Thursday, February 17, 2005

Vancouver, the Shiny City

by Suw on February 17, 2005

Arrived in Vancouver last night, tired and dying for sleep, yet I managed to say awake long enough to meet up with Jon and his partner Raman, with whom I am staying. Theirs is a lovely flat close into the centre of Vancouver.
Jon took me on a whistlestop tour of the city this morning, which was great. It's all so new and shiny! And clean! And the weather is more clement than I had expected. Today is sunny and warm, and very conducive to good impressions.
The next three days are filled with bloggie goodness, so I'm afraid that in a nasty stab of irony, blogging here will be light despite the fact that I'll have more to blog about than usual.

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Wuwzy Suwzy in The City

by Suw on February 17, 2005

Whooa, I feel so woozy right now. I'm sitting in a bar at SFO airport and I'm so tired that I feel totally light-headed and all spinny-roundy, despite having not touched a drop of anything more interesting than Sprite. Waiting for my flight up to Vancouver, which starts to board in about and hour and a quarter.
Had a great flight over from London though. Completely unexpectedly, I bumped into Dave NTK Green in the departures lounge, thus finding myself with an instant travelling companion. He was coming over to visit family, so it was a genuine coincidence, not the sort of 'going to the same conference' coincidence that I had with meeting Lee Bryant on the plane to Vienna last year.
The flight was great fun. Instead of ten hours of getting increasingly bored, we had some good conversations, and the clear weather meant we spent a lot of time looking out of windows at the astounding terrain beneath us.
The glaciers in Greenland, and the mountains, were something else entirely, and then all the flat land of Canada, divided up in to perfect squares which stretched in one direction as far as you could see (which from 37,000 ft is a bloody long way). The mountains on the other side were equally amazing, with some beautiful glacial valleys, but also one with the most wonderful meandering river, oxbow lakes picked out in white.
Then, flying down over Washington state, we were treated to probably the most exciting view I've ever seen – volcanos! Real proper ones! That look like volcanos! (Remember I was a geologist once – these things excite me.)
I tried to pick out which one was Mt St Helens, but I think I probably got it wrong. The only one that I could recognise for sure was Crater Lake, which was an astounding sight, it's cliffs picked out by the snow. They were all beautiful though and it was just wonderful to see them.
Anyway, now I'm sitting here, on a crappy T-Mobile daypass that keep flaking out on me. I can't wait to get on the next plane so I can go to sleep. It's 4pm here, which means it's midnight at home, but it feels more like 5am. Of course, it will be 5am GMT by the time I get to a bed. Can't wait.
Added: Oh, and I meant to say, there were their weird circular fields all over the place, which perplexed me mightily until we figured out they must have been irrigated by a rotating arm thingie.
And I watched Garden State and it was a fantastic film. I loved it. Zach Braff is really very good. And cute. Which surprised me cos I didn't think he was. But he is.
Oh, and T-Mobile really are shite.

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