Markus’ Blog

Finally, the day has arrived. We are departing for our two week vacation in Hong Kong. I hope the flight goes smoothly and Cathay Pacific is as awesome as they were last year when we flew to New York.

It’s going to be one tough flight for me anyhow. Not only will it be the longest I have ever been on a plane: over 13 hours. To top it off, I can’t sleep (very well) on planes. — We’ll see about the “very well” part. I hope it’s a “not very well” and not a “not at all”.

But being there and spending time there should be worth it. I am sure it’ll be a great experience. This will be, after all, my first time to any Asian country. I am very excited and very much looking forward to it.

Since we are bringing our laptop, there should be fairly regular updates (with pictures even!) while we are gone.

As indicated in a previous post I was scheduled to receive a new Canon Powershot G9. Well, about two weeks ago was the big day. After ordering a display model from a camera store in Toronto, my new G9 arrived.

I took it with me on my trip to San Jose to try it out a bit. The pictures are not too exciting, as I didn’t do very much other than go to the office and go out to eat.

I like it a lot. Not surprising, it’s got many feature enhancements over my good old G1, which I bought in 2001. It’s also a lot lighter.

We are back from the East cost. Well, in fact we’ve been back for a few days now. Lucky for us, because they are suffocating in snow back there, yet again. I believe there were at least two days that Pearson Intl. had to be closed because of snow storms since we left alone!

For a summary of our less then stellar trip (even though it certainly had its good moments) and how things changed from the plans I outlined in my last entry, see my sweetie’s blog.

Like they said, it’s still cold here in the East. Yesterday it snowed quite a bit in Toronto, and today there were a few more snow showers. Although I have to say it did warm up a bit (it’s even supposed to get up to 2°C tomorrow).

This is how Queen’s Park looked yesterday:

Today we went on a wine tour in Niagara-on-the-Lake. It was great — and we bought lots of wine, as was to be expected. And we saw the Falls, of course. Got soked by cold mist in the process. Surprisingly many tourists were running around. We had not anticipated that. We were convinced nobody else would be crazy enough to go and see the Falls in the middle of winter. We were wrong. It made us feel much better about our sanity.

I found it amazing that quite a bit of the Niagara River was frozen solid. The ice was quite thick, too.

Now it’s almost time for us to pack up and head home. Yay for warmer weather! — Before we do that, though, we’ll be having Dim Sum on Spadina Avenue tomorrow morning, venturing onto the CN Tower (I am hoping the weather will be clear) and exploring Eaton Centre.

Baring nasty weather and the likes, we’ll be headed towards Toronto in just a couple of hours, departing 7am (a.k.a. stupid o’clock) from YVR.

Now, why would anybody be so crazy as to fly into Toronto in the middle of freaking winter? They are predicting highs of 9°C and lows of -11°C for tomorrow. We sure are getting our winter coats back out. ;)

So, back to the why. Well, it went somewhat like that:

1. This Event is taking place, which has quite a few awesome performers.
2. Brigette has never been to Toronto or Ontario before (I have, but that was in 2002).
3. We said: “What the heck, let’s do it!”

It should be good times. Concert on Thursday, some sight seeing and shopping on Friday (it’s supposed to be a warm 0°C), Niagara Falls, Niagara on the Lake and a couple of wineries on Saturday and, finally, some more sight seeing and shopping on Sunday, before it’s time to head back home again, where temperatures are decent this time of the year.

Let’s hope that the weather behaves during our short trip.

So, we’re back home. Yay! It was a loooong January 7 for us.

The flight was good and uneventful. The immigration lineup was quite long, though, and the luggage people were even slower. But after an hour we had all our bags and were on our way home to greet Queen Calli Boo the Kitty who was very vocal and very happy to see us.

It’s been a busy few days here in London. Now the time has come for us to say goodbye to this lovely city. It’ll be good, though, to be home and to not have to lug our suitcases around anymore, and to get some rest and sleep.

It’s 7am in the morning on January 7 here and we are in the process of getting ready to leave for the airport — not without having a yummy British breakfast at the hotel first, though.

The plan is to catch a cab to Paddington Station at around 8:30, then take the Heathrow Connect train back to the airport, check our bags and wait for our plane to depart at noon (all of which will hopefully happen without issues).

It’s been an interesting few days, in London, so far, even though we’re only half way through our three and a half day stay. Good things have happened, as well as not so good ones. However, at this point it’s looking like things are settling down a bit and the remaining day and a half will work out as planned.

We got into London at around noon local time on Friday, January 3. The Heathrow Connect train ride from Heathrow to Paddington station was uneventful and smooth. The first little hiccup was the taxi ride to our hotel. It took way longer than the 2.5 miles that Google Maps quoted had me expect — and our cab driver wanted cash, which had me jogging to a nearby bank machine to get some.

Our hotel, the Grange Strathmore, turned out to be less than stellar. The room was on the smallish side, the (double) bed quite narrow, with a spongy mattress that had a tendency to make you fall off the bed. Next we discovered that the complementary Internet in our room was not working properly. Our Windows Vista laptop connected fine to the local hotel network (we got a 10.x.x.x IP address, which was fine) and we could see other computers in the hotel network, but DNS just would’t work regardless of what I tried, which rendered Internet access basically useless. It turned out that the hotel had had issues with Vista before, but obviously they couldn’t be bothered to fix them either before we got there or while we were staying there (their explanation was that they couldn’t get anybody in on the weekend to look at it).

Then our toilet stopped flushing (at around 11:00pm). Of course, housekeeping wasn’t on duty anymore (and no other double rooms were available), so we were given the keys for a washroom off the hallway. The next morning I was looking at the toilet again and found out that the marble slab covering (and hiding) the water tank could be lifted. Doing so must have somehow fixed the flushing mechanism, because the toilet started flushing just perfectly fine right after that. So, nobody from the staff could have done that for us the night before?

And finally, we were woken up three times, yes THREE times, during the night by a bunch of people who were talking and laughing loudly outside our room (we were located across from the elevator). When they woke us up the second time, I looked a the clock. It was 4:45am. The times for the other two times, I don’t know, but it couldn’t have been pretty.

The hotel manager was either unwilling or unable to do anything about any of our problems, so we checked out early (for a full refund of the unused portion of our stay) and moved (by foot) to the Radisson Edwardian Vanderbilt around the corner, which is where I am sitting now in bed and typing this.

On the positive side, we’ve seen quite a few nice sights and eaten quite some good food. There should be more of either coming up during the remainder of our stay.

Yesterday, we walked through South Kensington, had a nice pasta and risotto for lunch, and continued on to the British Museum. We concluded our first day with some burgers at Ultimate Burger, which was close to the museum and provided much needed shelter from the pouring London rain. — All pubs we had tried before were full.

Today, we saw Tower Bridge and toured the Tower of London (including the impressive Crown Jewels). Afterwards, we made our way to Oxford Street for some window (and real) shopping. To rest our tired feet, we went to a pub near Oxford Street, where we had traditional British pub food and a couple of pints of (muchly needed) Foster’s.

Tomorrow, we are planning on gawking at Buckingham palace, making it to an Evensong at Westminster Abbey, taking a look at the Houses of Parliament as well as Big Ben, walking up to Trafalgar Square, and, finally, visiting the National Gallery.

Tomorrow is also Brigette’s birthday, which we are planning on celebrating with a nice dinner here in London.

I am sitting at a table at my parent’s place writing this post (typing on a German keyboard no less — leads to many wrong characters ;-)).

Happy New Year everybody!

Today was another day meeting with family — and saying good bye already. It’s almost time to head towards London already. It was a fun afternoon that went on for way longer than originally thought. My Grandma had tons and tons and tons of food — as per normal. And the most asked question there is “Do you want something to eat? To drink, maybe?” And if it’s not my Grandma asking, it’s my Aunt.

Brigette’s most used phrase these days is “Nein danke.” LOL

Tomorrow will be a shopping day in Vienna, on Thursday we’ll visit some exhibits and we’ll see if we can find some other ways of experiencing Vienna on our last day. Friday morning we’ll leave for London.

It’s cold and grey out (only -5°C, but a wind chill of -15°), but we’re having a quite good time nonetheless.

We met my relatives for Christmas day, took the 26th off of meeting people, went to the opera on the 27th and for dinner with my relatives again on the 28th. Tonight it’ll be the first encounter with my friends (at one of my friends’ apartments in Vienna) since summer 2005. Hopefully I’ll be able to meet more of them tomorrow night at the only pub in Korneuburg (Gwölb). We shall see, I still have to phone around a bit.