This last weekend, my husband's oldest friends descended on our house and our fair city from the far reaches of the Lower Mainland. Whenever we get visitor's from out of town, we do a "let's pretend we keep a really clean house" clean-up of our house. It's not like were really dirty, it's just that my husband and I have full-time jobs, a busy toddler and we'd rather be sleeping than cleaning. In short, my family and I live in our house and a lot of the time, it looks pretty lived in.
When we get visitors from out of town, sometimes I wish I could do a bit of a spit/shine on the worst parts of Prince George. I love my city but there are parts of the city that I would gladly bulldoze down and let the forest reclaim it.
I love Prince George and I love our life here, but I still miss parts about living in a big city. My husband and I received a lot of ribbing for our decision to move away from Victoria and the greater Vancouver area and, I feel like that means I have to constantly justify the reasons for our move. It's likely that it's my own insecurity about moving from the Lower Mainland that makes me really look at Prince George with more critical eyes. Four years after we moved to Prince George, I still want our big city friends to understand why we live here and for them to say: "Hey, it's not too bad here."
To that effect, I have a list of demands for my city to make it more presentable for company:
1) Let's rebuild the downtown core from the ground up. Except for small pockets of rebuilt facades and heritage buildings, most of the empty store fronts are in aging, mouldly, strip-mall type buildings that are simply not salvageable (I'm talking to you, George St.).
2) Let's stop throwing garbage off the cutbanks. It's one of a few places in the city with an impressive view and it is horribly marred by garbage thrown by pigs in our city. I don't care how much it costs in stumpage fees at the landfill, use the landfill, not the land.
3) Can we please make it a priority to have a curbside recycling program? We are the largest community in B.C. that doesn't have a curbside recycling program and the very fact that we don't have one, makes us look like we are ignorant rednecks who don't care about the environment and like to throw garbage off cliffs.
But this is just me, feeling nervous and wanting my company to also like the city that I love.
