Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash
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Two Kiwis, one Singaporean and one Indian walk into a bar. No, it’s not the start of a joke. It’s a Sunday night in Vancouver, after a dragon boat practice that left our arms burning, our backs soaked and our spirits high.
What brought us to that table – pints in hand, shots arriving uninvited thanks to the overly generous bartender – was more than just a shared boat. It was the kind of connection that only happens when strangers from four corners of the globe land in a city that can feel both breathtaking and brutally isolating. For all its natural beauty, Vancouver is not an easy place to make friends. Or date, for that matter – but we’ll get to that.
We were the oddest crew: Brett, the Kiwi, was a former rugby player turned business coach. Built like a fridge, with a surprisingly soft heart and a boundless appetite for life and adventure that clung to him the way stories cling to legends; Jennie, the other Kiwi, could belay you up a cliff one day and paddle through whitewater the next. A full-time analyst, part-time adrenaline junkie and the closest thing we had to a team captain/camp counsellor; Divya, the Indian expat journalist, came from Dubai with a reporter’s curiosity and a dragon boater’s tenacity. If there’s a hidden gem restaurant in the city, she’s been there – twice. And me, the Singaporean, surgeon by day and a rower and outrigger canoeist by passion. I’d arrived in Canada thinking I’d miss hawker food the most. Turns out, it was the sense of rhythm and camaraderie in the water.
I felt old at 60 but stepping into a dragon boat changed my life
We met, unsurprisingly, at the False Creek dragon boat docks. The initial dynamic was cautious. We all had accents, came from sunshine-heavy places and were adjusting to Vancouver’s greyer tones, both in weather and social warmth. What started as hesitant small talk over paddle sizes and race schedules turned, somehow, into weekly pub sessions.
Dragon boating is a sport that strips people down to their essentials. In a boat, no one cares what you do for work or how long you’ve been in the country. You paddle in sync, suffer in sync and laugh in sync. That bleed-over into life off the water was almost inevitable. It wasn’t long before our post-practice pints led to weekend outings, group chats full of memes and late-night debates over the relative merits of Marmite versus kaya toast. We bonded over the challenges of living here – the $18 cocktails, the impossible rental market, the dating scene and the fact that making friends in Vancouver feels harder than finding an affordable apartment.
I’m a New Yorker getting used to living in Vancouver – one extra u at a time
Dating in Vancouver is … polite. Too polite. We’d all had our run-ins with “let’s go for a hike sometime” that never materialized. Someone once got ghosted mid-snowshoeing trail. Another downloaded every app, then rage-deleted them all. The third refused to date within the dragon boat community (“too much splashback if it ends badly”), while I decided that medical call schedules and dating apps do not mix.
But none of that mattered when we were together. Our friendship became our anchor in this foreign place. We weren’t just surviving Vancouver – we were building something of our own in it. A micro-community powered by bruised knuckles and an appreciation for the simple joy of being outdoors.
There was the night after the Concord Pacific Dragon Boat Festival, sunburnt and running on three hours’ sleep, when we ended up at an open-air EDM party by the waterfront. Covered in sweat and the remnants of race-day adrenaline, we danced as the sun dipped behind the skyline. That golden stretch of summer – when the city remembers it can be warm and carefree – was everything we’d been craving. We didn’t waste a single ray of it. If the sun was out, so were we: paddling in the morning, barbecues in the afternoon, biking around the seawall or just sitting on a dock sharing stories and snacks from four different continents.
We’re an odd bunch, really. Four immigrants with wildly different backgrounds. But we all came here searching for something – freedom, change, challenge, space. And we found it, not in the places we expected, but in each other.
Dragon boating gave us something we didn’t know we needed: a place to belong, a reason to stay and a rhythm to move forward by – together. Sometimes, that rhythm led straight to a bar, still in our wet gear, laughing too loudly. Four paddles. One table. Many more beers to come.
Matthew Seah now lives in Coventry, U.K.
