I'm wide awake at 6am this morning. Maybe it's because of the excitement of our first home viewing at 10am, or perhaps it's because I've still not adjusted to pacific time just yet I'm not too sure.
 
Yesterday morning we went to the ICBC office (DVLA equivant) to get a copy of roadsense which is like the highway code but a bit more in depth than what you get back home. We also used this to double check that our research was right in terms of our eligibility to drive out here. At the moment we can drive for 3 months on our UK licence but we'll need to take a BC driving test before the 3 month grace period expires. Lou is already feeling confident about driving here, I have to admit I find it a little bit intimidating myself but I'm hoping that feeling will go once I've had a few hours experience. We've not began to look at buying a car yet, except for the occasional glance on craigslist, and will wait until we've got a home sorted first.
 
Late yesterday morning we went back into downtown and went to the Service Canada office with all our documents to get our SIN number (national insurance / social security equivalent). There computers were down (no, I didn't offer to fix them!) so we had to go back after an hour but once we did we were seen to straight away and walked out with the numbers after about 10 minutes. Now that Lou had her SIN we went back to future shop and she got accepted successfully for a phone contract too (though we have to wait for the iPhone stock to arrive). It will be great once we both have phones, we might actually be prepared to walk somewhere without each other! We were going to go for a PAYG sim initally but the deals are that crap we'd have spent a fortune going down that route.
 
 In the afternoon we walked around a few neighborhoods that we had spotted whist riding the skytrain and that we liked the look of, taking numbers of places and ringing potential landlords as we found them. We have a viewing set up for a townhouse at 10am and we are going to try and book a few more for the afternoon too (in the Collingwood / Patterson) area.
 
In the evening we went out for our first proper meal (we'd been either too full or too tired in the 2 previous days). We went to the Cactus Club Cafe about two blocks away from the hotel. I wasn't expecting anything special as the name of the place made me imagine something else but as we got closer to it we realized it actually looked really nice. I had a great rack of ribs with vegetables (oh vegetables, I've never missed you so much!) and Lou had one of her favorites chicken fajitas. I also got to have my first beer since moving here, I went for the Granville Island Honey Lager (which I'd remembered well from our research trip in 2005) and it went down a treat - maybe a bit too easy!