Author: Milan

In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. Between 2005 and 2007 I completed an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford. I worked for five years for the Canadian federal government, including completing the Accelerated Economist Training Program, and then completed a PhD in Political Science at the University of Toronto in 2023.

Apartment hunting

Having arrived safely in Ottawa, the first order of business is finding somewhere to live. A family friend has kindly given me a bit of an introduction to the city. On the basis of what I saw and where I will be working, Sandy Hill and Centretown are the bits of the city I plan to focus on.

Since I am only definitely going to be here for one year, I am looking for a furnished single bedroom apartment. Hopefully, some promising leads will develop before I start work on Monday. Being near interesting places is a big advantage; being near the buses I will need to use to cross this frozen city in the winter is essential.

[Update: 14 July 2007] As might have been expected for a task where I need to coordinate information, the apartment search is now on the wiki.

Moving again

Tomorrow, I am moving for the second major time in two weeks – to the staging location in Ottawa from which I will try to find an apartment. Within a few days, I should have a cell phone and some sense of how to navigate the city.

Choosing what to bring with me is tricky. At the minimum, I will be spending one year in Ottawa in a furnished apartment or a room in a shared house. At the maximum, it is conceivable that I will be there for many years and eventually living somewhere I furnish myself. It seems most sensible to begin on the assumption that the former possibility is the likely one, scaling up as necessary on the basis of trips back to Vancouver and helpful people who are coming to Ottawa and willing to act as couriers.

Gem of a city

Astrid Fritzsche and the setting sun

There may be no better way to appreciate the city of Vancouver than to have a sushi dinner in Kits and then walk eastwards along the waterfront, through the cool summer evening. As the sun sets behind the mountains of Vancouver Island, everything in the foreground becomes a silhouette. Then, as you walk east, the bright towers of the downtown core get outlined against the North Shore mountains.

The sea, the mountains, and the mild weather will all be acutely missed in Ottawa.

PS. Now that I am back where North America region DVDs can be purchased, I splurged and bought the Planet Earth series that I have been wanting for ages.

Guu

Dinner at Guu

Between the hike and the dinner tonight, this was definitely one of the best days in the past year. Many thanks to the seventeen people who showed up for our ten person reservation, to the cooking staff at Guu for making such tasty food, and to the serving staff for tolerating our peculiarities with very good humour. I am doubly lucky to have such an interesting collection of friends and to have been able to see so many during my brief time in Vancouver.

July snow fun

Milan Ilnyckyj, Neal Lantela, and Olenka Slywynska on Dam Mountain

On the way to Crown Mountain, we found ourselves standing on snow about two metres deep. My father was with us for the first part of the hike – going up the British Columbia Mountaineering Club (BCMC) trail to the Grouse Mountain chalet. After he turned back for work, we carried on along the Dam Mountain, Goat Mountain, Crown Mountain route. The whole top of Dam Mountain was covered with this snow, so Neal, my cousin, and I spent a very enjoyable hour sliding down it in our hiking boots, using flailing arms for stability.

In the end, we decided that climbing Crown without ice axes and crampons would be too dangerous. Even so, the hike was enormous fun. It was warm and sunny, but the snow had not turned to slush. As such, it presented familiar terrain in an altogether new way. I think it is fair to call today the most fun I have ever had hiking in the mountains close to Grouse. It was quintessentially British Columbian and exactly what I was hoping for when I planned a hike for today.

Cabin to mountaintops

Neal Lantela at Barrier Lake

Cabin Fever 3 has been enjoyably concluded. It was excellent to spend time with old friends, as well as meet a few new people. As always the food, company, conversation, and recreation were excellent. I will probably write more about it and link some of the photos when I have a bit more time.

For those interested in the hike I proposed earlier, we have decided upon Crown Mountain. We are meeting at 9:00am tomorrow (Monday) in the north parking lot of the Grouse Mountain Skyride. If you have any questions, call or email me before 8:00am. The hike is described in the post linked above.

Personal strata

At every time in the last six years, I have had a substantial collection of personal items stored in boxes somewhere other than where I was living. Generally, this has meant a closet full of big Tupperware containers, duct taped shut between visits.

When the chance or the need arises to dig through the stack, the result is a kind of auto-archeology. Things of persistent value tend to stay near the top of the stack, because they have been left there by past expeditions. Things near the bottom – rarely glimpsed – are likely photographs or letters from more than a decade in the past.

Today’s minor foray was motivated by a search for writable CDs for the Cabin Fever trip this weekend, so it was both superficial and unsuccessful.