We haven’t put anything up for a few weeks now, mainly because we have been working a fair bit and have been essentially living the lives of shift workers. We’re keeping the bar staff at our local wondering why we are so weird - rolling in at about midnight, dressed from head to toe in black (our work uniform requirements), carrying backpacks, dark bags under our eyes, ordering a couple drinks and then wandering out the back service door and into the back alley (we live on the other side of the alley). We’ve had a few firsts for us in [View Full Entry]

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There’s that joke when you’re a kid that when all else fails, there is always the option of running away from home and joining the circus. Funnily enough, in our late 20s, that is exactly what we have ended up doing. Not long after we arrived in Vancouver we saw an ad in the paper for jobs with Cirque Du Soleil’s Vancouver run of Corteo, so we threw in applications and both landed jobs. (A big thanks to Detlef, Greg, Karyn and Rick for your presumed kind words). Lok scored a job as an usher in the Grand Chapiteau, showing people [View Full Entry]

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The first few days of June saw us move into our apartment and saw the first day of summer roll into Vancouver, bringing along its good friends cloud and rain. We’ve been pretty lucky on the weather front so far and we were always expecting some wet weather in this part of the world, so it was fitting that it came with the advent of summer. People keep telling us that Vancouver is a city within a temperate rainforest and that we don’t even know what rain is yet. I think we have a fair idea - it’s just like the [View Full Entry]

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It’s been a big week for us, and in many respects, a week that has seemed like it’s taken a month. We jumped on a bus from Seattle to Vancouver last Monday. It was a pretty cruisy trip and we had the honour of holding up the entire bus at the border crossing. Whilst everyone else got off the bus and moved quickly through immigration, we answered questions and went through the process of having our working permits issued. With all that we’ve heard about Canada, we were expecting a hearty welcome, a casual chat and a big hug to send [View Full Entry]

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We couldn’t have asked for much more from the Seattle weather, serving up both ends of the spectrum in a week. We’ve had whole days of black skies and dreary rain, which is what we were expecting, followed by four consecutive days of fine, clear and warm days, including one day of 30+ degrees. Everyone we spoke to couldn’t wait to tell us how good this weather was and how very rare it was for Seattle. We had our first live baseball experience at Safeco Field where the Seattle Mariners took on the San Diego Padres. The Padres are crap, and [View Full Entry]

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“Hello Passengers, we have now come to a complete stop. Sorry for the short delay. The train has hit a boulder and a hose has detached from the front engine. Once we reattach the hose in about 10 minutes, we should be on our way.” The wait was a little longer than 10 minutes and after about an hour and no success, the driver called ahead and asked that a spare carriage from a nearby freight train be sent to help us with the rest of our journey. About 15 minutes later the driver informed us that the onboard engineer had [View Full Entry]

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We booked five nights in Yosemite, not because it’s somewhere that we’ve always wanted to go or that we love bears, but because we keep hearing from people and TV shows that it’s a beautiful place. On that basis, we showed up with no expectations and no idea how we were going to entertain ourselves for just under a week. For starters we checked into our accommodation at Curry Village, which is one of four accommodation locations within the Yosemite National Park. We went for the tent cabin option because it seemed to fit in with the idea of roughing it [View Full Entry]

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The accommodation we have in SF - the Edwardian Hotel - is a pleasant and quaint little place on Market Street. The hotel staff came down and checked us in when we arrived late after our flight issues, despite the fact that the front office had closed half an hour earlier, so they get a huge tick for that. The cable cars, although a little San Francisco cliché, are really pretty cool. It’s great how they don’t worry too much about passenger safety and still let you stand up and hang out of the cars as they whizz past traffic and [View Full Entry]

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The saying goes that the journey is more important than the destination and there is a lot of truth to that, but I think the journey really starts once you leave the airport. Lines, Customs, cramped seats, US airports with their lack of space, poor signage, lost bags and absence of friendly faces are all just annoying hurdles that stand between you and the journey. With that out of the way, our journey is about to begin. Interestingly our flight to LA from Melbourne involved a short stopover in Auckland, which came as a surprise to us both. There was no [View Full Entry]

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