Touchdown in Vancouver

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Well, we made it! Our incredibly drawn-out and uncomfortable plane ride featured several transfers and an unpleasant ordeal in Hawaii - where U.S. Customs made us get out of the plane in the middle of the night, collect all our baggage, jump through innumerable hoops of bureaucracy, fill out reams of paperwork, have our bags searched (and swabbed for explosives!!) and wait around for several hours before we could get back on the plane again. This is despite the fact we were neither stopping over in Hawaii or going to the US! Our plane was simply refuelling on its way to Vancouver. They have really lost the plot.

Anyway, finally we arrived in Vancouver airport, where we were met by my parents. Of course, they didn't recognise me at first because my hair is still red as a frikkin' beetroot - 'rinses out in 6 washes', my foot ;-). My parents have been in Vancouver for about 2 months already, cleaning up my grandmother's house because she had to move away to live with my uncle. This is no small task, as it is filled with 40-odd years of accumulated stuff, mostly junk in no particular order. So we are going to help them with the final stages of the clean-up and move some of the left-over items out to their place in Bamfield (west coast of Vancouver Island) before they head back to Australia in about a month.

We were surprised to find that Vancouver is actually quite hot at the moment (being summer and all) - which is an interesting predicament, since in our haste we packed only winter clothing in anticipation of arctic-like conditions. Very clever.

One of the cool things about Vancouver is that it is surrounded by mountains. The other cool thing is that they have free wireless broadband beamed everywhere so, if you have a laptop, you can open it up wherever you are and surf the web at lightning speeds, quite a novelty for us ;-).

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Photos

Lure of Wireless Broadband
Me, Quin and my Dad enjoying the fruits of Vancouver's wireless broadband

Comments

[Darwin Chiong]

Redhead
Hey, redhead! You look even paler with the beetroot hair. But it suits you. He he he he.