Friday, August 8, 2008

Moving Day

Post number one from the deck of the epequod.
Last Thursday I embarked on my epic
voyage across the seas of Canada. We left Ottawa on the Greyhound and 3 nights later we were in Vancouver. One guy, Joe, was forcibly removed in a drunken rage. Another guy was left on the side of the highway after calling an old man a fag and our friend Viche a terrorist. Mag saw not only the Rockies for the first time, but also a moose.
When we got to Vancouver we got breakfast at Cafe Du Soleil with our friend Neal and his Van-crew, Mike and Heidi, they were lovely and so was my first cappuccino in 4 days. We wandered through Hastings and Powell and saw lots of prostitutes and discarded needles. We met 2 girls, Jade and her nameless friend who showed us how to bus to Katie's (http://fanglifegem.blogspot.com/) house. From there we checked out the amazing International Ultimate Frisbee Tournament, it was ultimate. We made vegetarian chili and promptly passed out in our first
bed of 4 days. The next morning I skateboarded around most of the city, I ended up in the Granville Market and had a cappuccino and looked at the tourists, then went back to Katie's. Upon searching the e-net I found that Mag and I had 2 hours to get to Pacific Central to catch a coach which would take us to Tsawwassen to catch the ferry to Duke Point, Nanaimo. We got there with plenty of time to spare. We saw a few seals and some seagulls that were notably larger than Ontario seagulls. We had no way of getting from Duke Point into town so we hitchhiked which took a long time and was scary and discouraging. Finally an unnamed man from Fort Smith, NWT picked us up, he was going to Duncan to see his son play golf in the Indigenous Games. We asked him to drop us off at Port Plaza in Nanaimo because it looked familiar to me but I really had no clue how close it was to the college. As we were hauling our bags from his truck another nameless stranger hollered at us..."where you going from here?" He drove us right to the frontdoor of the residence administration. We've spent the last few days setting myself up and trying not to turn into a hateful married couple living in this shanty I now call home.



Yesterday we tried finding this swimming hole called Colliery Dam Park, we had to trek for a good half-hour down the side of the Nanaimo Parkway which was terrifying, I hate doing that but we saw this biketrail at the bottom of this incline at the side of the parkway so we hopped the rail and got on this trail and saw a sign for the park, so we followed the trail.



It lead us to the swimming hole which was a bit green, but refreshing. I swam a lot, Mag was a bit nervous but she definitely got her toes wet.



When we were leaving I asked a woman if there was a better way to get back to campus than the one we used to get there, she said to follow the parking lot out and go past the army-base so I'm like "cool", we did this and it turns out we were 10 minutes away from the park the whole time, and to think we almost died on the edge of the highway when we could have just walked down the block to this place.
So yeah, we'll be catching a Greyhound to Victoria in about an hour where we'll do some touristing and then 3 short days from now I start classes. My heart is in my throat but I'm excited. I wanna rock the Malaspina culinary arts world.

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