses. Goddamn bloody busses. I got to the stop just as the bus was leaving. Which meant that it was another half an hour or something to the next bus. Finally home about 3am.

Up again at 8am. I was still fully clothed and all the lights were on in the house. I was extremely tired but I had luckily avoided the worst of the hangover symptoms. But it was still pretty rough packing all my shit in my car and talking to my landlord. I still had a bit of cleaning to do when he turned up but he was pretty chill about it so not to many worries. I was pretty stoked to fit everything I own in my car, which also felt pretty weird. Made it to the new place and only spent about 15min finding my parking space. Went out for breakfast/lunch with my new flatmate and then moved some stuff in. Unfortunately I cannot adequately articulate how rough the day was on here.

On Sunday I had a good sleep in, which was made better by daylight saving finishing. I think I slept for around 10 hours or something. Woke up to a pretty cracker day too and a sweet view from my new place:



Then Miranda picked me up and we went out to do the BCMC trail up Grouse. I tried to go as fast as possible but got a bit lost at the top. I ended up doing about 1 hour 10 min but I think I could have snuck under an hour if it wasn't for the detour. We carried on up the track for another half hour or so and run into some snow for some cool photos:






 We were gonna eat up at the place up the top but we decided we were too hungry and it would probably cost more arms and legs than we were willing to part with so we went down to North Van for a delicious Burger and Ceasar at the Village taphouse.

Gig, Hike and Halloween

Just a couple of quick things.

Went to see Chris Cornell solo acoustic gig again. It was a bit weird to being seeing a very similar concert again to when I went to see him in the Michael Fowler Center in NZ. But this time it was only $60 instead of $260 it would have been including flights and stuff in NZ. Concert was awesome as expected. It was pretty good to catch up with Brice again who I hadn't seen for a fair while. I also got a sweet long sleeve Chris Cornell shirt.

I went for a wander up Eagle Bluffs one weekend with Sy Yunn and Miranda and took a couple of photos:



Halloween also happened at one stage. People dressed up at work and everything! There weren't too many in my office but I saw plenty of people around the business park complex in full gear! Pretty hilarious. I also went and had dinner with a friend on the Saturday night on Commercial Drive. We were sitting in the window and it was pretty cool to watch everyone walking past in their getup. I didn't attend any partys but I have decided I need to track down a Kiwi bird costume. Would be awesome.

Monday, 4 November 2013

The Lions

18/19/20 October 2013

For some reason our Friday after work beers had got fairly out of hand the past few evenings and now 10pm seemed a respectable time to be leaving work. After that more people were having a few beers in town so I decided to go down there. Needless to say it was a pretty late night. At some point I found my way home and remember thinking "I need to set my alarm so that I get up in time to start drinking again"

On Saturday I had bought a ticket to go to a craft beer awards festival thing. I dragged myself out of bed at the crack of noon to get along there. The event was pretty awesome. Lots of different craft breweries around to taste lots of craft beer. It took a while to get back on the horse (should I say maggot?) after my 8th taster or so I was doing OK though. I mainly drank porters which I have decided I have definitely been neglecting. I especially enjoyed the "Sap Sucker" maple porter from Fernie brewing company. We hung around for the awards and then went to St Augustines for dinner. At some stage I suddenly got pretty knackered and we decided to call it a night. I was dreading another late night but I was stoked to find it was only about 9pm! I was into bed by 10pm which was good because I had a big Sunday ahead.

On Sunday I had jacked up a mission to get up the Lions with Brandon and a mate of his. I was pretty stoked because The Lions are a stand out feature of the Vancouver skyline and I had had my eye on them for a while. I was concerned I wasn't going to get a chance this summer but luckily we had another patch of good weather. I was also stoked because my company was fairly fit so we were able to tackle the more ambitious route to the Lions that went from Cypress Mountain and followed the Howe Sound Crest trail. The quickest and easiest way to climb them is from Lions Bay but apparently that is a pretty boring trail compared to the one we intended on taking.

I was up at 7:30 to finish packing and Brandon came round about 8. We picked up Brandons mate, Tim, on the way out of town. Tim was an old highschool friend of Brandons and they hadn't seen each other for about 5 years. Vancouver was enveloped in some pretty dense fog but I was confident we would get above it. As we drove up Cypress it thinned out and by the time we got to the car park we were above it. We got on the trail at about 9:30am and set of at a cracker pace. We got up to st Marks Summit at about 10:30am and got some awesome views of Howe Sound:


Then we realised why the trail was regarded as being quite challenging. We descended a hell of a long way and then had to climb up to the first peak of Mt Unnecessary, which was aptly named if you were just trying to get the The Lions. We got another couple of cool views of Howe Sound though:


The we went down again! Then another climb up to the second peak of Mt Unnecessary! From there we got a sweet view of our ultimate goal:


As you can see they are a pretty prominent feature. The we had to go down again before we could start the final ascent to the base of The Lions. For the rest of the trip our topic of conversation frequently involved discussing the climb to the actual summit of the West Lion. Brandon had been there before but did not attempt the sketchy scramble. We had all heard it was a pretty scary climb so we were a little apprehensive. When we got to the base our concerns were not alleviated at all by being able to see the face. We talked to a couple of guys that were just coming down from it and they said it was OK. One guy that seemed to know what he was doing said "just make slow and deliberate moves and you should be fine". Real comforting. We decided to go for it and were immediately greeted by a dodgy frayed rope to get down a 5m cliff. This bit was quite challenging but we were told it was one of the hardest bits too. Up higher it didn't really get harder but just got way more exposed. There was really only one other bit that I found challenging where I had to take a big step up on a slopey face with poor foot placement. My crappy trail shoes with massive holes in the sides of them (photographic evidence below) were too soft to place properly but I eventually made it over the step.


The rest of the climb was OK but it was super exposed. Just don't fall was definitely the aim of the game, below is a shot of the kind of terrain we were traversing. If you look closely you can see a pink rope on the left, somehow we got from where I took the photo to that rope!


We summited at about 2pm and when we got to the top it was all worth it. Just incredible. Here is a Panorama of looking North:


In the photo above you can see the East Lion and to the right beyond the fogged in Valley is where you would see Vancouver. It was such an incredible day up there. We estimated it was close to 20 degrees and not a breath of wind. Obligatory summit photo with celebratory beer (Tim in the middle and Brandon on the right):


We spent quite a while on the summit and ate some food. There was a couple of other people up there but not many people were ambitious/stupid enough to climb the sketchy section. I was a bit worried about the climb down but it turned out it wasn't too bad at all. There were a couple of difficult sections again but not too bad. We hussed along the trail but we were all realising why this route was regarded as difficult. On the way home we had all the downhill and uphill again and we were getting pretty tired. We were also running pretty low on water as well so we stopped at a wee lake thing to purify some water:


As you can see the sun was getting pretty low in the sky and when we made it back to St Marks summit we got some pretty golden photos looking out at Howe Sound again:


We were benighted with about 45 min left to go but we all had headlamps and we were back on a very well maintained trail close in to Cypress Mountain so no worries there except we were pretty knackered and hungry. We got back to the car at about 8pm which meant we were on the go for about 10 hours. We were pretty tired teddies but damn hungry so we went and gorged on some delicious burgers on Commercial Drive before going our separate ways.

I climbed into bed about 10pm pretty shattered but super stoked at such an awesome day. Cheers guys!