We've arrived! At last its happened!
We got into Vancouver at about 6pm on last Friday the 12th, expecting it to be pouring with rain and that we'd have a 4 hour wait to get through immigration.... none of that happened! We arrived to a lovely autumnal evening and were out of the airport with visas in passports within half an hour! Amazing! We got to the holiday apartment all OK and Anna was fed, bathed and asleep by 8:30pm. She has slept incredibly well this past 3 weeks. 12 hours a night apart from the 1st two nights in Georgia when she was jetlagged and only slept for 10.5! Bliss. The apartment is a 2 bedroomed place with a large living area, small kitchen and bathroom. It is perfect for the next month although we wouldn't want to live here any longer! A bit dull! We are one block from Stanley Park which is enormous. We walked for ages on Saturday and didn't even scratch the surface.... It takes 25 mins to walk to Ben's office which is smack in the city centre and overlooks the water and the mountains (see annotated photo attached!).
We went to Canada's second largest mall on Sunday (had to be done!). The main aim (apart from satisfying my curiosity as to HOW big it could actually be = the answer is MASSIVE!) was to organise a birthday present for Anna, get a cell phone each and do groceries. Ticked all the boxes although I have (!!) to go back again tomorrow to finalise the cell phone deal. So totally different from the UK that we've taken a few days to think about which deal we want. We have also hired a car for the first week as we very quickly realised that this is one huge city and we'll never get where we need to go without one. Ben's going to take an afternoon off some time later this week and we're going to go down to a big car mart in the next city down... we thought that they were all suburbs but apparently the burbs are all actually cities in their own right...weird! All our ideas of buying a car have changed since spending a week in Georgia - we want BIG now! Everything else here is BIG so why just have an estate?!??!? Minivan is the way forward! They make cars here we've never ever heard of in the UK. Electric sliding doors all remote controlled - whats not to like?! Ha ha ha!
Banking is proving to be a little challenging in that HSBC are proving to be slightly less of "The world's local bank" than initially promised! Sigh. However, they assure me that we will have our bank cards by the end of the week.... all our money is tied up in an account we can't access unless we go to one specific branch. Very tedious. Ben's then going to get us both Social Security numbers this week after which we are more established as far as the authorities are concerned. As for darling Anna.... she's been delightful! Her birthday's on Friday and we've bought her an early birthday present. She had a walker in Cardiff and we shipped it cause it was so big but she's missing it so much we bought her another one with Granny's birthday money.... Big hit! She's very close to walking now. She took one deliberate step in our hotel room in Cardiff but that clearly scared the pants off her as she hasn't done it again!! The frustration levels are building though which usually means there's a breakthrough looming. We hope! The teeth are at 7 so far. Very sharp and she loves trying to bite us. She has struggled today cause Ben went back to work. She's become a total Daddy's girl in the last month. Every time anything didn't go her way today I had crocodile tears and DADADADADA endlessly!!!! Cute until hour 3! She is eating all sorts of new food at the moment and is really easy to take out cause we just order her some sort of vaguely healthy kiddie portion and she invariably wolfs it down.
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