Greetings Dunkeld and Birnam. I hope you have all survived the winter so far. We have been watching with gobs truly smacked when we see the amount of snow and ice you’ve been having. Oy! We did have a few inches of snow for a few days with subzero temperatures but it disappeared fairly quickly. We do get some heavy duty gales and lots of rain though. Did you see Alan Dickson’s photo of the Cathedral in snow on the Scotsman website? Pretty good, eh?
The man behind this superb website, Phil Brammer, has been nipping my ear about writing a small piece for BAD info, and a moment in my life recently came along that suggests I give it a go. You see, for those of you who don]t know, I’ve just removed myself to Victoria at the southern tip of Vancouver Island in British Columbia. And at the beginning of December I did a “flag run” to Port Angeles, Washington, in the United States and returned to become a landed immigrant – a permanent resident of Canada.
And the moment that suggests I write about my Canadian experiences, is that on the way across the Strait de Juan Fuca, only an hour and a half trip, we were fortunate enough to see a pod of Orcas cross our path. Now you normally pay a wad of dollars to go out on a whale watching trip to see these guys with no guarantee of success, but here I was on a day-trip to get my passport stamped, and here were these fantastic creatures putting on a show. The captain of the ship, the MV Coho, gave us about 5 minutes’ warning of the meeting, and cut the engines as we approached, letting them pass by around us undisturbed. And our friend Lane Braden wrote on Facebook: “you guys are in orca territory!! The ones you will see around Vic are usually transient orcas, the kind that eat other mammals. Up the east coast of Vancouver Island, in the Johnstone Strait, off Telegraph Cove, are the northern resident orca pods, the other kind of orca, that eat only fish. Here’s the url for the research station that’s been up there for years, on Hanson Island. You can listen in, to dolphins, humpbacks, transient orcas, resident orcas when they are around: http://www.facebook.com/l/aae3b;www.orca-live.net/community/index.html. South of you, in the San Juan de Fuca Strait and further south, live the southern resident orcas!”
Anyhoo, I do believe in synchronicity. I had only just decided on that morning that I should bring my camera with me on the trip. I put up a composite photo as my Blipfoto entry for the day, and a gallery of photos on Facebook, and then Phil gave me another nudge about writing a piece for the website so…
Victoria Harbour
So, after having been associated with the village of Dalguise for most of my life, and after the last decade living in the parish of Dunkeld, I’ve relocated to Victoria at the southern tip of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, with my wife and daughters to help care for my father-in-law who has advanced Parkinson’s Disease. It is a pretty big adjustment for us, from über-rural setting to big city life. From having to make a 10 mile round-trip if we ran out of an essential item, to only a 10 minute walk to buy fresh at the corner store. All of a sudden, from knowing most of the people I met when I was out and about, I now know no-one, and no-one knows me. An almost surreal experience at times.
Canadians just love their country, by the way. Absolutely, totally, and utterly. And they are incredibly welcoming to new faces in their midst, and genuinely delighted to hear where we come from. I know we Scots are awfy proud of our country, and we’re generous hosts, but I have to say the Canadians have us beat. The Scots obviously loved to spread the gladness far and wide when this massive land was first explored and settled by immigrants, because just about everybody we meet here has some sort of connection to a Scottish ancestry. (I even spotted the surname of a young Asian girl as McDiramid the other evening – a slight mis-spell of the original surname, but another Scot at it again!) There are Canadian flags at every turn, and Canadians wherever you look. I even have a book on “How to be a Canadian” just to keep me right! For sure, eh?
Victoria is a hugely varied city full – no two buildings look the same, and it certainly lives up to its name of “Garden City” – you could spend days just wandering the streets enjoying all the fantastic gardens and trees. There is lots of space – streets and sidewalks are nice and wide. To me it is a very cosmopolitan city with people from virtually every ethnicity on the planet being represented here. EVERYONE is always courteous and polite including the beggars on the street, of whom there are many more than you might expect. Nothing is too much trouble for anyone, and this pervades throughout the city. I don’t think I have experienced an unpleasant response to any question I’ve asked since we arrived back in August, and you are always wished a “nice day” or a “great day.” None of the “service wi’ a girn” one receives all too often in the big cities in Scotland. It really helps make your day a good one!
Anyways, I realise that all of a sudden a brief note for the BAD website has turned into an essay, so I’d better fire it off and leave other topics for other entries. If there is anything you are intrigued about that I can answer, you can contact me via Phil Brammer, the webmaster, or post a comment here.
