Quick Trip down Memory Lane

"Life goes on...long after the thrill of living is gone"

The problem with being away from home for an extended period of time is that life actually does go on without you. No matter how much you live, you see, or you learn over the course of your trip, people at home just carry on with their lives. When you get back, all you want to do is talk about what you’ve done and how overwhelming things were while you were gone. Of course, many people are interested in what you have to say, but to most others it’s nothing new.

Since I’ve moved out, my old bedroom has been transformed into a storage facility soon-to-be workout room. The basement, which used to house all of my furniture, has been modified into a room full of chairs and my two ratty old couches have been replaced by one nice leather one and two lazy boy recliners. My TV is still the centre of attention in the entertainment unit, but the sound surround/home theatre stereo system I had has been emptied off the shelves and been replaced by nothing. My Playstation is now in its box and serves virtually no purpose. Heck, my bathroom has even taken on the role of primary wash centre!

Things I’ve missed, but not really known I missed:
- Looking left while crossing the road
- Being cold
- Vietnamese Subs
- Driving
- Having an alarm clock
- Dryer for clothes
- Properly heater and pressurized plumbing

Nostalgia, I suppose would be the best way to describe the week that has just passed. Snowboarding at Sunshine Village, where I pretty much grew up as both a skier and a snowboarder; Cowboys Nightclub: it’s “the most fun you can have with your boots on” and, of course, home of Thursday Night 25c Draft; 17th avenue SW, home of the Red Mile; Calgary Flames Hockey!; my old Isuzu Trooper; the list goes on, but most importantly friends and family.

Thanks to everyone who came to my surprise party and thanks to everyone who I’ve seen over the past week. This week is a short entry and since I am not in England, there is no new English cultural point to be discussed.

Moral of the story is: I’m headed back out of the country in about an hour. Rumour has it, Papa loves Mambo, so Las Vegas, here I come!

Trains, Planes and Automobiles

“Have you ever seen a real Eskimo?”

A couple weeks ago, I was up in a small city called Northampton. From London, it is no more than 45 minutes by train and I’ll admit, not as bad a town as one might expect. It has a nice little market in the town centre, they have a nice four level mall, plenty of small and franchised businesses and they even have a few McDonald’s locations. I DO understand that things cost less in a small town and maybe people don’t like the hustle and bustle of the big city. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with living in a town. After all, everyone needs a little place to call their own. Northamptonites, like residents of any other city in the world, take pride in their city. Nothing surprising. What I found absolutely outstanding, however, something that still blows my mind whenever I think about it, was the fact that many people had never been outside of the city. I’ll admit that it was my first time outside the greater London area since I had arrived, but I’ll reassure you that my own curiosity and sense of adventure was eating me up inside.

So, without any further adieu, this week’s English cultural topic:

TRAVEL

The british, I suppose are just like any other country’s people, the upbringing is to accept a multicultural society, they learn about the same world’s historic events and often when you go traveling, you’ll meet one. This is why it was so difficult for me to grasp the fact that people from a town less than an hour from London had never even been to London.
London is a HUGE. History, fashion, sites, sounds, big city life! It’s beyond me how people wouldn’t at least go in for the afternoon or something, especially with the reputation the brits have earned as world travelers. On the plane today, it’s about a 50/50 split between English and others. I guess there at least a few curious ones left after all.

Today is Sunday. Sure, I’m going home for a couple weeks. Sure, the party I went to last night was freekin unbelievable. No, I didn’t get to sleep in after a big night out. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t absolutely exhausted right now, but do you know what keeps me going?
I will have traveled over 8000 km today and I’m going to have seen the sunset in two different countries. As I write this sentence, I am somewhere over the atlantic chasing the daylight. When we took off from the airport in Glasgow, the sun was just going down, later on tonight, I’ll get to see it again.


Now, I’m not going to lie, traveling with a laptop does definitely makes life a great deal more enjoyable on the airplane, but the point of my bringing it along was not to complain about things that could have been better. But that’s kind of lame. Sure, maybe hospitality class is not all as hospitable as one might like, but don’t worry about it. That goes for life as well. I’m living my life. It seems like whenever I take a flight I just get the unceasing urge to write about the airplane, or air travel, or how packed it is, or how today I actually got a pretty decent window seat that doesn’t have the view obstructed by the wing, or how someone on the plane is wearing too much perfume, or whatever. I try to make clever comments based on the slogan of the airline, or complain about how much transfers to the airport cost, how slow the connection was in Scotland, how expensive the headsets are and how I’m always forced to buy a new one because I’m too stupid to just remember the many that I have at home. But I’ve pretty much covered it all in the past two sentences, so I’ll spare you the details.

The coolest part about travel for me is that I’m the one doing it. There is so much to learn in the world, but there is only so much you can learn from reading about it. So obviously for me, the value in traveling is learning. The difference is between actually experiencing something, rather than being told about it. In my travels, there have been cynics; there have been people who told me to stay in Canada figure things out and then head off, but there’s not adventure in that for me. My goal now, is to fill up my passport before it expires. I think most people get really bogged down in the routine, which, don’t get me wrong, can be nice. I’ve probably talked about this before, but I’m at a point in my life where everyone is getting settled into their lives and mine is still up in the air. Literally.

So no, I have never actually met an Eskimo face to face, but the fact is there is so much to see, so much to experience and so much to learn. Just remember that when you see a photo, someone had to be there with their camera.

I want to be that someone.

I'm dreaming of a...

...green/brown/grey/white Christmas?

Today, I had to wear the heaviest coat I brought with me to London. I’ve been told I look like a number of people over the past couple of months: Superman/Clark Kent; “the anything mix”; Ray from X-Factor; Fabregas from the Arsenal football club; the “guy from Canada who says ‘awesome’ like some Californian surfer guy”; and many more. Sometimes people even think that when I speak I’m Irish, but I think that’s just because they’re ignorant. However, the one thing I am NOT is a someone who gets cold easily. A person being cold on account of the outside temperature can only mean one of two things: i) you’re in the Arctic or the Antarctic or ii) it’s winter. Well, winter has finally arrived.

I was actually going to hold out addressing this topic, but upon further consideration, I have decided that today, a day that is one day past my self-imposed Sunday Post Deadline; I will give into fate and talk about what’s in the air. No, it’s not just pollution. “That” is this week’s English culture topic of the week:

CHRISTMAS

This past weekend marked the official kickoff to Christmas events in London. Christmas tree vendors began vending, the stores are now fully decorated, and because it is now just more than two weeks until the big day, people are becoming frantic. Finally, people are getting into the mix. Over this week and the next two weeks to come, thousands of British households will go into debt in order to finance their Christmas spending, just so they can, as the say, keep up with the Jones. This year’s hottest item? BOSE iPod docking station. Cool looking, but not overly practical.

Like every year though, it’s nice to see people get into the spirit of Christmas, buying for friends and family, setting up light displays in their yards, putting up ornaments and trees inside the house, hosting their very own “Office X-mas Factor”, rejoicing for peace on earth and mercy mild, singing Christmas carols in front of the fire… Unfortunately, I don’t have many friends, I don’t have a yard, setting up a tree would literally reduce my bedroom into a space slightly larger than a pudding can, and singing around a fire may become somewhat of a safety issue, considering my bedroom would already be mostly taken up by a Christmas tree.

Just like in Canada, retailers began advertising just after the end of Halloween (even though Halloween isn’t much of a big deal over here) and since the early goings of November there have been Christmas lights springing up all over the city in order to get into the festive spirit. I’ve actually been writing December in the month part of the date for the past 11 days, but the fact that it was actually December never really hit me until today.

Today, for some reason, it became December. The kind of winter I’m used to consists mostly of subzero temperatures and snow, a mix of sun and cloud and throw in the odd Chinook. Today in London, we had cloud cover, drizzle and 15mph winds. Why did it click today? I believe it’s because I’ll be home for a visit in one week. Seems like kind of a cop out, I know, but that’s fine. For as long as I can remember, the most important thing was to be with family for the big day. This year, I will continue the “tradition” of being with family for the holidays, but this year, I’ll be in hot and sunny, sin city of LAS VEGAS! I WAS dreaming of a white, Christmas, but I think I’ll spend this one in the desert…

Apparently Coca-Cola is credited with the image of Santa Claus that we have all come to know, cherish and recognize. To this day, many children depend on that same image to get them that bike, wagon or brand new Nintendo Wii.

So we understand why kids love it, but why to adults love Christmas so much? You go it. OPEN BAR! Although it’s apparently the norm and if as an employer you don’t do open bar you might as well all but kiss your staff goodbye (but not the good kind of mistletoe kiss you might expect - On the subject of mistletoe, I saw my very first real life mistletoe today. I know I was by myself, but still, it didn’t really make me want to kiss anyone – but I WOULD like to drink on someone else’s tab!)

They often say that eating too much isn’t healthy, but recent studies now suggest that a standard portion of Christmas dinner can actually be more detrimental to your health than originally though. In a normal meal consisting of turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing and mixed greens, you are also looking at ingesting something in the mix of arsenic, lead, aluminum, cadmium, organo-chlorine pesticides. These heavy metals can lead to serious side effects like migraines, allergies and high blood pressure and can even amount to serious illness like autism, multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s. In effect, eating a plate full of turkey will not only make you drowsy, it will make you dead. Plus, you’ll be fat.

When all’s finally said and done, no one really wants to be fat…except maybe Santa – whatever he might actually look like.

Are we there yet? Are we there yet?

“Do you guys want to get off here?”
“Yeah, let’s get off.”

In London, you can get around on public transport in a number of ways: buses, overland trains, or underground trains.
Of course, no one ever talks about how cool the overland trains are, because frankly, they aren’t. Buses, even though they often come double-deckered, aren’t anything new to anybody. So, when walking is just going to take too long you’re only left with one possible option, which is consequently this week’s English Cultural Topic of the Week:


THE TUBE

The London Underground, aka The Tube, is hands down the fastest way to get around in London – provided you don’t get off at the wrong stop and/or miss your connection by a couple of seconds. I won’t say how long it takes from place to place, but it’s an excellent underground network and let’s leave it at that.

After getting off the tube, when you blow your nose, the tissue is black. I’ve learned that – contrary to my original belief that London was just incredibly polluted and it was soot from the regular air – the black is actually brake shoe powder from the trains. (Which came as a slight relief, but I then realized that either way I will be subjected to it. Incredible? Not really. It’s actually pretty gross.

The thing that really blows me away is that you can actually get an Underground that goes ABOVE ground! Doesn’t happen in the centre, but further out (where I don’t like to go) it DOES happen.

The number of times I have smoked my head on the yellow help-lift-yourself-out-of-your-seat-or-keep-your-balance-while-the-train-is-packed-and-moving bar is ridiculous. The number is two (2). The point is, it just shouldn’t ever happen.
While in other cities, they call the underground train a subway or a metro. Here, a subway is a pathway that goes underneath a road, kind of like a crosswalk or a bridge, but it goes underground, “sub-way”. And just like any other city, they have some stops that are virtually useless. Mornington Crescent is one of those stations. The name means nothing to anyone, including most people who could potentially get off at this stop, so I won’t spend too much time dwelling on it, but the fact that exists is pretty much just a waste of time, resources and labour.

Upon arrival of every stop, the prerecorded lady comes on the intercom and gives directions specific to the next stop. This may be what other underground or overland lines you can access at this stop, details about what doors you can and cannot (dis)embark from, or what kind of attractions are near by that might be of interest to tourists. This is also the way I’ve been learning how to mimic the London british accent. Unfortunately, up until now I have only perfected one sentence. It doesn’t have much effect in my spelling it out, but imagine me doing an automated version of this: “This station is Tottenham Court Road. Change here for Central Line.” The lady kind of sounds like the computer onboard the Starship Enterprise or a lady version of the robot from Lost in Space, but we still get along pretty well.

This week’s post comes on a Sunday instead of a Wednesday/Thursday because I’m headed out of town this week for work and won’t have a handy computer at my disposal. I’m thinking about changing my post date to weekends, since I, like most people, have the most free time on weekends. Besides, the most interesting things happen on the weekends; that work thing doesn’t get in the way of fun.


I’ve also noticed that no one has seemed too curious about what I’ve done for work. What this means is that a) no one reads these damn things, which means that I just write to appease myself, b) no one cares what I do for work, or c) (which I hope for everyone’s sake is the real reason) that everyone has just already figured it out for themselves. The only guess I’ve had came from my little (but taller than me) step-sister who guessed I was a stripper. She gets an A for thinking-outside-the-box, but gets an F for being way off. I’ll take the average. Luckily for her, Cs get degrees. Well, I’ll let the cat out of the bag; I’m in sales. The group of people I work with is really cool and everyone is incredibly positive and really supportive, so the work environment is great. But seriously, with all of the sentimental stuff out of the way, do you want to know the best part about my job?

I can’t get there by bus, there’s no direct overland, I don't have a car and it’s too far to walk…so tomorrow, like every day, I get to take the Tube!