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bank account, bank discounts, Best Buy, Bowen Island, Capital Coast Savings, CIBC, cinema card, cinema tickets, Craigslist Vancouver, Go2hR, good banks Vancouver, Indeed.com, International calls, job searching, Job searching in Vancouver, Koodo, Living and working in Vancouver, monthly contract, Pacific Centre, phone contract Vancouver, recruitment agencies Vancouver, Scotiabank, St Patrick's Day Parade, TPD, Vancity, Virgin Mobile, Work BC
So I’ve been in Vancouver now for three weeks can you believe?! My first week flew by and despite the first two days of feeling a bit tired and worried with wondering whether I’d done the right thing, the rest of the week was great. I met some lovely people, did some sight seeing, took a ferry over to the beautiful Bowen Island and started to feel really settled. My second week, although still enjoyable, was a lot more sorting out things such as phone contract, flat, bank account and all the joys that go hand in hand with moving to a new place.
For my phone contract I set it up in a shop called Best Buy, located in the Pacific Centre (this is a lovely little shopping centre off Granville Street which does some of the tastiest smoothies I have ever had!). The customer service representative, Dale, was so efficient, friendly and super helpful (the best customer service I have ever received in a phone shop – EE/T mobile could definitely pick up some tips!) At first he tried to set me up with a Virgin contract as you get good benefits with them such as discounts off several stores and 2 for 1 cinema tickets however for some reason because I was on a working holiday visa they wanted a deposit of $500 which we both thought was a bit extreme. I therefore opted to go with Koodo. Koodo offer various different monthly plans and the good thing about them is that, yes they offer a monthly contract, which is unheard of in the UK. The data allowance isn’t wonderful but you can basically pay more for the amount of data you want. I opted for the $40 contract which offers unlimited texts, 500 minutes of calls and 500MB of data. It’s not a huge amount of data but you can get by with using wi fi in most places. To pay, they send you an email at the end of each month with the total amount you need to pay (tax is added on to this too!) and then you can simply pay the amount by debit or credit card. It won’t cost you to text internationally but it is worth checking whether it will charge the receiver. I don’t believe it does buit it would charge them to text or call you back.
Before I flew out to Vancouver I read that the Chinese New Year Parade would be taking place on Sunday 22nd February which left me very excited! There had been build up events and stalls spread across town to mark the year of the goat/lamb (this didn’t seem to be clear!) Some signs said it was the year of the goat whereas others said lamb and therefore there was a big display of lambs at one of the exhibition areas and then random posters of goats at other parts. The festival kicked off at 11a.m and if there’s one word to sum it up I would say disappointing. It seemed quite badly organised and was really long that it grew quite tiresome. It didn’t seem extremely professional and at one point there was a worker walking down the parade smoking and just having a general chat on the phone. I do not mean to take this away from some of the beautiful costumes on display as well as the drums and people dressed up as dragons as this was impressive, however the whole thing together did not not flow smoothly and after 20 minutes of watching we grew bored and headed elsewhere.
TEA and TAKES 