We celebrated our first Canadian holiday this weekend, by giving thanks...for good food and good company! None of the locals can give me a reason for why the holiday is celebrated a month before the American Thanksgiving, and many of the locals thought it was a worldwide tradition! Clearly there are many misunderstandings about the holiday... So, looking up trusty Wikipedia, this is the reason we are supposed to give thanks this weekend.... "Thanksgiving, or Thanksgiving Day (Canadian French: Jour de lAction de grâce), occurring on the second Monday in October, is an annual Canadian holiday [View Full Entry]

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The first of many inexpensive and awesome gigs that we are going to over the next few months, and hopefully the entire duration we are living in North America. Gigs are sooo insanely cheap here- Aimee Mann was only $35 incl fees and taxes, and most of the others are $25 or under. It feels great to go to music gigs again, to enjoy music with great crowds and atmospheres in pretty decent venues too. Thanks Chloe for coming with us! [View Full Entry]

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So, we've officially been a temporary resident of Canada for 2 months now, and I think this is an apt time to write about what we think of Vancouver. We've settled in quite well, both are working full time making a bit of money, and generally living each day as it comes. It's not a fancy life; we didn't land awesome jobs in architecture and film as we fantasized we would, but we're beyond that now and working towards our careers is something we've agreed can wait until we return home to Australia. There's no point doing that here - we're [View Full Entry]

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A fun day trip with Tina and Lachlan at Grouse Mountain, about an hour and a half from home. We will definitely come back during the winter, but the summer activities included some nice walks, chairlift action, some mediocre films about the mountain's history and a couple of very cute grizzly bears. [View Full Entry]

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a short film about our travels over the last 6 months [View Full Entry]

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Hello! So we've sadly finished our round the world travels and have finally touched down in Vancouver. We are absolutely exhausted!!! The last 5 months have absolutely killed us and we need a holiday for our holiday - don't get us wrong we had a myriad amazing experiences but after almost half a year of sleeping in hostels with up to 20 other smelly backpackers, living on bread and jam for days at a time, trying to learn almost 20 new languages, and having no income on which to live, it becomes extremely tiring and most of all stressful. But the [View Full Entry]

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Seattle was very, very cool. Most notable is its skyline, which we saw as we drove in from the south on a clunky old Greyhound, winding around the concrete highways and slowly revealing the unique-looking Space Needle and tall steel-and-glass skyscrapers. Seattle is grunge at its grungiest, it is hip at its hippest, and it is the definition of alternative. Alternative music, alternative fashion, alternative coffee-shops, alternative markets, alternative people. But not in a snobbish or elitist way at all. The Pike Place Market was full of fresh organic fruit, poodle-sized whole salmons and [View Full Entry]

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First of all, HAPPY 25th BIRTHDAY AARON!! YOU ARE AN OLD MAN!! HAHA. We stopped in Portland due to the advice of our friend Sam back at home. I think things have changed since she visited a couple of years ago. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lovely city - one of the few places we’ve visited where sporadic green parks and places of solitude actually work, and scores of anti-chain bookstores and coffee shops to keep the likes of us entertained for a few days. It also contains the beautiful Japanese Gardens up on Washington Hill, with beautiful views overlooking [View Full Entry]

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Close your eyes, and imagine this. You navigate through the early morning traffic of a small city with tree-lined boulevards, seeing remnants of dawn’s misty fogs roll over the snow-capped mountain ahead, juxtaposed against a foreground of a small handful of medium-sized skyscrapers. Leaving the city’s boundaries, within minutes you are gliding smoothly along the highway, windows rolled down and breathing in the cleanest air you’ve tasted in months. Around the bend you notice on your right a large waterfall cascading down a jagged clifftop, its watery forces cutting thr [View Full Entry]

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Chinatown Hungry and poor, we decided to make Chinatown our first stop in San Francisco. We bee-lined straight to a cheap dim sim restaurant ($5.99 all you can eat dim sims! (now I know saying this we sound as though we are total buffet endorsers, but we maintain- its not about the quantity, its about the price!… oh it was gastronomically heaven, even the regrettable third plate) passing myriad trinket stores along the way. They sold the most random things from kung-fu slippers to gunpowder pellets (you throw them at the ground and they make a popping sound like a gun [View Full Entry]

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