Moving to Nanaimo in June!

[ains23]

I have to say I dont think I will miss the big city atmosphere - we are about and hour away from London and have hardly been there! If we do choose to visit Vancouver at least we can make the most of it as it is further away. There is so much to see and do I am not fussed about not being on its doorstep!

[Soup Dragon]

I have to say I dont think I will miss the big city atmosphere - we are about and hour away from London and have hardly been there! If we do choose to visit Vancouver at least we can make the most of it as it is further away. There is so much to see and do I am not fussed about not being on its doorstep!

An hour outside of London? ... we came here from Bristol UK for the weirdest reason ... my Mum's name is Maureen, which always gets shortened to Moe & my kids call her Nanny-Moe, Soooo we saw this place on a map & said why don't we give that place a go ~ it's called Nanaimo! (Nannymoe )

Four & a half years later we are still here

[ains23]

An hour outside of London? ... we came here from Bristol UK for the weirdest reason ... my Mum's name is Maureen, which always gets shortened to Moe & my kids call her Nanny-Moe, Soooo we saw this place on a map & said why don't we give that place a go ~ it's called Nanaimo! (Nannymoe )

Four & a half years later we are still here

This is brilliant!! What a genius idea...Brave one too! ....Fate......It was all meant to be LOL!

[ains23]

Well, an hour by train.........Peterborough. Wont miss the place.......Its not my home - moved here from Scotland!

[RyanCoffey]

I'm in a similar boat myself. My mom lived in the UK for a few years and brought some Brit back with her who later turned out to be my dad.

Yeah, Crow and Gate. I sometimes take various British friends there who say something like "Wow, it's just like a real English pub... but cleaner!" There's also a gourmet food store in town owned by a Scot where you can find lots of things from home be it teas, jams, irn bru, scotch pies or jaffa cakes etc. It's called McClean's Specialty Foods.

[Wyatt Earp]

yes, the crow is very nice but for a quick lunch just visit the Grannery.

[Nostradama]

checking in. I don't care that other countries believe that they are "the greatest" and masters of the known universe, Canada is the best country in the world, IMHO. Bringing your children to Canada is the greatest gift you can ever give them.

I'm an ex-pat one who will never go back, and whose parents never did, either. My Mom and I spent our first night in Canada in a Montreal hotel room while my Dad scored a scalped ticket to a Montreal Canadiens' game, and the die was set. (If you can sit out a three-day revolution in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in an underground public toilet, you can manage pretty well anything, pretty well anywhere.)

I was born in London (I believe--whole other story, TMI), as were my parents, and if someone were to know the Brit class system, it was a strange marriage. My father was born a Cockney, could use his Cockney accent, my mother wasn't, and had what the Brits call a "cut glass" ("posh") accent. When she spoke, it was like listening to the Queen of England.

If pushed, I can flip into either accent. There are only two other Cockneys that I've ever met in Canada--one of them the father of a student. Five words into his first sentence, I interrupted and said "East Inja Dock Road, I yam. Whudda 'bout you?"

My parents were determined that I was going to be absolutely Canadian. If I pronounced a word with a Cockney accent (like dropping an "h" at the beginning of a word, saying "I'm 'appy" instead of "I'm happy", my mother had a supply of cardboard-cut "H's" in her "pinny" pocket (another forbidden word, it's "apron") and she'd drop it on the floor, I'd have to pick it up and pronounce the word correctly.

My Dad had lost his Cockney accent (but trotted it out on occasion), since he travelled world-wide; my mother never lost her "posh" accent--she only travelled Europe and travelled less. When they retired and began spending their winters in Alabama, my Dad got treated pretty badly until people realized he was a Canadian, not a Bostonian, because he sounded like John, Robert, or Ted Kennedy. It wasn't that people hated the Kennedys--they didn't, they basically worshipped them--it was that they generally hated US north-easterners. Once they discovered my Dad was a Canadian, it was red carpet treatment the whole way.

The funniest thing was that after their return from their first trip, ending in Nanaimo, I took my Mom shopping, and she was visibly uncomfortable and upset. Gulf Shores, Alabama, where they'd been for about five months, was at the time 97% African-American, and she was uncomfortable around what she called "all these white folks." My father, the absolute atheist, and my mother, after being invited, regularly attended Sunday services and church suppers at one of the local African-American churches. He went for the great music and the great food.

Saddest thing from the first trip south, changing my father's life forever and certainly forming mine: a young sailor off a Brit ship, he stood in a crowd of several hundred people in Biloxi, Mississippi, and watched the lynching of a young African-American man, knowing that there was nothing he could do. So he took my mother to the approximate spot where the lynching took place (picked the front of a post office as being as close as he could get), laid flowers there, and stood on the sidewalk crying. An unknown young man who is, certainly unknown to his generations-later family, still remembered about ninety years on, in Nanaimo, British Columbia.

No doubt the reason why when I phoned my father from the Vancouver Police Department lock-up in about 1961, after organizing a demonstration when a restaurant in downtown Vancouver refused service to me and a girl I grew up with because she was native**, his first word was "Congratulations !" Followed by "Do anything you can do to get them to charge you. That's publicity. You need publicity."

**This is not meant to be insulting to you or to anyone else. Many people on this forum know that I was long-term married to a Canadian native, now dead. The term "Indian" is definitely not used here
to describe the aboriginal peoples, now referred to as native, aboriginal peoples or nations, indigenous peoples, etc. But if you were to use the term "Indian" referring to a native person, it would be considered insulting and racist. Attitudes and opinions on both sides of the issue are changing rapidly and, with few exceptions, for the better. And the term "Asian" here is used to refer to people of Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, etc., descent, if it's used at all. I believe that in the UK it's used to refer to people of Indian sub-continent descent. This may be unnecessary information, but I can't really pinpoint when changes began, what happened when, but some things will have changed since your husband was here.

If there's anything at all I can do to help you out, please let me know. There are others here on the forum who are willing to drop anything at any time to help someone else out. Another forumite, Stanley Strazza, stands out in that department. Need help? Need a pick-up (truck)? "Stan the Man." He offered again, just this week, to help out a former student of mine whose husband is working one province over (Alberta) in our "oil patch" (Canada's major oil wells.)

I would be absolutely delighted to take you and your kids (kids here, not kiddies) to your first hockey game. Sure, our local hockey team isn't in the National Hockey League, they didn't do too well this season, but we still love them, and hockey games are genuinely Canadian and mostly family events. You won't see the kind of "rugger bugger" behaviour at a hockey game here that might be seen in the UK. It would be a trip down memory lane for me. That's a firm offer.

[PureChiropractic]

We just moved here from England in November. Spent the last 8 years in London. Nanaimo is an awesome place. Great for children. You'll love it!

http://www.purechiro.ca

[ains23]

Nostradama....amazing story and thank you for sharing it. With every posting on here I feel more and more closer to Nanaimo and the people there who call it home.

I absolutely, truly cannot wait to be a part of the community. Thankfully, my boys are super excited too! I know that even if I wasnt keen to move (which is polar opposite to how I feel!) I know this is the right move for my children and I hope they can look back at this move and be truly thankful we did it. They will always be British and have the passports to return if they so wish. Though.....I have a feeling they may not have that desire

Thank you all for being so welcoming!

[Nostradama]

is part of Canadian life, I think, from the early days of pioneering and in places the size of Nanaimo, at least, it hasn't been lost. And then, of course, as one of our former Prime Ministers said "We live next to a sleeping giant." So we stick together and help each other.