Granville Street at Night - Photo by Jennifer Johnston

Rain. If you’ve lived in Vancouver for any length of time, you come to know it well. It’s so inherently a part of the city’s culture and history that some long time residents try not to notice it anymore, and newcomers seemed prepared.

Most people would be shocked to know that, on paper, if you use total rainfall as your measuring stick, Vancouver isn’t even in the top 30 rainiest cities in North America. In fact, we receive less than half the rain of Prince Rupert, Canada’s wettest town.

It’s only when you look at the weather in terms of how many days a year it rains, that the stats start to get alarming, still it’s not enough to get us into the upper echelon of wet.

It rains an average of 166 days a year in Vancouver, which is definitely high, but there are still over 30 locations in Canada with rainier days than us.

According to Environment Canada, Vancouver is the country’s ninth rainiest location, when you factor in all metrics, and twenty-day stretches of rain aren’t uncommon between November and March.

Every city has its positives and negatives, and eventually, one has to make a choice as to whether or not the good outweighs the bad, and that’s fine for those of us who have been here a while, like Douglas Arthurs, 52.

He grew up in Saskatchewan and has lived in Vancouver for over 25 years, and has his own way of coping with rain.

“I get the f**k out by Dec. 5,” says Arthurs with a laugh. “I leave every winter for the tropics for about three months.”

But funnily enough there are those that move from the tropics, or even New York, knowing full well what they’re getting into and how to get used to the constant drizzle.

Antoine Heaulme-Laverne, 27, a recent transplant who moved to Vancouver from Paris, says that the trade-off is worth it.

“I knew that it was going to rain a lot,” says Heaulme-Laverne, “so I was very much prepared for that. I also knew that winters are normally not too cold, and that was a big thing for me. I would rather suffer a lot of rain than have a really cold winter.”

He says that he was fully prepared for the rain when he got here, and feels that the mildness and relative warmth of the winters were big factors when deciding to live here.

Eyad Kinkar agrees with him, to a point. She’s a recent immigrant from Saudi Arabia, and although she knew what to expect based on reports from friends, she still found it difficult to get used to the weather.

“It is a huge difference [for me] because back home the weather is hot all year round, but in Vancouver, it is so cold! For me, it’s freezing!” she says. She adds that the biggest surprise coming here six months ago, was that the summers are so short. It was a big shock for someone coming from a country with sun year-round.

Another mostly sunny country is Brazil. Johnny Mendes, 31, came to Vancouver over seven years ago. His preconceptions regarding Canada’s weather were almost stereotypical, in that he was expecting the city to be covered in white when he arrived.

“I was under the impression that Canada was mainly snow,” he says.  He adds that the short but warm summers were a welcome surprise, though it took him quite a while to get used to the long periods of rain.

Although every newcomer to the city has different reactions to our long and wet winters, the one thing they all seem to agree on is that the pluses outweigh the minuses, and they chalk the rain up as being the price you pay for living in one of the world’s most beautiful and greenest cities.

“It does rain a lot,” says Heaulme-Laverne, “but trees and plants everywhere more than compensate for it.”

And, if that is still not enough, Arthur has one more way of coping with the endless rain that falls for over 10 months of the year in Vancouver.

“On a rainy day, which are many, I purposely flirt with people in order to keep my spirits up and hopefully land a date.”