nearlyhere

For a lot of folks around these parts, life revolves around the sea, and many spend their weekends a boat – such as the vessel you see here. The day after this photo was taken was a Monday, but i’m not certain it explains why the flag is at half-mast.

It’s been a fairly domestic couple of weeks, highighted with a few barbeques with the cousins, a trip over the Malahat hills to Duncan (where Simon and Fiona picked up a new vehicle), an afternoon cruise across the Strait of Georgia on a classic launch, several wide-eyed expeditions to gleaming supermarkets and department stores, thrift shop rumages, car inspections of our own, the usual banking and insurance malarky, another trip to the doctor subsequent to Lala’s ejection over the handlebars of her bicycle, good cups of coffee, frequent and delicious provincially brewed frosty beverages and numerous conversations with genial Victorians, a few of whom were like-minded folks around our age, prompting the trade of telephone numbers. I guess we’re begining to settle in.

Victoria is a pretty cosmopolitan town, a good place to raise a family, spend your later years, and generally chill out. In terms that Kiwis can relate to, it feels like wellington in a cultural sense (only with better weather) with a good chunk of the Auckland nautical thing going on, and a bit of South Island freshness. If you walk down the one of the main streets you are likely to encounter a wide spectrum of fellow creatures, and an equally comprehensive variety of human hidey holes and hangouts. Victoria sports a growing populace of relatively impoverished individuals, many of whom are homeless and maybe on Meth. You have your hoardes of tourists, students, environmentalists, outdoor adventurists, artists, government workers, retirees, mariners, newly-weds, goths, cyclists, activists, punks, geeks, construction workers and real-estate agents … and those who appear to be all rolled into one. The inhabitants, even many of the homeless ones who trundle around with bags of glass and aluminium to recycle, are largely employed in the service industries. The only physical goods produced around here are beer, methamphetamine, ceramics and vegetables; pretty much everything else revolves around people: feeding them, transporting them, entertaining them, cleaning and clothing them and telling them what to do.

Greater Victoria is composed of several Municipalities, kind of like the old Borrough Councils New Zealand cities used to be divided into, before Local governments were re-organised and centralised in the early ‘1980s. Each town has it’s own police force and fire department, it’s own style and it’s own agenda, so the carousing of these independent bodies and a couple other Gulf islands townships into a unified force presents some challenges. This responsibility falls on the Capital Regional District, which in turn answers to the BC provincial Government and it’s various ministries, which are all based in Victoria, the Capital city of British Columbia. If you like administrating, directing, regulating and enforcing then Victoria is also your place. I was trying to figure out why the tap water tastes like it does; it might just be the flavour of red tape.

Many Kiwis complain about the country drowning in beadledom, which i can understand, but it has taken only a few days for me to realise that we have it pretty good back home; a fairly happy sort of middle ground between devil-may-lassaiz-fair and smothering socialism. Canada suffers a more advanced case of bureaucitis, but the majestic landscape, friendly folks, cheap gas and affordable consumer goods make it more than bearable. Large portions on your dinner plate soften the deal too, and if you’re the individual who has served it up to a hungry customer, chances are you’ll be making good money in tips… maybe even good enough to afford to buy a house in Victoria. By the way, the average price for a single family home here is a little shy of $600,000. These over inflated values reflect just how nice it is to live in this part of the world, and lots of people want to: apparently the vacancy rate here, when the student population has settled in for the semester, is 0.6% – the lowest in Canada.

Needless to say, we won’t be purchasing an investment property in the near future; our suite will do us just fine. Victoria appears to provide an optimal blend of the outlandish and the ordinary, a easy balance between a city life and the good one. Now we have found our feet and reset our compasses, we’ll begin the search for employment and no doubt soon our daily patterns will become more routine, and we will live like the locals do.