Irresistible Nanaimo

Our lunch with our American visitor, whom I mentioned in my previous couple of posts, was illustrative of why Nanaimo is such a neat place to live.

We took him to the Thirsty Camel which, as the name suggests, serves Middle Eastern cuisine, and is my absolute fave in Nanaimo.

The restaurant was packed, and the five of us were occupying a table that could seat six. A woman came along and asked us if she could sit at the end of our table, since there was no other space for her. She promised to do her own thing and not disturb us. We said, "Sure. Go for it."

While she was sitting there, she was stuffing and addressing envelopes. We just carried on with our conversation. Each of us told our visitor what had drawn us to cohousing. As Sharon said, each of our reasons was quite complex, and these were concepts that were not that easy to convey in a short sound bite, on a website, or anything like that.

Some time after the woman who had shared our table had left, Susana noticed that there was a piece of paper at the woman's place. Susana thought it was something that the woman had forgotten, and almost felt embarrassed about reading it, but she did.

Then Susana said, "Hey, guys. Look at this." On the piece of paper, the woman had written, "Key words that I heard were .......," and she went on to list what she considered to be the most important nuggets from our conversation. Then she'd written, "For information about community, contact Dr. So And So at Such And Such University."

We said to our visitor, "This is one of the reasons we love living in Nanaimo. The people here are so awesome."

Our visitor, who was in discussions about the formation of a cohousing community back in his own city, said, "I want to tell folks back home what people here are like. Can I take that piece of paper to show them what I mean?"