Vancover, eh?

Well, after an hour a half in the car, 5 hours on a plane, 3 hours being detained in Canadian immigration, and another hour on the "Skytrain", we made it to our apartment in Vancouver (actually in a suburb called Surrey)! It was a long day, but the boys did so great, especially considering our extra time with our "friends" in immigration. You've got to be extra careful letting people like us in your country!

In the process of getting our internet hooked up today, I learned a couple of useful things from the installation guy–first, I learned that a “Canuck” (the mascot of the pro hockey team here) is just a nickname for Canadian, similar to “Yankee” for American. Second, according to the installation guy, we live in the “butthole” of Surrey. But don’t worry, he said it’s getting better.

We got to get out and explore our area a little bit this morning, and "butthole" isn't what came to mind. We actually thought it was really nice. (Wonder what he would think of Carlsbad?) We had breakfast at McDonalds and then walked through a local shopping center before buying groceries at a T&T Supermarket – which turned out to be a completely Asian supermarket, minus the awful smells. So we didn’t necessarily find everything we needed, but it brought back fond memories of Thailand. Plus, the boys got to see the tanks of live fish, oysters, shrimp, crab, lobsters, etc. And we even got to see the T&T employee pull out a fish, beat it in the head with a stick, and then clean it for the nice Asian customer.

Our apartment is a little small, but overall very nice, and perfect for the boys. For those of you that were worried about us being on the 27th floor, we only have one small window that opens to the outside and it has bars over it. We do have other huge windows that don’t open, but provide incredible views of the city and the bordering river/mountains. We’re directly across the street from Skytrain station, which is actually the last stop on the line. It took us about an hour and a half to ride it all the way from the airport to our apartment, but we got to see a lot of the city, and the boys loved the train.

The view from our apartment:

Stacy and the boys on the Skytrain:

We're excited about our new home! We'll post more later...