Vancouver, eh!

This past week had me traveling to beautiful Vancouver, Canada (eh, hoser!). The only problem was that instead of being the mild Pacific Northwest climate I was expecting, I got cold and snow – record breaking snow and cold. The strange thing was that the weather in Boston was unseasonably warm. Somehow the November weather for the two cities was reversed. My reason for being in Vancouver was training – my first official week with the consulting firm I joined.

I flew into Vancouver on Sunday evening during a 20 cm snowfall. Somehow my flight (from Denver) wasn’t delayed at all. I hopped in a cab and enjoyed a nice slippery ride through Vancouver to my hotel. The cabbie (one of the first I’ve ever seen anywhere in the world who spoke fluent English) noted several times that he was going home after this run and not dealing with any more snow. In keeping with Vancouver’s reputation as a “green” city, the cab was a Prius Hybrid. On the dash of the Prius there is a monitor that shows the flow of electricity around the car – I think. The graphics Toyota used weren’t terribly clear, but it was still fun to watch. I won’t be able to buy a Prius because I’m sure I would spend more time watching the animations on that screen than the road.

The company put all the trainees in the Marriot Pinnacle – a beautiful hotel. I had a room on the 17th floor with a huge window over looking some nearby office buildings. I also had a view of the movie shoot happening across the street from the hotel – well, part of it. The shoot was actually happening in an alley which I wasn’t able to see, but they had the street closed off and large lights, fans, fog machines, etc. going just outside the alley. The alley was all done up to look like a Chinatown area with Chinese signs all over it. The movie they were shooting was the sequel to the “Fantastic Four.” All of us kept our eyes peeled for Jessica Alba – to no avail.

I wish I could say I was able to walk around the city a bit, but our training started at 7:30am and went until we finished dinner around 8:30pm – then we had homework to do. It was a very busy week, but also a very good training to attend. Part of the new group to join the company included a world class Badminton player from the Canadian national team and a Russian guy who spent over a decade training Cosmonauts. All of a sudden my 15 months in Bulgaria seemed pretty boring.

In continuing with the theme of eat-sit-sleep-eat since I got back from Bulgaria, we had some excellent dinners at various establishments around the city. The selections included Japanese, East African and a whole lot of great beef. Dead cow …. Mmmm, mmm, good.

Friday noontime we all headed to the airport for early afternoon departures. The US Customs service has set up shop in Vancouver so people don’t have to go through customs when they get into the US. That was nice. In true US capitalist fashion you have to walk through a duty free shop to get to the passport control. Mind you, not next to a duty free shop – through it. Then when you get to the passport control area you have to fill out a landing card. Do they provide any tables to fill the landing cards out? Nope. There was a small table, but it had those little barrier things you find at airports around it. We asked the TSA woman if we could use the (currently unused) table and were told “no”. Why? Who knows. We ended up using a window ledge to fill out our cards and were on our way.

By the end of the week the system that dumped 20cm of snow on Vancouver had made it to Chicago. Guess where I was flying through coming home? Yup, Chicago. I don’t know if I’m just really lucky or if I’m a minor weather god, but again the flight into Chicago wasn’t delayed either. The system moved out of the area just an hour or so before our flight got in. Another guy in my training group was scheduled to be on the same flight to Chicago but travel on to Pennsylvania. However, his flight to PA from Chicago was cancelled so they rerouted him through Denver. A pat on the back to United for doing the best they could to find alternate flight for him.

Once in Chicago my flight was delayed for an hour which I though wasn’t too bad considering. Still, my already late flight (12:04am) was now getting in after 1am. Good thing I was still on West Coast time so it still seemed like 10pm and I didn’t wander out of the airport like a zombie. The flight into Boston was uneventful except that our gate was taken by some other plane. The pilot didn’t find this out until we were already into the gate area so he had to pull a tight 180 to get out. It was great listening to the control tower/pilot chatter about how good the pilot pulled off the 180 (it was quite good – I didn’t think a 757 could make such a tight turn). Continuing my good luck, my bag was the second one off the conveyor belt. Another exciting trip completed.

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