I just can't tell you how much I treasure weekends and this one was a fun one. We started off our Friday with the intention of heading out to the free outdoor movie in the park next to our house with our neighbors, but ended up in a delightful evening at a friend of our friend's house, talking and eating delicious things until we basically just missed the movie. A lovely night. 

Then Saturday we celebrated my birthday with a trip to the Royal BC Museum (our local Natural History museum), sushi for dinner and Star Trek at the IMAX. What an awesome birthday! 

Random museum photos. They had some very fun exhibits including one about the "Race to the end of the earth" where we learned about the British and Norwegian racing for the South Pole. 

I don't know about you guys but I freakin loved Star Trek, I loved the first one and was super surprised that I loved the second one as well. Plus as I was standing in line, there was a group of nerds talking about all the terrible SciFi TV shows I watch and it just felt like home:) 

Sunday we partook in a very British tradition that they are carrying on here in Victoria, a Sunday Roast. We headed out to The Guild with our lovely neighbors (one of whom is Irish and therefore excited about this tradition) and our new friends and we all ate merrily of ye ol English food. It was super delicious. 

That is roast with gravy and Yorkshire Pudding. Very real stuff people. 

All in all a wonderful weekend  that I really wish could have lasted longer. Ah well, I probably spent as much time as is good for a person to sit and watch Star Trek The Next Generation for a while. 

Taking a stroll down our path reminds me how freaking lucky we are, despite the pangs of missing people that are still very fresh. 

We missed the Symphony Splash as I wasn't feeling great, but still had a great long weekend and like everyone else I find myself wishing all work weeks were only four days. Alas, thankfully here in Canadian there is a holiday almost every month of the year so until Labor Day everybody:) 

Oooohiii dear readers. It has been a while since I have updated. I have a couple good excuses which include moving, unpacking, travelling again for work and just generally trying to set up in a new country. 

It is still fun and beautiful here, but I'm not going to lie to everyone, I went back to KC this week and it made me miss it terribly already. Also, when you move to a different country you very quickly start to appreciate when you life was easy...you knew how to get places, you knew what the options were, you didn't have to deal with signing up for anything basically. The point is, gloriously easy life washed back over me bringing with it the family and friends that we left behind and darn it if it didn't make me a little bit sad. 

However! We sally forth and continue to appreciate our new home. 

So for pictures I will just go chronologically over the really random things I apparently decided to take pictures of recently: 

1.  We ventured off to Walmart on the bus (a long bus ride to get out to the suburbs but ALACK! deodorant is $3 there and suddenly we can afford things. Who knew it would take a move to Canada for us to appreciate the terrible convenience and price of the big box stores). K super loved that it was a two story one, with a cart escalator:)

So for the past week it has been a little bit heads down for me while I get started at my new job. What an undertaking, but since this is a lifestyle thing I won't bore anybody with the details. 

We've also been taking some time to explore this city of ours. Without a car, steps have been gotten, ya'll. Which is good, because as we are still in temporary housing we don't have as much leeway to cook at home and have been selectively sampling some of the local eats.

Fish and chips from our favorite place (so far) Red Fish, Blue Fish. Yeah, it is as monstrous as it looks. Mine is a "Red Dog" i.e. salmon while K likes the ole' fashioned cod. 

Here are some more reasons we love it so far.

We stumbled on the Gay Pride Parade and it was super fun.


This is impossible to see but that is a Bald Eagle in Beacon Hill Park.


K always, always loves the ducks.


The old guys get together to race their remote controller boats in this pond.


This is the prettiest police station I've ever seen.


We went to the Royal Athletic Park this weekend and saw our local Highlanders girls soccer team whoop up 7 to nothing in a very fun game. And as usual, we went down to the beach and felt revived and refreshed by the sea air.

Only two more days until we are in our place for real and we are sooooo excited. 

Canada Day was a whir of walking and food and crowds and general fun having. We experienced the first crowd we ever have here in our relatively small city and got to partake of some food truck bliss. K saw a guy with a water powered jet pack and I got to see a fireworks display over the harbour. Magical. 

A charming local bookstore. 

They had a huge stage going all day with local dancers, musical groups etc.

You can apparently book this as an experience, in case anyone needs a present idea for K:) 

Delicious Tacos 

 Pulled Pork Poutine from The Pig. Thank goodness for all the walking ya'll. 

Dinner from a Filipino food truck. Sooo good and K loved it as well. 

The Parliament all lit up. 

All in all, a great and tiring day and pretty stunning way to get oriented to this awesome country. 

The following few days we have mainly been trying to get our life here together, which is pretty complicated. Don't even get me started on how it is much more difficult to get a cellphone than it is to get an SIN here. However, we still get to spend our days walking around in the perfect weather, enjoying the sunshine and seeing more of our town. 

Forgive the fact that I'm posting more photos of the park near us but it is still amazing that we walked through this again and found more fountains and alcoves that we hadn't seen before.

We also stopped by and set up some internet (yay!) and K got to see how his print will look in our new place. Yay #2 for the fact that it is currently getting painted:)