There I was on day 3, strolling on Cypress street towards an empty garden chair in the communal gardens (built on an old railway track, i.e. very singer/songwriter atmosphere), to ponder on the flats that I had just seen. Should I go for the bigger, more expensive one, which was not as cute, or for the one-bedroom under the roof? In the middle of that internal discussion, appeared an elderly lady in a vivid floral dress, wearing an enormous straw hat and underneath a quite desperate expression (covered in a truly thick layer of white suntan lotion). I didn’t think anything of it, until she started to purposefully stride towards me, asking if I had a phone. Honestly, my first thought was that it must be one of those schemes where they try to steal your phone in a creative way!
It turned out however, that she had locked herself out of her car, and wanted me to call road side assistance, so they could break it open. Of course, I felt for her, as that was definitely something that could happen to me (every day in fact, if I had a car). Standing there underneath the bushes, we made introductions and changed to speaking Spanish (way out of practice!). I learnt that she had been living in Vancouver the past 23 years, having had her patch in the communal garden about the same amount of time. Soon the conversation turned to her roses, which were attacked by some evil fungus (imagine wild hand gestures with shovel) and the remedies that she had already tried: water with vinegar, water with oil, water with sugar…honestly, I’m not making this up – I tried so hard not to laugh, as those poor roses must have felt like the next salad in the making…I promised to get my mother’s advice and would meet her back at Cypress street whenever I had news. While I was cobbling my words together in Spanish, she started chopping and plucking all sorts of leaves and herbs out of her wonderfully chaotic green bed as a ‘thank you’…I left with a big smile on my face, a warm feeling in my chest and an incredibly rich smelling bouquet, knowing that I had come to the right city 🙂
p.s. I went for the smaller flat under the roof..but more about the joy of moving later…
