The Imperceptible Immigrant

Missing in Action

July 24, 2022 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

Regular visitors to these pages – and indeed those who are subscribed to this long-running assemblage of trivia – may have detected something of a stony silence around these parts of late. There has been – it cannot be denied – an absence of posts.

The explanation for this phenomenon is simple. For the first time in around two and a half years the Imperceptible Immigrant and The Girl are off and away… travelling!

On previous such jaunts I have endeavoured to keep the blog up to date as we went; the which was not always easy, particularly when it came to the editing and uploading of photographs.

This time I decided upon a different approach; I would collect images, impressions and experiences as we journeyed, but I would not upload or write anything until we returned.

Well – our sojourn is almost over. In a couple of days we head back to the west coast of Canada. Once there I will again commit to electronic media all manner of impressions of the places to which we have been and of the things that we have been doing.

See you there!

Tags: Europe, Holiday, Travel, United Kingdom

Vancity

April 14, 2022 in Flotsam and Jetsam, Photos | Permalink

My apologies! I have of late been falling down on my blogging duties. I offer as no more than a feeble excuse that things have been in-feasibly and, perhaps, unexpectedly busy of late. The Winter term at College has been building to its climax; we have been entertaining friends from abroad (more of that in a further post) and I have been trying to get a grip on all that is going on in the garden – between bouts of (less-unexpectedly) inclement weather.

I know… poor show all round!

I did promise more on the trip to Vancouver that featured in my last post. I took some photos and, whilst they are not that exciting, I will nonetheless share them with (ie – force them upon) the gentle reader.

As I mentioned in that previous post, the purpose of the visit was for The Girl to attend a conference organised by her First Nation at one of Vancouver’s hotels/conference centres. The event was very well organised and well attended – and clearly yielded extremely positive results.

The business side of things did not, however, prevent The Girl and I getting out on the first evening for a splendid romantic dinner at Cardero’s in Coal Harbour. Whilst The Girl tucked into the scallops I enjoyed a lovely piece of European Sea Bass (not that easy to find on the west coast) and we shared a really rather decent Chablis. Nice atmosphere too:

On the Saturday – whilst The Girl was engaged in her sessions – I pretty much stayed in our room, watching the matches of the final weekend of the 2022 Six Nations tournament. Well done to the French on a thoroughly deserved (if also widely predicted) Grand Slam – and the less said about the Scots (who seem to have regressed by about three years!) the better!

This chap – outside our fourteenth floor window – seemed keen to know the scores as well:

The trip was a good one – with yet more familial contacts made by The Girl – plus the opportunity to have breakfast with a dear friend who now lives in VanCity. For my part it was actually a pretty good rest to be able to relax in a decent hotel room up in the clouds high above the west end of the city.

Tags: Dining, Friends, Holiday, Photo, Rugby, Six Nations, The Girl, Vancouver

Vancouver Days 4 & 5

August 9, 2021 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

The last two days of our brief but highly pleasurable visit to the mainland were dedicated to visiting some of The Girl’s family – for the first time since the pandemic began. On the Sunday we had a most enjoyable dinner in Port Moody with cousins and then on the Monday retraced our footsteps to North Vancouver to pay a call on The Girl’s ninety five year old aunt. It was wonderful to sense just a glimmer of normality after such a long time with little but our own company – vastly pleasurable as that always is.

We had made only the most tenuous of plans for the last day so had not booked a place on a ferry crossing to the island, guessing that the Monday would be fairly quiet and that we could just pitch up and jump aboard.

Wrong!

As The Girl negotiated the maze of routes out of Vancouver towards Tsawwassen I looked up the status of the sailings on the InterWebNet. At this time of year ferries depart hourly – on the hour – but we could see that the 1 o’clock and 2 o’clock sailings were already full. As The Girl put the ‘pedal to the metal’ (she likes that!) we watched the rolling updates from BC ferries indicate that the 3 o’clock was filling rapidly and that the 4 o’clock was not far behind. When we finally reached the terminal at Tsawwassen we we told we might be on the 4 pm or it might be the 5 pm!

Having not yet had lunch and mindful of the long wait to come we headed for the terminal building to source ourselves some victuals – only to discover that a power failure had resulted in all of the concessions being closed – barring the confectionery stand and they were only able to take cash as all of the machines were ‘hors de combat’.

Bah!

That was not the most healthy repast that we have ever consumed.

No matter – we were determined not to let such small things spoil a most enjoyable trip and we were soon home again.

A final flurry of images from the journey home.

Tags: Family, Holiday, Photo, Travel, Vancouver

Vancouver – Day 3

August 6, 2021 in Flotsam and Jetsam, Photos | Permalink

The third day of our sojourn in and around Vancouver was dedicated to seeing again the dear friend who lived with us for a period at the start of 2020 and is now based in North Vancouver. The limitations imposed by the response to the COVID-19 pandemic – and in particular the need to restrict oneself to strict social ‘bubbles’ – have meant that, though some of our dear friend’s furniture yet lives with us, we have not been able to see her since she moved out last summer.

Now that the restrictions have been eased we very much wanted to get together again – and we duly set off across the Lion’s Gate bridge in the directions of ‘North Van’.

The form for the day was a drive up the southern half of the ‘Sea to Sky Highway’ to Squamish for a spot of lunch. I have not previously traveled this route (which starts off along the east coast of the Howe Sound and which leads ultimately to Whistler) and looked forward to enjoying its beauties. The nature of the day and the sheer weight of traffic meant that stopping to take photos along the road was not realistic, but should you be interested this website gives a good and detailed introduction to the route.

I did snatch a couple of shots in Squamish but lunch and catching up were a far higher priority.

After lunch we visited Shannon Falls, which are but a stone’s throw from Squamish (should you be an Olympian and possessed of a very light stone). Shannon Falls is one of the highest in British Columbia – with a drop in excess of 800ft – and is classified as a horsetail fall, with multiple elements fanning out (like a horse’s tail) and with the water making frequent contact with the underlying rocks.

I have read subsequently that Shannon Falls – along with other similar types of waterfall – can be difficult to photograph convincingly – which explains (I hope!) why none of my shots really does it justice or truly captures the scale of it.

The standard of the photography aside – a jolly good day was had by all…

Tags: Friends, Holiday, Lunch, Photo, Travel, Vancouver

Vancouver – Day 2

August 1, 2021 in Flotsam and Jetsam, Photos | Permalink

Two things occupied our time on the first full day of our recent visit to Vancouver.

The first was a visit to the Vancouver Convention Centre to view the ‘Imagine Van Gogh‘ exhibition, the which is described by the promoters – appropriately in our view – as an ‘immersive’ exhibition. This event has popped up in various places in North America and in all probability in other parts of the world also. We enjoyed it – particularly as one is able to see detail of the genius’s work in extreme close-up. I took these photos, which should give some idea of the scale of the thing. Do click on the images to see them on the largest possible scale…

In the evening The Girl and I dined at a rather lovely bar/bistro called ‘Tableau’. Though a week in advance of the actual date we had decided to treat this as our anniversary dinner and duly indulged ourselves in a thoroughly decent bottle of Chablis. The evening was considerably enhanced by the excellent service (and the complimentary fizz) provided in particular by the restaurant manager/sommelier who hails – as it turns out – from Chalfont St. Peter – a village within about five miles of where we used to live in South Buckinghamshire in the UK.

We thoroughly recommend Tableau should you find yourself in Vancouver.

Tags: Art, Dining, food and drink, Holiday, Photo, Travel, Vancouver

Vancouver – Day 1

July 30, 2021 in Flotsam and Jetsam, Photos | Permalink

I have not of late had much opportunity to take photographs with my new camera (new this year!) other than in our garden or on walks in the locality. This is, of course, one of the many side effects of the pandemic. On our recent long weekend break in Vancouver I determined that I would rectify this and duly snapped away to my heart’s content. The results should offer a visual record of our few days away.

The best way to get to Vancouver from our home on Vancouver Island is to take the ferry from Swartz Bay (but a stone’s throw from where we live) to Tsawwassen on the mainland and then to drive into the centre of the city from there. This is not the only possible route but it is the most efficient.

The ferry journey takes only around 90 minutes but is a particularly pretty crossing, passing as it does through the Gulf Islands. At about the halfway point the ferry route passes through a narrow and fast flowing tidal passage, between Galiano and Mayne Islands, which is called Active Pass. At this point the ferry crosses the equivalent sailing going in the opposite direction, but I have of late noticed that it also coincides with other smaller ferries serving the Gulf Islands themselves.

Here we are in a dance with three other ferries in Active Pass:

As I described in my last post, The Girl had found for us a splendid 23rd floor apartment at Carmana Plaza in Coal Harbour which is not only extremely comfortable and well equipped but which also has excellent views of the West End and English Bay:

The first day on leave was inevitably much occupied with travel, settling in and eating, but we did also have the opportunity to get a little shopping in. This example (replenishing my much loved Molton Brown hand-wash at Holt Renfrew) gave me the opportunity to play with another acquisition – a new macro lens that I picked up on the way into Vancouver.

Pretty neat, huh?

More pictures next time…

Tags: Holiday, Photo, Shopping, Travel, Vancouver

Square root of negative one

July 24, 2021 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

“Vancouver is the square root of negative one. Technically it shouldn’t exist, but it does. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”

Douglas Coupland

It is but two weeks since The Girl and I left Vancouver Island for the first time in over a year for our rapid-fire visit to Kamloops – and yet here we are again already… away from our island home.

It is the pandemic – of course – that has kept us on the island until very recently, but we are both now fully vaccinated and the relaxation of the BC lockdown has enabled us to take some very careful steps back into the outside world.

The trip to Kamloops did not go quite as we had originally planned. We had intended to stay there for several nights, encompassing the event for which we had gone. As things turned out the fresh wild-fire at Sun Peaks overnight on the Saturday filled the valley in which Kamloops nestles with thick smoke on the Sunday morning, forcing us soft coastal dwellers to beat a hasty retreat back to the island. This meant two consecutive days of pretty heavy driving and our arriving back on the peninsula not until around 10:00pm.

The Kamloops trip came up fairly late on, but we had already planned a long-weekend away in the City of Glass – Vancouver – as a sort of ‘welcome back to the world’ – given that we knew that we would not be travelling further afield this year. The idea was to have a relaxing city break – to re-meet old friends and family with whom we have not been able to connect of late – to wine and dine ourselves and – mayhap – to take in a little culture.

I am writing this on the Saturday evening in the 23rd floor suite that The Girl (to whom I inevitably leave these important decisions) found for us in Coal Harbour in Vancouver, overlooking the West End and English Bay. I have the camera with me and have been making liberal use of it. I will regale you with the results and details of what we got up to once we are back home next week.

So – welcome (carefully) indeed back to the world…

Tags: COVID-19, Holiday, Travel, vaccine, Vancouver

Things are looking up…

June 17, 2021 in Flotsam and Jetsam | 2 comments

“When things are looking up, there’s no point in looking elsewhere”

Agatha Swanburne

Here in British Columbia there are now definite – if still quite fragile – signs that things are beginning to return to some sort of normality.

Progress in this direction is being pursued with a high degree of caution and restraint, though we are of course as vulnerable as are most nations to the antics of the usual idiots. We do, however, eschew the sort of hyperbole that some must endure. Not for us the “World beating” – or “Irreversible” – or “Sure and certain knowledge”… I’m ‘sure and certain’ that you catch my drift…

This very day The Girl trotted down to the Mary Winspear Centre in Sidney to get her second COVID vaccination – the which was booked about three weeks ago.

I was beginning to wonder (for no good reason other than my impatience!) if I had somehow dropped off the list when I finally received the email inviting me to book a date for my second jab. I jumped at the chance and have an appointment in only ten days time.

”Result!” – as the ‘yoof’ were wont to say some decades ago…

So much are our spirits raised by these developments that we are now seriously contemplating re-entering the outside world by booking ourselves a mini-break during the summer – though we will not be leaving the province anytime soon.

More information – you may be sure – as it becomes available.

Tags: COVID-19, Health, Holiday, optimism, vaccine

The longest year

February 15, 2021 in Life as we know it, Photos | Permalink

“If you want to test your memory, try to recall what you were worrying about one year ago today.”

E. Joseph Cossman

So very much has happened in the last year; it is difficult sometimes to ‘get one’s head around it’. These photos were taken a year apart! Where would I rather be?…

Tags: Holiday, Mexico, Photo, Snow, Sunshine, Victoria, Weather, winter

The Journey Home – 5

June 21, 2020 in Flotsam and Jetsam, Photos | Permalink

Well, here we are at the end of this short retrospective – one year on – of our 2019 trip to the UK and Greece. The Girl and I had a wonderful and memorable visit to Europe – a fine balance between spending time with loved ones and old friends, revisiting a bit of the old country and getting to wallow in glorious antiquity in a part of the world that neither of us had known well.

As is the way of such things, on our return to BC we immediately started thinking about and planning further excursions, little knowing that – along with everyone else – our future travel plans would all have to be put on ice for an indeterminate and possibly indefinite period.

The Girl and I loved Athens and you can read the notes of a year ago and view the photos that I posted here and here.

Finally – a few more images from those taken in Athens: