What you CAN do though, is jam a whole pile of useless and unwarrented photos into one jam-hole, and start jamming, cus when you have a whole bunch of jam, that shit works out sweet. Like jam.

Here’s a look at some things that ended up on my phone, some remembered and some complete news to me, over the past few weeks.

leave any comments or questions below, and usually I’d say click the nip to enlarge the tit, but I fucked it this time so don’t.

1. Cinema opposite work that USED to show arthouse and now shows G.I. Joe Movies.

2. Some unknown geezers massive back scrawls shown to me in The Cambie.

3. Go down Main Street and you will find a dog up a stick.

4. Quan almost forgot his name tag.

5. Typical version of Vancouver vandalism. This must be stopped.

6. Winter trees make great photo frames.

7. Bronwynn did this to her locker cus she a patriotic Surrey redneck.

8. Something I found in my sketchbook of steaming.

9. Best Michael Jackson Tshirt ever. Had no idea what it was till weeks after buying it for $2.

10. Again. These vulgar criminals ruining our streets.

11. I buy beer based on the label.

12. And recommendations.

13. I borrowed something and was very grateful.

14. Note to the best hosts ever.

The thing goes on forever. Or as we’ve established, what feels like forever! I say this for every single video, but this actually does no justice whatsoever, as this video covers literally just one randomly chosen path out of about… 50? I should probably come up with a better excuse for this video really not capturing the feeling of overwhelming beee-yoo-tee that my eyes effortlessly grabbed at the time, but I was too busy actually looking at it.

What I’m saying though, is the name Pacific Spirit is going to come up many more times on this site, as there’s tons left to explore, and I won’t be satisfied until I’ve left a foot print on 99% of that place. So basically, I won’t ever be satisfied. You don’t know though, I’ll just tell you I saw it all.

 Pretty unreal huh? I have a slight obsession with pointing the lens (not my eyes) at the sun blooming through the trees. This being filmed on a GoPro means I have no control of the exposure, it’s all auto, but still get some great moments.

Oh and check this, when you finally plough through miles of this thick, green, non bulldozered, tall shit, there’s a gigantic university full of impressive architecture in the middle. As well as botanical gardens, native monuments, and about 4 gorgeous beaches including my favorite one in Vancouver – Wreck Beach. Videos of all that jazz inspiring eye heroin coming eventually (no point in saying soon).

Anyway, the sun is shining, my precious little laptop borrowing time is coming to an end, and these videos don’t require a hell of a lot of explanation anyway.

This is basically what we did, wondering around Vancouver on our first ever full day without gigantic bags on our backs. Free to wonder and get lost as we please. Which we did a lot. It’s a bit of a shock when you go from instantly getting your phone out and staring at it when ANY problem arises, to having to rely on bloody PEOPLE around you… But luckily, being in Canada, everyone is super friendly, more than willing to help, and actually gives you a ton more help than you asked for. Even as you’re walking away.

So that was our first few hours in Vancouver covered, everything looked brilliant at the time, but I have come to learn there is TONS more to see that is a million times more impressive, and I haven’t even got through half of it yet.

 Just another little video I thought I might as well include here, as it doesn’t really justify having it’s own post. A lot of these videos, as I’m sure you can tell, are basically just home movie/holiday photos for my own pleasure in later life, that very few of you will be interested in, and they merely serve as a moving postcard for those that care. This one however, I am sure nobody would care about… So here it is! Enjoy!

That, by the way , ladies and gentlemen, is the first and last time you will ever see Quan doing the washing up. 

As with most things, it took us a while to finally get ourselves over there, in fact, the only way I found out how close it really was, was during a forced trip down the police station. I was forced down there by an insurance company, not in the back of a car in cuffs. I think I actually would have preferred that after all the fruitless frustation I’ve taken hard in patience hole from these tight fisted sellers of disappointment. 

So anyway, we went to look at some beautiful machines of speed, which are never going to let you down really are they? I knew there was going to be some stunners, but this was unreal, especially as they only have around 10% (that’s a made up figure based on what I can remember for a very long and enthusiastic conversation with a fella that worked there, but basically, they have A LOT in storage and a very small museum) on display at any one time, the sound of workshops and tune up’s in the background making it very tempted to go wondering where we shouldn’t. 

After looking at what were on the whole, frankly, a load of death traps, we went to look at the new models you can ride away today. Some of the bikes in the museum where seriously the equivalent of a penny farthing, or a vintage road bike frame, with a bastard engine strapped onto it. Some of the time I couldn’t even tell what the engine was meant to be running on, they looked too tiny and futuristic for something 100 years old, that catapulted brave/deranged men into walls and audience members so regularly.

In comparison, the bikes in the show room looked like they could run through walls and over parked cars. Or they at least looked like there was something to actually sit on and hold on to. We didn’t even bother looking price tags, as the price of a bloody shot glass with a logo was more than I could afford and the price of a T-shirt constituting my entire wardrobe’s value, but one bloke assured us we were still cool to sit on them and have a feel if we wanted.

As we were leaving we saw a smooth little skinny beaut that we both recognised (the Iron 883 is it’s factory name if you want to look it up, but we just called it Sleek Ass Mamba). It was the bike that Keith Buckley, front man of Every Time I Die, rides around while narating his sprawling road poetry which makes you feel illiterate, in a DVD extra which I’ve forgotten the name of. If you’ve seen it, you know. The bike is such a sleek definition of style, and we had a moment of premature terrible decision making when we saw that it’s price tag was totally (if you live in a state of permanent suspended fantasy) affordable. We were blown away by how cheap it was (in comparison to the others) and how it was actually the bike of choice anyway. Unfortunately, our conscious and a series of facts and figures concluded in us leaving without the bike, but dreams of riding her another day. And that possibly being the last thing we ever did.

Yes, that is quite a lot of photos of bikes, but ain’t they all pretty? Couldn’t really decide which ones weren’t going to make the cut, as they all have some unique features, and you can just flick through and find your fav. The one that we fell for is all black mat bike, in a black and white photo. So all black anyway. Errr… Oh yeah we’re sat on it!

I’ll be very brief here as it’s very late in the no longer day, which usually is no big deal (NBD from now) as I regularly wake up about an hour before my work shift at 5pm, but today I did the whole upside and outside during daylight hours for a very long time… Meaning I’m not realising I’m pretty easily not far off the 24 hour mark without trying at all.

That’s the reason for pure gabber right now. So to get on, I went downtown for no reason other than to repeat my awe of the first touristic viewpoints and photo grabbings. To be honest, I get this pretty much every time I go downtown anyway, but this time I made a point of it. I went straight back to the galleries I’ve visited and liked the most, and clicked away like a student trying to make it look like he knows what he’s doing with his last minute project.

If you’re looking for more insight-in-to-the-sight than that, you’re out of luck until the future me finds this post and edits his past self’s lazy and pointless effort, then maybe deletes a few of the posts I like now but will hate later, just to punish him in the past/future. I’m pretty tired. Considering and editing are way more effort than just mindless typing right now.

Here are some photos of a day I had wondering round Downtown Vancouver, when it wasn’t raining for once, checking out the sights I knew had the views, and the gallaries I knew had the updated arts. Many more to come.

This is by far the laziest post yet, but it was not a lazy stomp around town for many hours, and it won’t be the next 20 times, so take that into consideration. Don’t worry about any consideration when you write you’re comment though. Anything. Hello?

Right, start at the beginning. I was round me nan’s on Christmas Dayns. Actually no, I was the furthest from me nans house I’d ever been. In a little known cunt-tree called Canada, on the far side of it as well, as this bitch is big. We had big plans for Christmas, which included the biggest bottle of vodka I’ve ever seen, 2 presents each wrapped in newspaper under a broken lamp (the tree), a could-be-fatal, but probably delicious dinner, and blasting tunes all day long finally hooked up to the biggest speakers in the house. Oh and the whole place to ourselves with 0 complaints expected whatsoever (new record).

So as expected we went mental. Cracking open the first can at like 10am and drawing on the living room floor by 11 was pretty much the deal. I remember looking at the one bit of footage I saw before the pure theft of all possessions (explain later), filmed from a camera left in the corner of the room, and thinking “fuuuuuckinell, this must have been when we got back. We are absolute waste”. Then the video cuts to when we actually did get back from our trip down the pub, and it’s just a fucking disaster. Serious lack of clothes, visible flooring, and dignity.

Yeah basically here’s what’s was up. I realised a few days before Christmas that I was (WAS) now in the possession of 3 pretty decent devices for filming with, and we were going to have a 3 man Christmas party, so it was agreed that one would be set up in the corner, I’d film with my phone as much as I could, and the lads would take it turns in filming anything worth while with the GoPro. To be honest this is the main thing I am pissed off about, the loss of so much footage, including what was probably the loudest and most ridiculous Christmas Day 3 lonely lads can have.

So we ate, drunk, partied, danced, broke shit, and filmed it all from 3 different angles. We had a nice rest after dinner, cracked open the voddy, and got ready to head down to the pub for an orphans Christmas smash. Apparently, the second I walked into this pub I pretty much threw the door off it’s hinges and fell into a table, and was told that we couldn’t drink there, but obviously in the nicest, most polite Canadian way. Pretty sure he would have appologised and we ended up having a chat anyway, rather than an instant kick out and threat of the police.

We found a bar 1 second down the road that would serve us, and believe it or not, this is where shit gets a little hazy. Again, this is just something I was told, but I supposedly told the bat tender to shut the fuck up because I was in the middle of a story, and he was kindly mentioning that I was drunk to an illegal amount, but still no kicking out from this place. Lovely people.

So anyway, I get kicked out. Tried to walk home and pretty much crawled most he way. I just realised this has become a story of hey, check how drunk I got, fucking cool right? But  basically, point is, I was having a pretty gnarly day, and it didn’t let up when I got home soaking from crawling in puddles. We continued throughout the night, only stopping when our bodies couldn’t hold onto the planet anymore, and called it a day around 4am. One thing I do remember though, very specifically, is going to sleep with my brand new iPhone lying next to my head, on my pillow, blaring music as I went to sleep.

Realisation

I wake up and, obviously, it sucks. I’m awake and feeling the grimmest ever (you always feel the worst EVER), and the first thought I have is to find my phone and watch back some of last nights award winning footage. After 4/5 seconds of looking and realising that if it’s not in direct arms reach, then it’s not going to happen, I go back to sleep. I repeat this process another couple of times until I start to wake up and properly and try to actually look for the thing. Looking under the bed, actually getting out of the bed, everything.

The gaff is in too much of a state to even begin to start looking for something properly, and my GoPro which I am SURE I left sitting on the shelf seems to be missing too, but they are both small objects and could be anywhere. No need to panic just yet. The more I clean and the more I look in every single corner though, the more I’m thinking OK enough, actually WHERE is this shit. At this point though my massive Sony HD Camera and MacBook are still sitting clearly in plain sight next to me as I clean up.

After speaking to Squad and Kian, who don’t have the phone or camera, the only thing that doesn’t add up is that weird kid that for some reason was in my house and tried to get into my bed. Did I mention that? Yeah some dweeb that contributed nothing to the party, and might as well as been a drink wasting ghost, made his one and only move towards being an animated human, by trying to get into my bed while I was going to sleep. On he jogged. 

We decided it MUST have been him. Even though Squad was convinced that he saw my phone AFTER the kid left, and that he didn’t even know what the GoPro was, and there was a full bottle of vodka missing that he couldn’t have taken as he was seen getting into his taxi, and we were all so hungover to piece together any straight sentences, and we were all so confused that ANY answer made sense…. So we stormed out the house looking for the kid at the bar that we met him at, cus he was definitely going to be there.

He wasn’t there. We told were told by people that know him though that IF he did steal something it was 100% an accident because he’s a really nice dude but just gets a bit too wasted sometimes. Sounds like a fucking loser haha (hypocrisy). I was still in a state of disbelief that it wasn’t just in the house in a place I hadn’t looked yet. Me and Squad went for some food and tried to push pieces of our mind back into the right slots.

I walked home feeling kinda numb because first of all this was a brand new phone, but more than that, there was SO MUCH footage on the iPhone and GoPro that I REALLY wanted to watch back right now! That’s all I cared about really. That is until I came home to find my previously locked front door wide open, my previously locked bedroom door wide open, my too high off the ground to climb in (so I though) window wide open, and my HD Camera and MacBook which I had locked in my bedroom for ‘safe keeping’ were both missing.

I think at this stage I was just in a state of mild shock. The worst feeling was that some fucker had actually, definitely, without any doubt, come into my house and robbed the fuck out of me. It took a good few days to stop jumping out and running into the living room with a broken baseball bat (not joking) at every single sound and creak. Which is a lot in these weird wooden Canadian houses. I felt sick that someone had strolled in and helped themselves to my shit TWICE. One time while I was fucking sleeping. They stole the phone from next to my head while I slept, then came back a few hours later, in the 1-2 hour window when the house was empty, and helped themselves to the rest.

Accusations

I won’t go into the blames and revenge plans that have been talked about half jokingly over the last month, because as passionate as I (and friends) were about ‘finding this fucker’, that has now calmed down into just thinking well it’s all over now, I’m not gunna get my stuff back, but I can get on with my life. There were some pretty wild accusations being thrown around though, and at one point I went round the neighborhood Pet Detective style (is that the comparison I’m looking for?) and actually got a ton of information about some the characters we have living round here. I don’t wanna go into detail but one woman invited me in and we talked for about an hour over trouble in the neighborhood, people getting up to no good.

The Happy Ending

There isn’t one. The insurance company I’ve been using for a couple of the items are being the sharpest and most prolonged pain in both of my bollocks, and dealing with them from the other side of the globe makes things a bit more difficult. Especially as they don’t seem to understand that my 2 forms of communication, my phone and my laptop, have been fucking STOLEN. Which is why I am contacting you. Asses.

Honestly though, I’ve given up caring. Whatever really. I’ve got plans to replace all the footage (once I replace the camera?) and I’m sure I’ll be able to make it much better this time. It’s not like I didn’t enjoy going to those places, I didn’t go purely to film them, and summer is just around the corner. I have considered looking in pawn shops and scowling the internet every day, but whenever I think about it too much I get a bit like…… uhhhhh. You know? Also, some woman who lives right across the street put a letter through my door saying she’d seen someone snooping round the other day, which put me right back on edge and checking every room again, but only for like a day.

I don’t wanna end up like a suspicious and paranoid hater of humans. For the first day or two I was looking at every single person like IT AS YOU YA CUNT. Even old women out walking the dog that wouldn’t recognize my phone or laptop even if they worked in the Apple Store, and especially the 1/2 sketchy looking people you see around here once per bloody month.

Lessons

So what I’ve learned first of all is now to pretty much keep my life online. You can’t steal the internet, so as long as everything is backed up ‘on the cloud’ or whatever, just gotta be careful with passwords and that. Also, in the future I won’t be so bloody lazy with photos/footage and the giant gap between actually capturing them and editing and uploading them. I had a giant backlog, about 50 or so posts worth, just sitting there, which could have been whittled away night by night, but instead just sat growing in the ‘edit it later’ folder. Although I did enjoy going out and getting this media, the main point really was to reflect back and I now can’t do that. In the future, I’ll be giving myself a strict deadline between getting the footage and getting it up, and in the mean time at least have it backed the fuck up ey. Learn that.

So turns out Canada is not crime free, and obviously this has lead to a ton of people telling me their crime experiences. Seriously though love, unless it’s a stabbing and theft of your baby, you ain’t gunna beat mine. No soppy bollocked tosspot gets robbed twice in one fucking day. AT CHRISTMAS.

Though I may as well include a photo of the room where this all took place, seeing as I don’t have any other photos to add right now! Click to enlarge, please comment below if any shits are given.

Obviously there a fuck-ton of advantages to having a proper camera, rather than something which I primarily made for calling people and throwing birds. Even though a lot of them were over my head, there’s a buttock load of setting to mess with, a proper adjustable lens with aperture, focus and exposure, and of course the size and quality of the photos means there’s plenty of information which can be adjusted in the editing without destroying the sharpness or clarity.

BUT, there is some really gigantic advantages to using the crappier, and lazier, phone based version… I’m always gunna have the thing on me, meaning photo time is any time. It doesn’t require a bag and planning for me to take it around, I don’t feel constantly on edge that I might drop and break the thing, I can edit photos pretty much as much as I’d really feel the need to in the press of one button, and it’s the same thing which sharing and uploading. Just a million times simpler, quicker, and more fun. I think it’s a lot harder to be ‘creative’ or just at least get the results you want if there’s restraints that stop you enjoying yourself.

When most the time, it’s purely the place or the subject you want to show off, rather than your possibly non existent photography skills, then  I’m never going to blow these photos up or do any mad editing – even if I were, I actually like the grainy and over-blown aesthetic – I just want to share the amazing sights that surround me.

Click the pictures to enlarge them to their full glory, and leave words of love/hate below.

That was not the case, and it did not disappoint at all. This was probably my favorite place to visit in Canada so far, even after all the amazing landscapes, lush parks, and sky scrapers practically out of science fiction movies (from an always living at sea level perspective), the architecture in this part of the city beat all of that.

It seemed like there were 50 types of building per street, each impressive in their own way. Whether it was mental little cafes and shops, each unique, somehow standing out in a sea of buildings screaming at your eyes. Huge apartment building which at one time were probably considered poor ass hobo houses, but now look like every attic artists dream, and are probably full of 200 believers that they are the next Picasso.. though to be fair to this city, a few of them may be right. Or there was the building you get in every city; churches, museums, libraries, castles? (ok, not every), lavish hotels, and the city hall… These blew my mind multiple times. It is lucky not all of these buildings are all in the same square because not only would the architecture impress you so hard that every other city in the world would end up looking like a blind baby designed it by throwing lego at a sticky cat, but the architects would have torn each others work down in jealous rage.

Basically what I’m saying, is some of these are, believe it or not, pretty nice. Quite impressive you could say. I would also add, you had to be there. This camera (and anything other than your own eyes with your brain attached) does it no justice, and the wide angle does make it quite hard to appreciate scales. As well as actual shape and generally what the fuck it looks like in real life. Just trust me, they did a bang up job.

I tidied up the edit here from what I had originally intended, which was keep shots running as I wondered around the city, but I feel that for the next few videos I want to really just keep the best and most vital footage, all the lean stuff, and cut out the fat.

Oh and after seeing all those insane examples of brilliant olden architecture… On the walk back, we stroll through the financial and hotel filled part of town which has the tallest and most extravagant modern buildings I have ever seen. They were not shit on what we saw before, but they were still mighty impressive.

Click the images to view full size, and leave any comments below.

So there’s not a whole lot of explanation required other than the park part, and the party, both of which I think I covered in the title. This is the same park which we started and end at when we went up Monte Royal (check that now, yes?), and there’s a ton of trails, ponds, and general hanging out spots to enjoy.

If I lived in Montreal, I would no doubt go to this park every Sunday. Well, I heard the winters are harsh as a set of icicle testicles so maybe I’ll save it for the slamming summer time.

The length of this video is a bit extravagant considering it’s kind of just a video of me walking backwards and forwards across a park, but I wanted to do a bit more messing around with the edit, and got carried away with the song.

I think I’ll stick to the stark and simple style of chronological editing, and letting the footage do the talking from now, as I think it suits the whole Video Postcard idea a lot more.

Click the pictures to see them good and proper, leave a comment below, thank yourself on my behalf.

Going from my shoddy memory of the information placards that I didn’t read, Vancouver used to be pissing well covered in these neon bastards, offending all the senses, until finally someone said enough was enough, and having burnt retinas wasn’t really worth knowing that there was a strip club down the road. Even the funeral directors had them! Doesn’t really seem to be the place you’d be rushing to get to.

They look awesome though ey? Major blast from the past, vintage old school garish kitsch horrible but amazing because of eye sores. That look awesome, still have to make sure that’s clear. Also, how the balls do they make neon? I want an entire neon house that all the neighbors hate, and buzzes so hard I can’t sleep.