I ♥ Vancouver

All is finally in place: I got a great job, enough free time but not too much to get bored, a nice boss and co-workers, (more) money to spend, some great new friends and old friends visiting, and of course a nice (and mostly warm) house in a nice neighbourhood and with the best boyfriend :). Oh and it’s all in one of the prettiest and most fun cities I’ve ever been!

After my last post, I experienced my first north American Halloween and carved my own pumpkin! A lot of the houses were decorated and some people went all overboard and made a whole graveyard in their garden! It was so cute to see all the kids and even the parents dressed up :) and ofcourse those in between also got their costumes out to party! Together with some friends, I went to a party in Tom’s bar where the theme was Jack the Ripper’s dark London. I was very happy to see that the amount of “sexy” witches and police women was less than I had expected. Some image created by all those crappy American teenager movies I guess.. And here is what we (me, Bibi, Liz, Sabrina and Genna) looked like:

The first snow started to fall on the mountains some weeks ago and this weekend it’s even supposed to snow in the city! Which is a big deal as that usually only happens once a year… but this year is promising to be a good one! Some news articles say it will be “the coldest winter since 1955” due to a cold La Nina weather pattern and people are warned and instructed to prepare themselves.. haha! The local mountain resorts will be opening within the next days/week! So I better get my snowboard waxed soon and start saving up for the very expensive lift tickets!
Yesterday I already got a good winter preview went I went to Whistler with Maria (a German friend from my exchange in Finland) and her cousin, who also lives in Vancouver. The village was all white and it I experienced the first snow flakes falling on me since January! You can imagine my excitement ;)! And we saw a bear that was easily making its way up on one of the slopes, after being chased out of the village by a dog! Driving through the forests and mountains and seeing a bear really made realize again how wild and amazing this province is! And how great it is to live in a 2-million city and still have all this wilderness so close by!