Whereas living in London led to me to jet setting between countries, collecting stamps in my passport and coming up with entertaining anecdotes or observations about different cultures, living in Vancouver has left me spending my spare time trekking around the great outdoors, doing lots of active stuff and seeing some of this beautiful country (along with trying to pronounce beer with an “r” ).

The only problem with all of this great outdoors goodness is that it doesn’t make for particularly interesting stories write; unless of course anyone’s interested in highly repetitive tales of me spending my winter hooning down snow covered mountains over and over again. And, while it’ll take quite a while for me to get bored of seeing majestic mountain ranges and towering pine trees I’m pretty sure that my repertoire of adjectives would also become pretty repetitive pretty quickly.

The upshot to all this is that from the perspective of my other favourite hobby where words are unnecessary, taking pictures, there is no shortage of inspiration. Although some people who’ve travelled with me would find it hard to believe, I’ve managed to take even more pictures here in Canada then while travelling other parts of the world.

So for anyone who’s interested in seeing rather than reading about how I’ve been occupying my time, butter up the popcorn, turn down the lights and crank up the projector; here’s a years worth of holiday photo slideshows that you can watch without having pretend to be interested in my accompanying stories about all fascinating people I meet and funny things that happened.

• Pemberton Music Festival
• Alaska
• The Yukon
• Kayaking
• Skiing at Whistler
• Snowshoeing
• The Rockies
• Vancouver tourist shots

…and then of course I’m still playing lots of cricket.

By the way, if anyone is uses Flickr I’m always keen to add new contacts and see other peoples pics….

These two things combined have spurred a little bit of reflection and soul-searching from yours truly. The common theme in these internal musings tend to center around the changes from who I was then and who I am now.

Now that I’ve spent the majority of my 20’s pissing my life up against the walls of bars in various parts of the planet, I’ve started and finished a few chapters in my life’s book. I could rabbit on about how I’ll return to Australia with the usual extra maturity and arguably having become a responsible adult, or give you a boastful list of all the weird and wonderful things I’ve seen and done - but I wont.

So instead, here’s a list of the various less tangible things that seem to stand out in my head when I think about all:

• I’ve lived the London experience. And, like the masses of other Aussies who’ve done the same thing I’ve developed a deep emotional connection with the two songs London Still by The Waifs and Every Fucking City by Paul Kelly.
• I’ve felt what it’s like to be an Aussie abroad amongst other Aussies. I’ve known both the celebration and the embarrassment that it brings.
• I’ve ceased to discriminate against my own countrymen and woman just because I didn’t leave Australia just to meet other Aussies. Instead, now I try to avoid them because we’re fast taking the place of Americans and becoming the most obnoxious travelers in the world. Long gone are the days when we were seen as the most fun and easy going people to drink with. Now more often than not we’re the most drunk people in the bar that carry on inappropriately and piss everyone off…but then maybe that’s just me getting old.
• I’ve seen plenty of churches, temples, museums, ruins, statues and enough cities that now they all just blend in to one (hence the appreciation for Paul Kelly).
• I’ve been drunk in more local bars then I can remember through the next day, with people of more nationalities than I can find on a map.
• I’ve willingly hung up my backpack and don’t automatically cart it everywhere, unless an occasion specifically calls for something that needs to be carried rather than wheeled. I have no hesitation in choosing a decent quality hotel over a hostel anytime. I even don’t hesitate to choose an upgrade to a more comfortable form of transport if it’s available, even if that means missing a ‘local experience’.
• I’ve come to realise that absolutely no road I’ll ever walked down, nor anything I’ll ever do has been done before - by an Aussie.
• I’ve been lucky enough to work professionally, develop a career and mostly earn decent money while on the road. Unlike many of my friends who’ve had to work in a bar for twice the hours for half the pay and just end up getting drunk every night (as apposed to me who has just ended up getting drunk being served by my friends).
• I’ve succeeded mixing up my accent to the point where I’m not sure where the various parts of it come from anymore, let alone the terms and phrases I utter with it. Nowadays I can’t wait to move back to Australia not to be with family and friends but to start ironing out the English kinks and rediscover the joy of saying no wuckas without getting confused looks.
• I’m starting to think that describing myself as “Ben Melbourne from Melbourne” is becoming a bit of a misnomer now that I’ve lived away from Melbourne almost as long as I lived in it (keeping in mind that I actually grew up in the country town of Wodonga three hours away from Melbourne).
• I’ve lived an ongoing love story that has spanned several continents. In doing so I’ve succeeded in following my good mother’s hard earned advice of falling in love with a good Aussie girl so as to avoid having to make the choice of living on the other side of the planet from family (something that my Canadian Mother learned the hard way). On a side note, visiting Tina and trying to drag her to back to Canada with me is also another main motivation for the trip home…
• I followed in many of my father’s widespread footsteps, as he is want to remind me upon arriving in a country he once visited…and eventually managed to start forging a few new paths of my own.
• I’ve lost the need to regularly write lots of long winded emails keeping everyone I’ve ever met up to date with every little thing I’ve been up to.

And finally, I’ve developed an appreciation for a quote that a friend told me just before I left:

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” - Gilbert K. Chesterton

…which is yet another expereince that, mixed accent in hand, I am about to embark upon.

After my long-winded Caribbean diversion a failure to find a rich sugar-mumma to sponsor my leisurely lifestyle has meant a return to the working world. It was touch and go there at points as to whether I would, but I did finally decide to give up the homeless and unemployed beach bum lifestyle and follow through on the plan to move to Vancouver.

Now, having successfully found myself a job and somewhere to live, I’m confronting that time of year when I’m starring down the barrel at six long months of cold, dark winter and I start to wonder what the hell I’m doing still living in the northern hemisphere.

It’s not all bad though. Vancouver is just as much of beautiful city as I remember it. I’ve got a decent job working for the CBC (the Canadian public broadcaster) on their website as an Information Architect. I’ve found an awesome apartment to share with another guy in the trendy area of Kitsilano so I can maintain my usual inner-city yuppy lifestyle (my place just at the end of the bridge in this webcam overlooking Kits). I’ve had no trouble getting to know the locals and making friends, in fact my Aussie(/English) accent is actually a bonus here compared to London.

I even managed to play half a season of cricket and achieve one of my main goals in moving here of playing a game at Stanley Park - according to the Don one of the world’s most picturesque cricket grounds. I stumbled across cricket being played at Stanley Park last time I was here a few years ago and without realising it until I actually did it have always subconsciously dreamed of coming back and playing there myself.

The best part about it all is that I don’t miss London one iota. With the exception of the many good friends I sadly left behind, I haven’t stopped to think about that cesspit of humanity for a second. I’m not sure whether it because London is such a shitty, crowded and polluted city, or because Vancouver is such a liveable city but I have been walking around for the last couple of months randomly announcing to anyone in earshot that this place is just so darn nice. Maybe it’s just because I haven’t had to go down an airless underground tunnel with the rest of the rat race recently, or maybe it’s because I know that once winter properly sets in that I can take off from work early and go skiing up in the mountains for the evening. Either way, the idea of the long winter ahead doesn’t seem to scare me as much as it did in London for the last few years.