"Use a gun... do extra time. Don't use a gun."

Well, Happy Easter everybody - hope you all enjoyed the long weekend.

Last Thursday I went to Whistler which, thank goodness, finally received some snow - 86cms of it in 3 days. It was a welcome change - 2 weekends before the mountains were bare up to the midstation. It was much more encouraging to see some white this trip.

On Saturday went to Seattle - caught the bus down at 9am and didn't arrive in downtown Seattle until 3pm, blame overcautious border security and extremely bad American freeway traffic for the delays. (Note it took us 1.5 hours to get through the border. We were all fingerprinted, photographed, interrogated. Coming back into Canada took 10 minutes... "Where do you live?" "UBC". "OK have a nice day")

But Seattle is a pretty cool city. Dirty, yes. Unsafe, relatively. Too many cars - for sure. The transit downtown though was relatively good - free in the entire downtown area, but the only people that seem to use it are old people and blacks. An advertisement in the bus amused me: "Use a gun. Do Extra Time. Don't use a gun" - as if to say, if you're going to kill someone, please - use a knife, use your fist, even drown them - but just don't use a gun.

Seattle Centre is a tourist precinct off the end of downtown whic houses among other things the EMP, Experience Music Project and SFM, Science Fiction Museum. Both were excellent - at the EMP you could spend a whole day, looking through the history of "northwest" music (home of Nirvana and the entire grunge movement), the Bob Dylan exhibit, make your own music - and even record it and star in your own music video. Rina and I spent a while in a studio honing down our guitar and drum skills. I swear I'm buying a drum kit when I get back home.

Sunday night went to see Washington play Seattle in basketball at Key Arena. Basketball is huge in the States and this was a great game, with Seattle losing by just 1 point... the crowd is great, though extremely partisan. There are cheerleaders, dancers, blimps, and yes lots of hot dogs, pretzels and Bud (which tastes a lot like piss).

The nightlife in Seattle is great - on Saturday night we went to a Jazz bar and drank Martinis, on Sunday we went to the opening of a quasi-hip hop club in trendy Capitol Hill... the sound is a lot more raw in Seattle than Vancouver which is great, the DJs experiment a lot more and the crowd is really chilled. Cabbed it down to a Breaks club which was hosting a DJ comp - this was really great, stuck around there till the early hours. Unlike in Canada you can smoke in clubs in the US, so this reminded me a lot of Sydney.

Did some shopping - much better in Seattle than Vancouver. Cheaper prices, massive malls and department stores - hey, it's America after all. Then arrived back in Vancouver on Monday night and back to the reality of several assignments, exams and presentations due over the next few weeks.

I have photos of Seattle & Whistler to post, but haven't had time yet to shrink them down to blogspot size, so I will get to that soon.

Email me people, I will reply eventually and I really like hearing from you even if I don't acknowledge that for a while.

Until next time (hopefully soon)

-Nick

Long overdue update

Clearly my comittment to update this blog site weekly has all but failed - so for those who expend the effort to check this more often than I do, I apologise.

Frequent skiing, regular partying, crappy wages and living with pot-heads aside, life is somewhat more normal than it was when I first arrived. I have managed to fill most days with fairly significant amounts of productive activity... Mondays consist of class, 2 hours of work, class, a winetasting course in the evening, and an hour of (free!) French tuition from a friend... Tuesdays class, the traditional bi-weekly lunch with some of the other exchange students, more class, then Salsa in the evening.... Wednesdays class, work, class then often out in the evening (Au Bar - $2 high balls!), Thursdays and Fridays much of the same... then the weekend, skiing, partying, and a bit of work here and there.

I seem to get a lot more stuff for free here than I do at home. $20 per month for unlimited transit use. The gym and pool are both free (at certain times of day - $2 per visit at other times). Completely free, high speed, wireless internet all over campus, absolutely no download restrictions (apparently Canada is the only place where MP3 downloading has been deemed officially legal). Free food - apparently the residents association at Gage believes it necessary to spend their annual budget on pancakes, ice cream, pizza and whatever else they can justify under the them of promoting interaction between residents.

Travel plans - well, I suddenly realised the other day that despite my frequent trips to Whistler, I haven't really seen much of Canada yet. So here is the plan:

Easter: trip to Vancouver Island, including the BC Capital Victoria, and the picturesque town of Tofino.

After finals: Seattle, San Francisco and possible LA/Vegas

Then back in Vancouver to see U2 and Maroon 5. Then to NY, as a base for a trip to Boston, Toronto, Niagra Falls (from the Canadian side, of course), Montreal, Quebec City, and possible down to Chicago.

Possible side trip to Mexico from NY - although not sure about this yet.

Then June off to London, Paris, Lyon, Spain, Switzerland and to Hamburg for Winter school in July. And back home in August!

Apologies to those who don't really care, but I havent told my parents all this yet!! So if anyone else has any suggestions on things not to miss, please feel free to comment.

OK and lastly, thanks to everyone who emails me. I am equally as bad with replying to emails as I am with updating this site (my oldest emailing desperately deserving a reply is from 26th January), but stick with me, I will get to it!!

Enjoy 4th year ppl, don't work too hard or stress too much, steer clear of Macquarie fields and write me a comment or email!

Later,

-Nick