Sausages.

I love a good sausage (focus my friends, keep the puns at bay). And to date, despite a thorough search of Vancouver’s butchers and markets I have yet to find a sausage that comes close to rivaling the infamous, the beautiful, the succulent: The Superquinn Sausage (which, incidentally, has its own facebook fan group)

Himself and myself take it upon ourselves to try a sausage from every meat-like store we come across, including:
Whole Foods
Jacksons on 4th Avenue
Market Meats on 4th Avenue
Butchers on Granville Island
Choices Market

The problem is two-fold. The first is that they don’t assume that a sausage should be made from pork (mad Ted, mad) and the second is that they are particularly fond of adding a multitude of unknown herbs to the meat.

So here’s the deal. You need to specify that you are looking for something like an English pork banger (seems to put them on the right track) and when they reach for the least colourful looking lump of pale pork sausage, you know you’re getting close.

But not close enough. The best we have tasted is Whole Foods pork banger. Not a patch on a good Irish sausage, but not terribly offenisve to the sophisticated Irish palette at the same time. Jackson's isn't bad either and they're so damn nice in there that they would probably re-create your perfect sausage if you asked nicely.

If anyone has any insight on other purveyors of the humble pork sausage in this city, leave a comment and we’ll be over to yours for dinner. Or breakfast.

A word on Canadians. Specifically Vancouverites.

(They love to dress up. Halloween is nearly too much for them. I dressed up as a Canadian for our work Halloween party. They asked me where my costume was..)

1. They don’t do last minute.
Spontaneous they are not. They have every bank holiday and long weekend planned months if not years in advance. For example, you might find yourself discovering that there’s an upcoming long weekend and decide to take off out of the city only to discover that every resort, hotel, camp ground and hut has been booked out for the past six months. None of your last mintue get aways, unless you think deciding something four months ahead is last minute.
Also, when someone says “meet you at six for a drink” they mean that literally, or you tell someone to come over for dinner around 8ish, they will be on your doorstep at 8. On the button.


2. They get to the cinema while you’re still at home deciding what film to see.
They don’t do reserved seating over here so as a result they all get to the cinema a good hour in advance it seems. They’re also huge fans of reserving an entire row of seats for their buddies. Once again, it kind of throws last minute plans out the proverbial window.

3. They love to line up. (That’s queuing to you and I)
They’ll think nothing of standing in line for an hour or two. It’s sort of a national past time. They love a good line up. Outside restaurants, bars, musuems, shows, you name it there’s a line up. And its not an Irish line up which is just a collection of people pushing in the same direction, survial of the fittest style, over here it’s a neatly organised, single person line.

4. They don’t go to a bar to banter with strangers (or rather they can’t)
Most bars have a person greet you at the door, find out how many are in your party and seat you at a table accordingly. This presupposes that you know exactly how many people will be joining you whereas back home you never knew who would make it out for a few drinks and at what time they might show up. If you have a table for five and a sixth person shows they get a bit fussy. (how dare you have more than your specified amount of companions in this public house).
Once seated you then have an appointed server who does table service meaning you have no real reason to chat to anyone else because everyone is sort of incubated at their respective tables. Nobody stands around and chats. I think this is one of the reasons that it can be hard to get to know people over here, bars are not structured to incur a bit of banter and chat. It’s quite formal and organised.

Cars: To buy or not to buy..

We got carried away when we arrived and bought one of those Jeep Wranglers that were really cool about twenty years ago. The first pictures are from when we were happy saps with our new car and with its roof off in the summer. The next photo is of the car being towed away after it basically fell apart on the side of the road on Vancouver Island a few months later. It was fun while it lasted. Which was about four months.

If you live in downtown Vancouver you don’t really need a car. The city is small enough that you can walk to most places and its pretty bike friendly too (not to mention rollarblades but I won’t judge…). Public transport is quite good, the buses are pretty frequent and full of interesting characters and the skytrain (a flamboyant name for a 1980s monorail) takes you out east if you are so inclined. I’ve been on it once and that was plenty for me.

But given that you will be a bit of a tourist for the first while you will probably want to be going places and seeing things and a car is pretty handy for the odd epic adventure. So here are some options to consider

Zip Car and Co-Op Cars
There are two interesting services to make note of over here that act as decent substitutes to owing a car.
1. Co-op cars
2. Zip cars.

I don’t know much about the former but I was a Zip Car member for a while. Basically you pay about $50 to join which means you have access to Zip Cars in your neighbourhood (or anywhere in the world for that matter). You go online, put in your location and the length of time you need a car and the kind of car you want, and it calculates your options. The average cost of a car is about $12 per hour (approx) depending on whether you want a trusty Nissan or a funky Mini or a family car of sorts. It’s pretty handy if you need a car for a couple of hours on weeknights, but beware that we ended up cancelling our memberships because it became so popular that it was pretty hard to get a car if you didn’t book it well in advance (we tended to wake up on a Saturday and decide we wanted a car in an hour which proved to be wishful thinking)

Renting
You can rent cars all over downtown, they do good weekend packages and some even do monthly packages (or at least they did when the car industry was taking a battering)

Buying
Cars are easy to buy here and they are pretty affordable. You can buy a car in the morning, drive to the insurance company get it insured and have it home by lunchtime. The ICBC (Insurance Corporation of British Columbia) is a good thing, because unlike Ireland where all insurance companies are independent meaning you get a variety of quotes per dealer, the inusrance system is centralised over here, so your quote will be the same no matter what dealer you go to. Its nice that the system is so transparent.

If you want to take advantage of the no claims bonus, you will need to get your insurance company to fax the relevant documents to your insurance dealer here. Otherwise you pay a tonne extra.

Insurance is pretty pricey though so that can make owning a car difficult, even if the car itself doesn’t cost much. Check out Craigslist to get an idea of prices.


Parking
Parking is damn expensive in this city. And they tow you and ticket you the way the Irish clamp you. If parking isn't included in your monthly rent, a space can cost anywhere from about $50 to $150 a month. So just keep that one in mind.

Borrow mine.
Audrey the Audi sits outside our house looking for love and attention, and somebody to clean all the segul shit off her windows.