Archive: Posts about Victoria
April 3rd, 2008, 10 Comments »
We’ve just moved into our fourth furnished apartment. The other three were in Europe and Africa (where it’s par for the course, as far as I can figure)–this is our first in Canada. I can’t sing the praises of furnished apartments enough–they make so much sense:
- They reduce waste, because people (especially young people) aren’t buying crappy furniture that gets used for a few years and then replaced. It’s in the landlord’s best interests to buy furniture that lasts.
- In a small way, they reduce fuel consumption. There’s much less business for moving companies and their trucks.
- It’s bloody convenient.
Normally any move is fraught with painful, expensive trips to Ikea. Our place in Victoria is ‘furnished’ right down to cutlery and cleaning products. We could literally walk in with a bag of groceries and be ‘moved in’. We’re also fortunate to have a garage in which we can store our sundry boxes and the few sticks of furniture we’ve got kicking around.
When singing the praises of furnished apartments, people often become concerned about aesthetics. It’s not their stuff, so they could never get comfortable. I wondered about this, too, but it turns out that I couldn’t care less. Yes, we’ve lived in nice places in Malta, Morocco and Victoria, but our first apartment in Ireland was kind of shabby. And appeared to have been decorated by a colour-blind octogenarian with bad cataracts.
You get used to things pretty quickly. So the walls are a kind of rotten robin’s egg blue, so what? Either you learn to live with it, or get permission to change it. In either case, these aesthetic compromises seem like a small price to pay for the convenience of your place being fully furnished.
Do you prefer furnished apartments or blank slates on which to lay your lifestyle?
10 Comments »
March 20th, 2008, 9 Comments »
My Dad told me about this the other day, but I had to see it to believe it. There’s not one, but two billboards supporting Barack Obama on the Pat Bay Highway outside of Victoria. I snapped a photo of one as we passed by:
Bizarre, eh? Apparently this one went up earlier in the month:
The full-size billboard was paid for by Dean Park residents Reg and Karen Mooney with the dual purpose of provoking family debate and putting in a personal push to get troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Reg Mooney, 75, a management consultant and former president of Goodwill Bottling, is a supporter of Democratic candidate Barack Obama and recently attended one of his rallies in Las Vegas.
The second one, which also has a message for Prime Minister Harper, just went up the other day. Apparently it costs about CAN $1250 a month to run a billboard along this stretch of highway (it’s reserve land, and the billboards generate revenue for the local band).
The first billboard’s owner has strong ties to the States, but this has reasonably practical applications as well. Victoria has millions of visitors each year (I couldn’t find a reliable number, but when I worked there it had the busiest info centre in the country), and many of them are Americans. Of course, only a minority of them are entering the city via this highway, but it might be enough to justify this surprisingly low cost.
9 Comments »
March 17th, 2008, 2 Comments »
It was a whirlwind week of meetings, appointments, errands and a conference in Vancouver last week. On Saturday I made the move across the water and have taken occupancy of our Fairfield apartment.
I’m pretty happy with it. It’s a modern reno inside the shell of a 1912 heritage house, with some original features (doors, floors, stained glass) retained. The office upstairs is big and bright, and has a rooftop deck off it with views of the Olympic peninsula and downtown. It’s furnished down to the face clothes and grapefruit knives, which is awesome. One trip to the grocery store and I’m ready to work.
It took Shaw Cable two trips to get my internet access working, but at least they were on time, honest and efficient. Julie’s in Morocco for another two weeks with her sister, so I expect to get plenty of work done.
One thorn in my productivity is that I had to take my MacBook into the shop. About three months ago, the fan started to sound like a crippled Sea King helicopter. It was seriously loud, and it would often rev and spin out. The surface temperature of the laptop increased, and I started seeing worrying behaviour in graphics-intensive apps like World of Warcraft.
Given that the thing is less than six months old, I’m underwhelmed. I count myself lucky that it didn’t melt down in Morocco, where I suspect that there’s a dearth of Apple stores.
I took it into Soho Computer Services here in Victoria. They’d only had it for four hours when they called to confirm my diagnosis–the fan is shot. Kudos to them for the quick turn-around.
Hopefully I’ll have my muted, cooled MacBook back by the weekend. In the meantime, I’m using our underpowered G5 iMac. It’s in desperate need of a RAM upgrade, but it’ll have to wait until I get my laptop back.
2 Comments »
February 18th, 2008, 3 Comments »
About two weeks ago, I was anticipating a painful, tedious search for an apartment in Victoria, BC. In particular, I wasn’t looking forward to trying to rent a place from abroad. We didn’t mind doing it–we rented places in Malta and Morocco sight unseen–but we feared that landlords wouldn’t be down with that.
Thankfully, after only a couple of weeks, we’ve secured a furnished, two bedroom suite in a heritage house in Fairfield. I was somewhat worried about living in a small building, but the owner assured me that every is quiet and pretty much keeps to themselves. The place has a big office upstairs, and a large south-facing deck.
We had to lobby pretty hard to get the place, but I think my aunt sealed the deal. She did an inspection in our place, and talked us up to the owner. We’re taking her out for dinner when we get to Victoria.
And though I bemoaned Craigslist for its crappy interface, that’s where we found this place. So, Darren 0, Craigslist 1.
I put a few photos that the owner took up on Flickr.
3 Comments »
February 5th, 2008, 19 Comments »
We’re looking for rental accommodation for the first time in nine years. I was really hoping that, in the interim, things in rental property search had improved. They have, but not as much as I’d hoped. Consider our options in Victoria:
- Craigslist - Everybody loves it, but I think the interface sucks. I can’t filter by location. Plus, the quality of the ads is seriously mixed. I have to wade through a lot of noise for a little signal.
- Househunting.ca - I gather this is Canada.com’s housing portal. It’s actually really good. It presents results on a map, and you can sort on price, number of bedrooms and so forth. And, wonder of wonder, it looks like I can subscribe to an RSS feed for new results on my search. It’s lame, kludgy RSS, but better than nothing.
- Random property managers’ sites - These are poorly designed, and have laughable search. Check out these results–they’re clearly designed for the property manager, not the renter. The renter cares about price, not the name of the building.
The essential problem is that, unlike MLS.ca, there isn’t a one-stop rental site that lists every available apartment. I ought to be able to specify my requirements on such a site, and get notified when there are apartments which meet my criteria.
Instead there are a bunch of silos, and only one of them will let me know when there’s new apartments in the inventory.
Two other observations: it’s shocking that so few of the online listings have photos. Even more shocking is the dearth of email addresses for contacting people in the classifieds. Wouldn’t they prefer to receive and manage inquiries via email instead of with a barrage of phone calls?
What We’re Looking For, and a $150 Bounty
For the record, we’re looking for a furnished, two-bedroom apartment within walking distance of downtown for less than CAN $1800, to rent as of March 15 or April 1. We want to live there for one to two years. I’ve rendered our ideal location in the magic of Google Maps:
View Larger Map
Unless it’s exceptional, we don’t want to live in a suite in a house. I like the anonymity of apartments. We might consider renting an entire house, though that seems unlikely in this price range. Nice to haves include:
- Close proximity to a grocery store.
- We’d prefer not to be on the ground floor.
- Hardwood floors.
- A view.
I’m not relishing the thought of searching and checking out a bunch of apartments in rental-starved Victoria. So if anybody finds us the apartment which we eventually rent, I’ll pay you CAN $150.
19 Comments »
January 30th, 2008, 15 Comments »
A few people have expressed dismay about our moving to Victoria and not back to Vancouver. Somebody even told me in an email that “Victoria was lame”. Is it? Maybe a little, but we have fond memories of living there during university.
More practically, we’re returning to the West Coast to build a house on some land we have on Pender Island. There’s much better ferry access to Pender Island from the Victoria side than the Vancouver side. There are far more trips, and the trip is much shorter (45 minutes instead of a 2 hour multi-island milk run).
Assuming it’s not a total disaster, we’ll live in the house we built. For how long? That’s hard to say. We’re already talking about renting it out and living abroad again, so we might live there for 6 months or 16 years.
We do have plans to make very regular trips by ferry or seaplane to Vancouver, so Vangroovy is not getting rid of me quite that easily.
15 Comments »
January 28th, 2008, 52 Comments »
UPDATE: After some confusion (see the comments), I’ve established that the cable provider is in fact Shaw, not Rogers, in Victoria. I’ve adjusted this post accordingly.
Maybe it’s just the plodding web access here in Morocco, but today I visited both Shaw and Telus’s websites today to scope out Internet access when we settle in Victoria in April of this year. They both offer a premium service at 5 or 6 MB/s and a 60 GB maximum per month for about $40 to $45 (before all those ridiculous extra fees). I assume there are discounts when you package Internet access with a landline (unlikely) or TV (likelier).
This is like voting for a prime minister in recent elections. Which is the least distasteful choice? I’ve complained (and heard many complaints) about both services in the past. Which is, uh, less worse? My criteria would probably be:
- How long does it take to get service after signing up?
- How reliable is the service?
- Who’s less likely to penalize me for exceeding the 60 GB maximum (a real concern, now that you can download HD movies that might average 4 GB)?
- Who’s less likely to filter network traffic and selectively decrease download speeds for bittorrent traffic and the like?
- Whose corporate policies are less repugnant?
What would you recommend? Maybe I should just go with carrier pigeons?
When we lived in Yaletown, I could circumvent this sort of red-state, blue-state problem by voting independent and signing up with Novus. Are there any such alternatives in Victoria?
52 Comments »
