I'm sitting in the Vancouver airport, trying to quickly inhale a draught and a couple shots before a flight to Montreal, which boards in fourteen minutes. I was going to do a quick Facebook status update, something generic like "today was hectic" and then I figured that something that generic didn't tell a story. And since I'm a fast typist, and bored, let me tell you about a random day in the life of Scooter, in excruciating detail ...
Background: I just finished a tree planting contract in Alberta yesterday. So today was my "in transit" day on my way back to the East Coast. The past week was interesting - 80 km/hr winds, crazy ranchers, pre-daylight safety meetings every morning, eating gas station salads for a week, and I may have even run into KD Lang in town.
4am: Up early to hit the road from Consort, Alberta (beside the Saskatchewan border). Side note about Consort - you know how some towns have creative and uplifting slogans like "our people are our best asset"? Consort's is "really rural." No kidding, it's on the sign coming into town, which also says that the town's population is 679. I didn't see that many people though.
6am: Quick stop at a Tim Hortons. Tried their soup with bun. The bun was amazing. I went up to ask how much it would cost to buy another. Fifty cents. I was tempted to buy twelve, to see if I'd get a baker's dozen, but I only had $5.00 in change left. Besides, the last thing that I needed for today was a distended belly. The steering wheel on my truck wasn't adjustable.
7am: Had to pull over to put pants on. I was driving the 5-ton, and the heater was broken, and a couple hours of seeing my own breath in the cab was too much to take. Mental note: always wear pants in October before the sun comes up.
9am: Just past Calgary, heading to a nursery to drop off the truckload of flat garbage tree boxes for recycling. That took about 45 minutes. The nursery probably didn't recycle them, probably just burned them for heat, but who am I to be hypocritical?
2pm: Saw a coyote, and shortly afterwards, two wolves.
3pm: Saw what I think might have been a blue heron, but not positive.
4pm: Lots of domestic llamas and alpacas on the farms that I've been driving by.
4:15pm: Saw three brilliant white mountain goats. Those things are pretty odd-looking (although not as odd as an alpaca, come to think of it). Weather getting nasty - I hope they don't blow off the cliff.
4:30pm: Blizzard in the Rockies. Snow sucks in early October.
5pm: Just before Jasper, saw about eighteen elk. I also saw a retarded tourist, decked out in full camo gear, taking photos of the elk with a tripod and a telephoto lens that was also camo'd, who was taking his pictures from BEHIND a big white suburban. Idiot! Does he not realize that the camo gear does not help if there is already a two ton white gas-guzzler hiding him? I was tempted to pull over and go stampede the elk off into the bushes, or some other tom-foolery, but I was on a tight schedule.
8pm: Arrived in Prince George, had a few minutes to drop off my truck at the office and empty the quad and all of my other gear out of it, then bolted for the airport.
8:44pm: Arrived at check-in, one minute before my flight started to board. And by the way, there was a time change in there, so this was actually about sixteen hours on the road so far. Cutting it close, but really, they even let me check my back-pack, so I guess I still had several minutes to spare before I would have missed the flight.
By the way, I wasn't alone in this whirlwind tour. There were seven of us in a convoy of five trucks making the voyage - myself, Jackie, Nate, Kyla, Al, Matt, and Dana.
Anyway, I'd like to embellish this post with a lot more of the fun details along the way, but I have one minute to finish my drinks and run to gate C38 for boarding.
PS: God bless YVR - best airport in the world for free internet, lots of sushi shops, and one of the cleanest airports that I've ever been in.
PPS: Next stop, Montreal, then Moncton. Trying to make it to Sackville by Saturday afternoon so I don't miss my cooking shift at the Olive Branch at supper, and then my bartending shift at the Pub on Saturday night. Can't miss the Pub on a Saturday night! Kati, if you read this, please have a "voldka-bomb" (or four?) ready at 11pm ...
Showing posts with label montreal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label montreal. Show all posts
Saturday, October 03, 2009
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Osaka, Japan
I flew to Osaka (Japan) this past weekend for a show. Although I’ve travelled pretty extensively before, this is my first time in Asia, so it’s been a great adventure so far.
I started by trying to fly to San Francisco for a visit on Wednesday night. Unfortunately, I flew through Montreal and then Chicago. I got to Chicago with no problems, but when I arrived there, I found out that there had been a huge snowstorm there the previous day, which had cancelled over a thousand flights. It was really nice outside at the time, with very little snow on the ground, so I didn’t really think that there were going to be any problems. However, when I got onto the plane, the airline eventually said that they couldn’t fly us to San Francisco because there were no pilots left in the airport – the pilots for our flight had been diverted to fly another plane earlier, to help catch up on the backlog of stranded passengers.
This didn’t seem like it would be a problem – they said that they were going to fly in a different crew from New York to take our plane to San Francisco, so the delay would only be a few hours. However, by this time, the storm had moved so it was over New York, which meant that it took a couple hours longer than expected for that crew to get out of LaGuardia. By the time they arrived in Chicago, the airline decided that those pilots couldn’t take our plane to San Francisco, because it would put them over their daily flight time limit. Our entire flight ended up getting cancelled, which was a disaster because that put all of us into the huge pool of people waiting to fly stand-by. I then ended up getting bumped off or passed over for the next four flights to San Francisco, as the airline tried to slowly catch up on the backlog.
In the end, I did get to San Francisco, but not until after midnight (about twelve hours later than expected). I was a little disappointed by that, because that was the stop on the trip that I was looking forward to the most. However, on a positive note, it was the one night on the trip where I could mostly easily deal with not showing up. Hopefully I’ll be able to reschedule for a visit later this spring, or maybe right after the summer ends.
The rest of the trip went smoothly, and the flights to Vancouver and then Japan were uneventful. We crossed the International Date Line, so it suddenly became Friday afternoon instead of Thursday afternoon. I was a bit nervous getting into the airport because my passport was only valid for two more months and Japan requires a foreigner’s passport to be valid for six months from the time of arrival. However, I had the itinerary to prove that I had a flight already booked to leave the country a week later, so that didn’t turn out to be a problem. Dan Elliot from the Oasis Lounge picked me up at the airport, and took me directly to his club, where I started to orient myself to the Japanese culture. A few hours later, a friend of mine (Ian Warney) showed up. Ian is a DJ and is living in Osaka teaching English. We went out for a night on the town, and I met a bunch of people that evening.
On Saturday, I spent the day touring around Osaka, and taking photos. That evening, I played at Oasis, which turned out to be a very fun night. Ian found me again on Sunday night and we went out for more sightseeing, and then we ate at a nice restaurant in a skyscraper overlooking Osaka.
So far, Japan has been great. There are far fewer foreigners here than I had imagined, but that’s about the only real surprise. The only big challenge so far has been trying to figure out the subway system. I’ve been on subways all around the world (London, New York, Paris, Moscow, and a ton of other smaller cities) but the Osaka subway has been the most confusing that I’ve seen, by far. The fare varies depending on how far you are going, and you have to buy a ticket getting on, then electronic gates scan it as you leave your destination station and don’t let you out if you didn’t pay the right fare. If you didn’t pay enough, you have to go back to another machine and do a “fare adjust” on the ticket. The Osaka (and Toyko) subway systems are not one large system, but instead are a whole bunch of separate lines run by different companies, so transfers can get complicated with ticket changes. Finally, there are very few signs in English, to make things even more confusing. However, after a few days, it was starting to make sense to me. Some of the stations are incredibly busy though – there is one station which has an average of three MILLION people per day passing through it. That’s pretty impressive, considering that the subways shut down at 12:30am and don’t start again until 5:30am.
A few other interesting notes so far:
- The cities are very clean compared to North American cities.
- There is apparently very, very little crime in Japan, and people feel completely safe and comfortable walking around anywhere in the cities.
- I have only seen a few children in the entire time I’ve been here – the Japanese must hide them away somewhere.
- I thought that I might get away with not running into anyone I knew during my visit, but on Sunday night a friend who had gone to university (Kyohei) saw me downtown and luckily had the time to spend an hour or so touring with us. That was an interesting coincidence, considering that Osaka is pretty big (nine million people, I think).
- There are far fewer Western chains than I had expected (lots of Starbucks & MacDonald’s and KFC, but that’s about it).
- A small but noticeable percentage of the population wear face masks in public and while working, either to limit the spread of diseases, or to protect them from smog & allergies.
- The amount of seafood is astounding – it is available everywhere, even as snack food in convenience stores.
Needless to say, I’ve been able to take a ton of interesting photos so far. I’ve got two photo pages up on my website now from the Osaka portion of my trip, and I’ve tried to add many more observations about Japan in the captions to the photos. Here is a link to the Osaka photo pages:
http://www.djbolivia.ca/photos_osaka2007a.html
After I left Osaka on Monday morning, I had three days scheduled in Tokyo, so I’ll write more about that part of the trip in a few days.
I started by trying to fly to San Francisco for a visit on Wednesday night. Unfortunately, I flew through Montreal and then Chicago. I got to Chicago with no problems, but when I arrived there, I found out that there had been a huge snowstorm there the previous day, which had cancelled over a thousand flights. It was really nice outside at the time, with very little snow on the ground, so I didn’t really think that there were going to be any problems. However, when I got onto the plane, the airline eventually said that they couldn’t fly us to San Francisco because there were no pilots left in the airport – the pilots for our flight had been diverted to fly another plane earlier, to help catch up on the backlog of stranded passengers.
This didn’t seem like it would be a problem – they said that they were going to fly in a different crew from New York to take our plane to San Francisco, so the delay would only be a few hours. However, by this time, the storm had moved so it was over New York, which meant that it took a couple hours longer than expected for that crew to get out of LaGuardia. By the time they arrived in Chicago, the airline decided that those pilots couldn’t take our plane to San Francisco, because it would put them over their daily flight time limit. Our entire flight ended up getting cancelled, which was a disaster because that put all of us into the huge pool of people waiting to fly stand-by. I then ended up getting bumped off or passed over for the next four flights to San Francisco, as the airline tried to slowly catch up on the backlog.
In the end, I did get to San Francisco, but not until after midnight (about twelve hours later than expected). I was a little disappointed by that, because that was the stop on the trip that I was looking forward to the most. However, on a positive note, it was the one night on the trip where I could mostly easily deal with not showing up. Hopefully I’ll be able to reschedule for a visit later this spring, or maybe right after the summer ends.
The rest of the trip went smoothly, and the flights to Vancouver and then Japan were uneventful. We crossed the International Date Line, so it suddenly became Friday afternoon instead of Thursday afternoon. I was a bit nervous getting into the airport because my passport was only valid for two more months and Japan requires a foreigner’s passport to be valid for six months from the time of arrival. However, I had the itinerary to prove that I had a flight already booked to leave the country a week later, so that didn’t turn out to be a problem. Dan Elliot from the Oasis Lounge picked me up at the airport, and took me directly to his club, where I started to orient myself to the Japanese culture. A few hours later, a friend of mine (Ian Warney) showed up. Ian is a DJ and is living in Osaka teaching English. We went out for a night on the town, and I met a bunch of people that evening.
On Saturday, I spent the day touring around Osaka, and taking photos. That evening, I played at Oasis, which turned out to be a very fun night. Ian found me again on Sunday night and we went out for more sightseeing, and then we ate at a nice restaurant in a skyscraper overlooking Osaka.
So far, Japan has been great. There are far fewer foreigners here than I had imagined, but that’s about the only real surprise. The only big challenge so far has been trying to figure out the subway system. I’ve been on subways all around the world (London, New York, Paris, Moscow, and a ton of other smaller cities) but the Osaka subway has been the most confusing that I’ve seen, by far. The fare varies depending on how far you are going, and you have to buy a ticket getting on, then electronic gates scan it as you leave your destination station and don’t let you out if you didn’t pay the right fare. If you didn’t pay enough, you have to go back to another machine and do a “fare adjust” on the ticket. The Osaka (and Toyko) subway systems are not one large system, but instead are a whole bunch of separate lines run by different companies, so transfers can get complicated with ticket changes. Finally, there are very few signs in English, to make things even more confusing. However, after a few days, it was starting to make sense to me. Some of the stations are incredibly busy though – there is one station which has an average of three MILLION people per day passing through it. That’s pretty impressive, considering that the subways shut down at 12:30am and don’t start again until 5:30am.
A few other interesting notes so far:
- The cities are very clean compared to North American cities.
- There is apparently very, very little crime in Japan, and people feel completely safe and comfortable walking around anywhere in the cities.
- I have only seen a few children in the entire time I’ve been here – the Japanese must hide them away somewhere.
- I thought that I might get away with not running into anyone I knew during my visit, but on Sunday night a friend who had gone to university (Kyohei) saw me downtown and luckily had the time to spend an hour or so touring with us. That was an interesting coincidence, considering that Osaka is pretty big (nine million people, I think).
- There are far fewer Western chains than I had expected (lots of Starbucks & MacDonald’s and KFC, but that’s about it).
- A small but noticeable percentage of the population wear face masks in public and while working, either to limit the spread of diseases, or to protect them from smog & allergies.
- The amount of seafood is astounding – it is available everywhere, even as snack food in convenience stores.
Needless to say, I’ve been able to take a ton of interesting photos so far. I’ve got two photo pages up on my website now from the Osaka portion of my trip, and I’ve tried to add many more observations about Japan in the captions to the photos. Here is a link to the Osaka photo pages:
http://www.djbolivia.ca/photos_osaka2007a.html
After I left Osaka on Monday morning, I had three days scheduled in Tokyo, so I’ll write more about that part of the trip in a few days.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
New York City
I just got back from a weekend in New York City. I went down to visit a friend of mine, Polly, who works in Research at Mount Sinai. I had been asking her questions a few weeks ago about a club called Pacha, and she suggested that I come down and see it myself. We figured that the 27th/28th would be the best weekend for me to visit, and ironically, it turned out that Gabriel & Dresden were playing at Pacha on Friday night. Small world.
I got to the airport on Friday afternoon, and since Polly was at work until 5pm, I just hung out in the airport for a few hours, listening to music and doing some work. That's when the next coincidence happened - I ran into Gabriel & Dresden at Laguardia. I talked to them for a few minutes, then headed downtown shortly afterwards.
I met up with Polly and the first thing we did was to get some alcohol for the weekend. After that, we ordered sushi for dinner, then went out to a pizza place to meet up with one of her friends. Later that evening, we eventually we made our way to Pacha. Pacha was a decent sized club - it had four levels, and I would say that it probably held about 800 people, as a guess. I'm not sure, but I think that the cover charge for regular guests off the street was $30. Drinks were $9 for bar shots like rum, and $7 for beer, so it was quite a bit more expensive than most Canadian bars, but not out of line for a big club like that. The lineup at the coat check was huge, which I laughed at because I didn't bring a coat. Of course, being a bar manager myself, I spent quite a bit of time looking at the logistics and operations of the club. I was pretty surprised to see that they had (I think) six bartenders working at each of the two main bars. My place would have two bartenders, or sometimes three, for the same volume of alcohol that was being served at each bar. But at least those bartenders looked a lot more relaxed that we are when we're serving.
Needless to say, the lighting systems were incredible, and the sound was decent throughout the entire club, not just on the dance floor. Gabriel & Dresden played from about midnight to 5am (I think the bars stop serving alcohol at 4am, but then they can start again at 8am). I was talking to Josh for a bit up in the DJ booth during his set, and they looked like they were really having fun playing that night. Their set was quite a bit different than when they had played in Boston - to me, both nights sounded great, but this set sounded more tailored to a dance club crowd, with more vocal tracks and mainstream tracks, whereas at Rise it had seemed more like a set for an afterhours club crowd (not surprisingly).
On Saturday afternoon, Polly took me for a partial tour, including Ground Zero, the ferry to Staten Island, Wall Street, and around other parts of Manhatten. Later in the evening, we went to a place called Crocodile NYC. This bar was insane. It had a crowd about the same size as my bar on a Saturday night (250 people), but it was less than a third the size. It was absolutely impossible to move around, or to get drinks quickly. To make things even more interesting, they gave out a free pizza with every beer, so for $20, we eventually got four large glasses of beer (two Stella & two Guiness, I think) plus three 12-inch cheese pizzas. It was a minor fight for me to finish the two beer and two pizzas, but I managed eventually, and was hungry for more. The bar was ridiculously warm, probably partly due to the crowds and partly due to the 700-degree pizza ovens in the back of the bar. Anyway, it was a pretty neat place, and obviously a lot of other people thought the same thing, considering the crowds.
After Crocodile, we went to a venue called Shelter, which was more of an after-hours type of club than Pacha had been, although they did serve alcohol. Cover was $25, bar shots were $8, and beer was $6. There were a whole bunch of good DJ's and producers performing that night, including D:Fuse, D-Formation (I used a couple of his tracks on my last mix), and Tone Depth (from Montreal). There was also another DJ who I had never heard of before, Chloe Harris. I was quite impressed by her set, so it was good to learn about her. The lighting system upstairs at Shelter was pretty impressive too. I wish that I'd been able to get some decent photos, but it wasn't possible with my camera.
On Sunday, we went for Chinese food in the afternoon, then did some more touring after dinner. We met a couple of my old friends from university in front of Virgin Records in Times Square, and we went up to the Marriot Marquis for drinks with them. After that, Polly took me to a fantastic Mexican restaurant for dinner. I've eaten Mexican food in a lot of places (including Mexico), but this was definitely some of the best that I've had. Of course, I can't remember the name of the restaurant, but I'm not going to forget the food.
I have photos from the trip on this page:
http://www.djbolivia.ca/photos_newyork2007a.html
The only sad part about the weekend was that there was so much more to see that I didn't have time for, so I'll have to go back as soon as I get a chance ...
I got to the airport on Friday afternoon, and since Polly was at work until 5pm, I just hung out in the airport for a few hours, listening to music and doing some work. That's when the next coincidence happened - I ran into Gabriel & Dresden at Laguardia. I talked to them for a few minutes, then headed downtown shortly afterwards.
I met up with Polly and the first thing we did was to get some alcohol for the weekend. After that, we ordered sushi for dinner, then went out to a pizza place to meet up with one of her friends. Later that evening, we eventually we made our way to Pacha. Pacha was a decent sized club - it had four levels, and I would say that it probably held about 800 people, as a guess. I'm not sure, but I think that the cover charge for regular guests off the street was $30. Drinks were $9 for bar shots like rum, and $7 for beer, so it was quite a bit more expensive than most Canadian bars, but not out of line for a big club like that. The lineup at the coat check was huge, which I laughed at because I didn't bring a coat. Of course, being a bar manager myself, I spent quite a bit of time looking at the logistics and operations of the club. I was pretty surprised to see that they had (I think) six bartenders working at each of the two main bars. My place would have two bartenders, or sometimes three, for the same volume of alcohol that was being served at each bar. But at least those bartenders looked a lot more relaxed that we are when we're serving.
Needless to say, the lighting systems were incredible, and the sound was decent throughout the entire club, not just on the dance floor. Gabriel & Dresden played from about midnight to 5am (I think the bars stop serving alcohol at 4am, but then they can start again at 8am). I was talking to Josh for a bit up in the DJ booth during his set, and they looked like they were really having fun playing that night. Their set was quite a bit different than when they had played in Boston - to me, both nights sounded great, but this set sounded more tailored to a dance club crowd, with more vocal tracks and mainstream tracks, whereas at Rise it had seemed more like a set for an afterhours club crowd (not surprisingly).
On Saturday afternoon, Polly took me for a partial tour, including Ground Zero, the ferry to Staten Island, Wall Street, and around other parts of Manhatten. Later in the evening, we went to a place called Crocodile NYC. This bar was insane. It had a crowd about the same size as my bar on a Saturday night (250 people), but it was less than a third the size. It was absolutely impossible to move around, or to get drinks quickly. To make things even more interesting, they gave out a free pizza with every beer, so for $20, we eventually got four large glasses of beer (two Stella & two Guiness, I think) plus three 12-inch cheese pizzas. It was a minor fight for me to finish the two beer and two pizzas, but I managed eventually, and was hungry for more. The bar was ridiculously warm, probably partly due to the crowds and partly due to the 700-degree pizza ovens in the back of the bar. Anyway, it was a pretty neat place, and obviously a lot of other people thought the same thing, considering the crowds.
After Crocodile, we went to a venue called Shelter, which was more of an after-hours type of club than Pacha had been, although they did serve alcohol. Cover was $25, bar shots were $8, and beer was $6. There were a whole bunch of good DJ's and producers performing that night, including D:Fuse, D-Formation (I used a couple of his tracks on my last mix), and Tone Depth (from Montreal). There was also another DJ who I had never heard of before, Chloe Harris. I was quite impressed by her set, so it was good to learn about her. The lighting system upstairs at Shelter was pretty impressive too. I wish that I'd been able to get some decent photos, but it wasn't possible with my camera.
On Sunday, we went for Chinese food in the afternoon, then did some more touring after dinner. We met a couple of my old friends from university in front of Virgin Records in Times Square, and we went up to the Marriot Marquis for drinks with them. After that, Polly took me to a fantastic Mexican restaurant for dinner. I've eaten Mexican food in a lot of places (including Mexico), but this was definitely some of the best that I've had. Of course, I can't remember the name of the restaurant, but I'm not going to forget the food.
I have photos from the trip on this page:
http://www.djbolivia.ca/photos_newyork2007a.html
The only sad part about the weekend was that there was so much more to see that I didn't have time for, so I'll have to go back as soon as I get a chance ...
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