Vancouver (is Great)

So there are some obvious difference between Newfoundland and Vancouver...

This is the demographic breakdown of Vancouver based on ethnicity from the 2006 Census. As you can see, it is a colorful palette leading to a variety of cultural and ethnic backgrounds. This is obvious wherever you go in Vancouver: there is a huge assortment of shops, restaurants and other emporiums for every bit of culture you can find in Vancouver. Sitting in the Pacific Center (a mall) food court one day, I could hear at least 3 non-english languages being spoken around me; in the lunch room at the BC Cancer Research Center every day I can overhear people talking in chinese, spanish, french...

In contrast, the ethnic breakdown of Newfoundland would look something like this:

Guess which slice is "White Caucasian"

When a foreign culture-based store or restaurant opens up in St. John's it is "That new Asian place" or "That fancy new Thai restaurant." Here it's just a restaurant. In St. John's, Sun Sushi charges absurdly (St. John's-ians: You think they're reasonable? They're not.) high prices for mediocre (it IS mediocre, if not outright bad) sushi. And yet it's the only place people go, because it's the only place they can go, and people think they're cultured for eating sushi in Newfoundland (oh ho ho). I'm not saying "Don't eat at crappy places in St. John's because you can get better stuff in Vancouver," you have to deal with what you have; it just sucks that that's all you have.

Similarly (not to belabor the point, I just find this amusing):

Vs.

Half the religions in the legend aren't even represented in the chart

Anyway, Vancouver does have some things in common with St. John's:

It gets foggy sometimes...

And of course it rains:

Like from October until April

My first month here, it hardly rained at all. In fact it was a very nice summer (there was a string of days in August where it was consistently 27 degrees; that lasted about 10 days). It's a bit amusing when people here complain about the weather on a day where the weather is better than anything Newfoundland sees from September until May (I must admit I've used the "They say there's only two seasons in Newfoundland..." joke several times in the past 3 months). Now though, it's rained probably 7 of the last 14 days, and I only expect that to increase between here and January.

Oh, oh! Speaking of nature-related phenomena, they have earthquakes here. One day in August (maybe September) there was apparently a 6.X Richter earthquake, the shockwaves of which could apparently be felt at the BC CRC. It was weird getting a text from my mom saying "Heard there was an earthquake..." and thinking "What the fuck in the world is she talking about" (Note: this so-called earthquake, if it can be so-called, was not news-worthy, leading me to question how mom heard about it at all). Also, the other day we had an earthquake drill at work. So yeah, definitely a weird experience, but it's still better than having a black hole to nowhere open up in the middle of your city.

Well fuck me to death in the head.

I'm going to wrap this up but before I do I wanted to address something. People say living in BC is expensive. Is rent high? Sure. Is it higher than Newfoundland? Nope. Are groceries cheaper? Yep. Do you save money by not having to own a car due to a reliable public transit system? Yep. The point being, those people are wrong.

The real joke is Warren's desperate financial situation.