Always Read The Map Scale

21 October - Am back in my flat and my footses and legses are in horrible shape. I walked all over Vancouver today and I retraced my steps quite a few times too. I'd made a few appointments to check out some share houses today and I though it would be relatively easy to walk it. I'd already been told that trips I'd already taken were 'bus distances' but I found them to be easily walkable. The jetlag woke me up pretty early (5ish) but the first appointment was at 11 so I did some preliminary job searching. Walked a very long way to the first appointment and was early and there was nobody home. Toddled off and had an awful coffee from a very nice man who had a stuffed lion in his café (he gave me the history, the lion died of old age in the zoo) and returned to the house to find nobody home. And this was the one flat that I didn’t have a phone number for. What was worse was that I had another appointment at a house across the road from this one at 5pm (thought i'd kill two birds but nobody was home at that one). Went to about a dozen bike shops to try to find the best one - there were some very nice ones that were way too expensive and some awful ones that were also way too expensive but on the whole the guys who run bike shops in Vancouver are infinitely more helpful and friendly than the ones in Sydney or London. Think i've decided on where i'm going to get it from now - a nice Trek MTB with disc brakes that slides in just under my budget.
Wandering from shop to shop brutalised my feet - eventually I took advantage of public transport (which is quite good f you know where you're going, which I don't) to get me to one of the share houses. Both of the places I saw today were quite similar - house with four or five travellers or students or escaped convicts (in both of them I would be replacing a Korean student [probably from South Korea]) and they all had shared washroom (they don't like to say toilet or even bathroom over here it seems), kitchen, some storage, cable TV and, quite conveniently, wi-fi internet. The one that was further away (still close to the SkyTrain) was in a crappy basement flat underneath a very, very nice house (the landlady shooed me away from the front door when I arrived, I think she didn't want the neighbour to see me) and the other was in a niceish house but isn't available until the 15th unless I want to take a room slightly bigger than a small single bed.
In any event, i've just got to learn that when something two things are a couple of centimetres away from each other in the map this can translate to 10km in the real world, next time i'm going to read the scale.
One slightly nice thing was that I found a place called 'Cob Bakery' (which must be part of the bakers delight chain) which sells cheesymite scrolls, haven't had one for three months and it was ... pretty good for a Canadian bakery. Also had an opportunity to show off my prodigious strength by helping some Japanese students take their relatively light bags up the stairs in the hostel.
One thing that i've noticed here which is absolutely infuriating and will be eradicated in the Utopia I eventually create is the GST and PST (i don't know what PST stands for yet). All prices are advertised without and usuallyend with .99 and when you pay you it goes up 7 or 14% and i'm getting heaps of crappy pennies filling up my pockets. Very annoying. Nobody could ever convince me that pushingthe cost onto the consumer was the right way to go - when you see a price, that is the price you should pay - no arguments. If the government wants to put a tax on something it should be invisible to the consumer - i'll be here for another 9 months and I don't think i'm ever going to get used to that one.