Living the high life in Burnaby, British Columbia

Before we moved to Vancouver, we managed to find on Craigslist a fully furnished apartment to sublet for the first 5 months of our stay here. While we had seen pictures and had a virtual tour using skype, they simply didn’t do the apartment justice with its amazing city and mountain views.

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We don’t watch TV each evening anymore; now we relax with a wine and watch the clouds roll in over the mountains, the sun set behind the city, and the apartments light up and come to life. After 6 weeks, we still haven’t tired of the view. I’m also still surprised by the number of emergency vehicles that are always screaming down Kingsway and that pink, red and blue lights are quite a popular choice to light up other apartments!

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Being used to lots of open space and the outdoors, I wasn’t sure how we were going to go with living 12 storeys up in a concrete high rise, surrounded by other high rises, but this place has a certain magical appeal to it. We are high enough up that we can just see over the top of the tall trees and watch the world go by below us, without getting vertigo. The apartment itself has a really homely feel and best of all, we only had to bring our clothes to move in.

Of course living in a high rise has its downsides such as having to take the elevator to take the rubbish out, having to impatiently wait for the elevator when only one is working, and the amount of dust that seems to quickly cover every surface. You can’t just “go outside”, you have to make a trip of it when you have a toddler (but then isn’t everything a bit of a mission with a toddler?!).

Soaking up the view the other night, I felt certain that this place had found us as much as we had found it. Sitting on the lounge I almost feel like I’m on an urban vision quest; this room with a view is the perfect place to receive inspiration and direction from the universe for what our overseas adventure might provide us.