As planned I start working at 4AM and I really enjoy it. After helping a couple of clients via e-mail, I get a phone call from one of my favourite clients and we talk for a while about the website and business. It’s so nice to be able to work wherever in the world I am. Even though last week was an interesting adventure of getting to Vancouver and discovering the city, I did miss working and being productive.
I work for about two hours and then loose my concentration a bit. I’m thinking about being here and that if I want to give it real shot I need to find a place to live. I go house hunting online for a while. It’s hard to find something affordable in Vancouver, but I see a few places and write a couple of messages to meet somewhere this week. I think it’ll come down to that if I find a nice place that I’ll stay the planned time or else that I might go home earlier. We’ll see how it goes in the coming days.
I take the bus to the city with a clear goal: find a good office to work. Vancouver has lots of coffee places, but most of them have only small tables and are not really optimised for work. Searching for a good workplace is actually a nice way to see more of the city. I walk for about an hour and then find a really large Starbucks. It’s a Reserve bar, that’s a special edition coffee store where they have all kinds of rare coffees. There is a nice one in Amsterdam, at Rembrandtplein. I think that was the first Reserve bar, but I’m not sure about that. In any case, this is the largest Starbucks I’ve ever seen and they have the big table I was looking for. I order a cappuccino and sit down with my laptop, happy that I’ve found a good workplace. At some point a man walks to my table and starts talking in Dutch to me. He heard me on the phone and figured I was Dutch. What a fun surprise. He introduces himself as Bart and tells me that he works as a technician for Starbucks, fixing their coffee machines. He moved here twenty years ago and worked as a technician ever since. Bart tells me that this store only opened last week. What a luck for me.
I keep working in the coffee place until halfway the afternoon and then go to a bookstore that I discovered yesterday. They have a large table at the second floor, great for reading or writing. It’s nice to already have a few favorite spots in this new city. It makes it feel a bit more like this is my city now. I don’t say feel like home yet, but knowing a few places to go makes a city much nicer to stay in. At the table in the bookstore I do a bit of writing in my bullet journal, making plans for the coming time. I think I’ll spend more time in this bookstore in the next few days.
Around dinner time I’m walking back to the bus station. I don’t really have a kitchen in the Airbnb, but I made a dinner plan for this week anyway. Today is Asian food, so when I see a Thai food place on my way home I stop to get a curry. After dinner I take the sea bus back to North Vancouver, do some groceries and go home. When you wake up crazy early as I do, you also have to go to bed on time. That’s easy enough here, because it’s already dark outside for a while and I’m really tired. I’m happy to have had a first good workday here in Vancouver.
