Monday, May 22, 2006
Jet Plane Leaving without me...
But instead of sitting in a cramped space for 12 hours and camping in the airport, I was in the office, working away in front of my computer at work. Luckily, I remembered my departure date, so yesterday I called in and changed it to a later date as well as dump my Dublin to London route. Since I have no idea when I'm returning, I changed it to the latest date possible, January 10, 2007. If I decide to come back earlier than I'll just change it again. At $200 CAN per change, it's still better than purchasing a new ticket, but I shouldn't change my mind too much.
Bo on the other hand is not as lucky. His ticket was non-changeable, so he will need to purchase another ticket. However, we will still need to pack... for our Switzerland trip that's coming up this Thursday, May 25 2006. I need to brush up on my German. Guten Tag. Wie Geht es Ihnen? Ich bin sehr gut.
Saturday, May 20, 2006
My plane...
Thursday, May 18, 2006
The Da Vinci Code...
I decided, to pick up reading. So today, I went and picked up another novel. One by Micheal Chichton called Timeline. I like the idea of time travel. Then after the first few chapters, I realized that i've already seen the movie. I remember the movie cause Paul Walker was in it and I liked the movie that he was in previously, Fast and Furious. I don't think i'll finish reading this one.
Last weekend, we found a nice place to hike. Ivinghoe Beacon is only 10 minutes from us. We hike a nice trail up to the highest peak. There was a flock of sheep grazing the land. I tried to take a picture of them, but they would always move away from me. Then I had one that was staring at me and I stared back. We had a staring contest going there for a while.
Two weekends ago, my Canadian friend took us to Tring Park. It's nothing like a park, I think they just call it a park. The park is huge and the trail is endless. A bunch of cows seems to live there. When we walk close to them, they walk away. They don't mind having humans around, just not close up.
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Finally got paid...
Then they forgot to process my expenses, even after calling them up about it. Before this, they lost the timesheet that I faxed in and took over a week to get back to me after I've mailed a 'have you received my timesheet' email. And no, that is not all that they messed up on. With just a click on the 'forward' button, the Jr accountant that manages my account sent a string of private conversations between me and the accounting company to the employer (I was furious, imagine that, me being furious. That doesn't happen much. Does it?) Then there's more... And these guys are suppose to be professionals, but so far, they are doing a piss poor job!
Saturday, April 29, 2006
Another Europe Trip!
Luckily, Bo has family there and will provide us with crash space, so we're all set! My guide book tells me that majority of the people in Switzerland understand English, bonus! I don't think we'll have any problems
getting around...
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Vienna Trip

This is somewhere in the city centre area. I think this is the Graben, one of the main streets in the central district. We did many hours of walking around the beautiful district 1 area.

This is inside a McDonalds. The inside is full of movie memorabilias. Quite different from any other McDonalds i've been to. I ordered a pack of Broccoli Cheese Nuggets. Yummy!

There are these huge cigarettes in the entrance of every subway station. Do you think this gets the point across?

There were many of these little shops set up in the outer area of the Schonbrunn Palace (in District 12) Egg anyone?

My guide book advised us to take tram 1 or 2 that goes around the Ringstrasse, a street that circles the city centre. But we accidentally took tram J (cause the 'J' looked like '1' to us) We didn't even notice that we're on the wrong tram. A few minutes later, we saw this church and decided to get off and check it out. After getting back to the station, we finally realized that we were not on tram 1.
some more pics...

The famous golden Mozart statue in Stadpark. (I don't really know if it's famous but I see it on alot of brochures)

View from the Schonbrunn Palace to Gloriette. The Schloss Schonbrunn was the summer palace of the Austrian emperor.

The Parliament and here's something I found on the net:
Vienna's Parliament was constructed in the Greek Classical style to reflect the democratic ideals of the new parliamentary government adopted by the city of Vienna. The building was designed to give an illusion of height, with the tall pillars and the second-story level entrance. A statue of Athena was placed in front of the building, facing the street, not the Parliament, however, further shifting the focus on the Ringstrasse.
Lower part of the statue, taken from the second level of the parliament.
Moose, posing at the base of a pillar...

We rented city bikes for 2 days, and it was an excellent way to travel around. Vienna's roads are quite friendly to cyclists. There are many cyclist lanes... I don't know if drivers are as friendly to cyclists though.
There are many areas preserved for nature. I think my guide book mentioned that there are more wooded areas then developed areas. I think we cycled for over 20km the first day, my thighs were a bit sore the next day. Indeed, I need more exercise!
We rode along the Danube River and it was beautiful. We were lucky to have a full day of sunshine until only our last 30 minutes. It was pouring cats and dogs. But afterwards, the rainbow came out, the sky cleared and we made it home for dinner.

I think I can point my phone in any direction and take something interesting. This is one of many old buildings in Vienna.

Street scene in the central district. I think this is on the RingStrasse across from the Parliament.
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Some Pics...
We have two attic windows, this is one of them. If we ever get unlazy and clean it, we will be able to clearly view the stars at night, lying in bed.
Looking out from our attic window, we have this beautiful view...
We stayed at the GreyHound Inn in Jan/Feb for about 5/6 weeks. We have a room with a country view. Makes sence since we are many miles away from a large city. We see horses horsing around all the time. I watched school kids play in this field when I was recovering from my flu.
Chinese New Years in London. I was lucky enough to have two lion dances performed right in front of me.
Trafalgar Square during Chinese New Years and a couple of people showed up for the festivities...
Friday, March 31, 2006
Slowing getting ourselves organized...
The room we found is more interesting than the 'room on top of the bar'! We're on the roof! At least it has hot water, a fridge, stove and oven in our 'roof room'. I hope it's temporary though. Otherwise, we'll either get a bad back or bumps all over our head. We're sharing the house with 7 others. It's more like a family run hostel. We need to get ourselves sorted with the car situation (currently renting a car) and the work stuff before looking for something permanent to live in.
Bo and I just came back from a 3-day trip to Cork/Dublin (Mar 27-29). We met Bo's dad at the end of his Europe tour so we got a few days off and took him to Ireland. We went to the Blarney Castle and I finally kissed the Blarney Stone! But I don't think i've been blessed with the gift of gab yet. Maybe it takes some time for it to kick in. We also went to Kinsale, a little fishing village about 40 minutes bus ride from Cork city centre. We took a scenic hike (with quite a few ups and downs) to Charlie's Fort, one of Ireland's heritage sites. My history is a bit rusty to non existent, but this is what I got from the guide... the fort is a star shaped fort that is mostly fortified on the side facing the sea. The side facing the land was the weak side since they do not expect to be attacked from that side. The walls are not as fortified and the fort is built on the bottom of the hill.
There was a bloody and only battle in 1690, where the enemy came from the side of the land, took 3 days to cannon through the shortest wall, and won. The English kept it mostly for training ground until they returned it to Ireland a long time later. Then the hippies moved in and got to party there for a few years until the Irish government decided to fix it up and make it into a heritage site.
On Wed at 7am, we caught the 7am bus from Cork to Dublin. It was a long 4 hr ride and we arrived in our room in Dublin at around noon. I started packing non-stop till 6:30pm. Bo had to run around city centre to finish off things and get a haircut, and show his dad around. I managed to pack the things that we want and have room to take. We had 3 huge luggage, 2 carry on size luggage, and a duffle bag. We checked in 4 bags and still had 3kg to spare from our 60 kg limit! We still have alot of stuff in Dublin, but i'm not sure if we will be able to get it. I'm going to miss my air filters and the 19-inch monitor...
On a sad note, Bo fried our rice cooker so now we don't have one. I really liked our one cause it does congee as well. They sell rice cookers in UK but it's mostly the basic ones that does rice only. The fancy ones like ours are a bit pricey here! =(
On a happy note, Vienna, here we come. We're going to Vienna from April 13-18, 2006. We're starting our holiday early this year and hopefully we will be able to travel more.
Thursday, March 16, 2006
I am an Independent Analyst
I saw this on Chir and Ev's blog. Kind of neat, but I think what it says about me isn't right. My report: http://www.personaldna.com/report.php?k=XJMEfnKPOJTnRdV-MD-AAACA-b96e&u=6eca39c70547
Well, maybe just a little correct... what do you think?
I've not tried the psych stuff, but if anyone is interested: http://personaldna.com/psychyou-psychme.php?for=3b8bcb78a063
Here's a link to the test if anyone is interested: http://www.personaldna.com/tests.php
I've fixed the link, so it should work...
Friday, February 24, 2006
Toronto...
We checked out Pacific Mall, North America's largest Asian mall. It was so unbelievably huge. It reminded us of large malls in China. Rows and Rows of little kitchen size shops, one after another. There's also a huge population of Chinese people in Toronto to support this types of places.
She has a housemate, but we've only seen him twice the entire time we were here (for 5 seconds). On the first day, we saw him leaving for work and coming back from work. Though I always hear him taking a shower in the morning. But we never saw him again, I almost forgot that Leanne even has a housemate!
Thursday we went to check out the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (TSO). It started at 8pm and ended at 10pm with a 10 minute intermission. The music was very pleasant and peaceful... so peaceful that Bo and I took a few 1 minute power naps. It was not at all boring but a whole week of non stop running around, doing errans and being a tourist, was very tiring! The concert was awesome and we would do it again. If anyone visits Toronto and likes this kind of stuff, then check out the TSO website and look up tsoundcheck. There's discount tickets for people under 30.
We took the Toronto street cars around downtown. They are very handy and there are lots of them. We wait an average of 0 to 2 minutes for a car. They are not traffic friendly though, cause they stop in the middle of the street and the cars can't pass if they are letting people off and on.
We ate at this Dumpling House for brunch twice cause it was a nice change from other kinds of food. They make the dumplings to order so they are extremely fresh. My aunt use to make them, and she can make them just as fast. Watching them is interesting. They can roll one out in seconds!

We celebrated Bo's birthday in Toronto with DQ. This was my banana split that I couldn't finish. Bo had a peanut buster parfet, that I couldn't photo cause he finished it all... Happy Birthday Bo!
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Niagra Falls

We went to Niagra Falls on Tuesday, Feb 21 2006. The temperature has warmed up a tiny bit but we still found it to be quite cold. It was only about an hour drive from Toronto. Leanne gave us her casino membership swip card so that we can park at the casino parking lot for free, yeah. We walked along the Falls street and first saw the American falls. It was not what I had expected. But I think it's due to the fact that it's winter time and the sky was dark and ready to rain. Looking at the Canadian Horseshoe falls from a distance was not spectacular. There was alot of mist blowing towards us and we could barely see the thing. It was like a rain storm. But as we got close, the view got better. After about an hour, the sky started to clear up and we were able to see more of the falls. I managed to get this panoramic shot of the Canadian falls with my 2.0 mega pixel camera phone after the sky cleared and the wind changed.
Ottawa..
Our appointment with the British Embassy was at 10am on Thursday. This was the main reason of our visit. We were able to apply and get the Working Holiday Visa for UK within an hour. If we applied anywhere else in Canada, it would of taken 2 weeks because they would need to mail the application and required documents to this Ottawa British Embassy.
From Ottawa, we were a bridge away from Quebec, however, since the rental company gave us unlimited kilometers, we were only allowed to drive within Ontario. So we didn't drive into Quebec intentionally. Though, we did accidentally drive through the bridge. So we were there for 2 minutes. If we didn't op for unlimited KM, then we would have needed to pay for each KM over 1200 KM driven. When we returned to car we put on a bit over 1350KM...
The winter festival was also on when we were there. We decided to take a bus over to Gatineau, Quebec. There was a snow scupture competition, it was part of the winter festival. It was a nice 10 minute bus ride. It was so cold and we were so unprepared for the weather, we didn't stay very long. But still long enough to slide down some the slides made from ice. Good thing they built a tent for people to warm up. We were in there half of the time. I ordered a cup of hot chocolate in English and they replied in French.
Being in Ottawa, I finally feel the bilingualism at work. When I walked into the Body Shop, a sales girl first asked "Do you need any help?" then she switched to French and ask me the same question. I'm starting to wonder if the people from the east would think that we (people from the west) are less Canadian because so many of us do not speak French. Do we need to know both English and French to be a true Canadian?
All the pictures posted were taken by my phone camera.
The next day after arriving in Ottawa, we woke up to a frozen city. Our car is covered with a 1 inch layer of ice. The antenna was completely encased in ice. When we left UK, we anticipated a temperature of -4 degrees. It was close to -30 that day and the next few days did not warm up either.
I don't think we've had anything this bad in Calgary before. The windshield wipers were buried in the ice. It took about 10 minutes to chip the ice off them windshield and windows. The ice on the hood didn't come off until we went into a roofed parking lot a day later. The trunk was all iced up and we were only able to use it after arriving a few days back in Toronto. Luckily, we filled up right after arriving in Ottawa, before the rain/snow storm...
This is a model of downtown Ottawa in the Tourist Info Centre.
It was extremely cold outside. The is Parliament Hill, taken from the inside of the Ottawa Tourist Info Centre. We went for a guided tour of the Parliament building. It was quite good. We were thinking about skating on the Rideau canal, known in the Guinness book of records as the longest piece of ice to skate on. However, the temperature was just way too cold. We couldn't even stand walking outside for a few minutes. Skating a round trip on the Rideau Canal takes an average of 1.5 hrs.
Monday, February 20, 2006
My Little Canadian Moose
This is my Canadian moose that I brought along for this trip, and called it Moose (Pronounced as Moo-Cee) Also got myself a new phone (Sony w800i) that I will be using to take pictures to post on the blog. There aren't any new pictures posted on our site cause I forgot the password to upload to it and we haven't contacted them for it yet.
Moose, getting the royal treatment in the GreyHound Inn.
Bo is studying Microsoft .NET stuff, he wants to be Microsoft Certified. Moose is there to encourage him.
Moose, watches Legally Blonde 2 with us.
Moose is learning how to drive in our Clio. The company provided us with a rental car for a few weeks. When it was delivered to us, it had about 13 miles on it. So I were lucky enough to get a brand new car. By the time we returned it (about 3 weeks later), there was over 2000 miles on it!
Sunday, February 19, 2006
Subways (not the sandwich!)
However, the London and Hong Kong subways are the best in my books. I especially liked the Hong Kong subways since they have pretty LED lights that display the exact location and direction that the subway is traveling to. The London Oyster cards and Hong Kong Octopus cards also makes entering and leaving the subways easier and faster. In Hong Kong, the octopus card can also be used in some 7 elevens!
Friday, February 17, 2006
Leaving (again) on a jet plane...
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
St Albans and Brighton
On Sun Feb 5, we set off to Brighton in the afternoon. It was about 40 miles from Tring. It took about 1.5hrs to get there. The traffic in Brighton town was quite busy and it was almost impossible to find parking on the streets. Even when we pulled into a paid mall parking lot, there were many cars in front and behind us looking for parking. In Brighton, we walked over to the Sea front and enjoyed some English Fish and Chips, and a fresh red mullet sandwich. This beach didn't have any sand though, just loads of small rocks. I think this water is the English Channel? I need an atlas.
Monday, January 30, 2006
Happy Chinese New Year...
Happy Chinese New Years to everyone. On Sun Jan 29, we took the train into London to celebrate New Years. It was about a 45 minutes ride into central London. The streets in Chinatown, Leister Square and in Trafalgar Square were flooded with people. There were just as many westerners there as Asians. There were dragon dances, lion dances, Chinese opera, martial arts performances, firecracker and fire works display... When we were lining up for food at one of the restaurants (there were line ups in all the restaurants) we caught the lion dance right in front of us. It was going around to the restaurants to 'Capture the Green'. The 'Green' is usually a lettuce with a red pocket, tied to the front entrance of the restaurant. The lion is suppose to dance around and 'Capture' the lettuce in it's mouth, chew up the lettuce and spit some of the pieces out. (The lion dancer gets to keep the red pocket) I took some video clips of the lion dance on my new Sony Erickson w800i mobile. I'll try to post them.
I also bumped into Adrian in Trafalgar Square. He was part of my team in my Marketing class at UC. Apparently, he’s been here since September 2005 and is working in UK for year. What a small world…
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
In UK for how long?
We're currently working in Tring, a little town about 1hr drive to Greater London. There's nothing here in terms of entertainment, not even a bowling alley or a cinema. There's no sit down Chinese restaurants, but there are a few Chinese Take-Out places. We've been having alot of those lately. The company gave us till the end of Feb to find our own accommodations and transportation. Things are slowing falling into place, until we found out that the company has not gotten us our visa and they don't know how to get them. So now we are in la la land. Apparently, we need to go back to Canada to apply for one. We're finding out if we can get an Irish one for the time being. We'll see what happens. On top of that, my laptop, which I’m using for development, recently died on me. Luckily, it was still under warranty. We got it sent in and it *should* be fixed in a week. The company did provide me with a machine, but it only had 256MB RAM. It was extremely slow to develop on that machine. Especially when i'm running Windows XP, VS.NET, Server 2000, IE, ... and have lots of pages open. After pointing out the lack of memory, it finally got upgraded to 512MB RAM. I miss my laptop, it was *MUCH* faster! How frustrating!
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Home Sweet Home
At first, I thought that I was going to stay in Calgary, but three weeks ago, I started a contract(same company as Bo) so now, I'm just coming back for Christmas. Bo will be staying for 2 weeks before heading back to Dublin to finish off his contract. I'll be staying for 3 weeks.
The first evening back, I was so excited to be home. Bo's parents came to pick us up from the airport, and dropped me off home, where Mom was waiting for me to arrive. We chatted for a bit, then she took me to T&T.
The next week was filled with having Dim Sum, lunch and dinner with family and friends. Then Bo caught the flu. I suspect that he got it from Geoff at Sandi's party. I've heard quite a few people from the party fell ill sometime afterwards. So we didn't go on any snowboarding trips. Then a few days later, I caught the flu from Bo. Arg. I was disappointed that I got sick. I didn't go anywhere for almost a week. Bo left Calgary on Jan 3rd, he's almost recovered by then. Luckily, I felt alot better during the last few days before I left, so I managed to meet up with a few friends. By the time I left, I was feeling alot better. But I felt quite sad, cause I didn't want to leave.
I left on Jan 11, on an 8pm flight and arrive the next day at Dublin at 5pm. My connection flight from London Heathrow was delayed for about an hour. I was so tired by then, I almost fell asleep on the chair. Apparently, the BMI plane had an oil leak so they had to get another plane ready.
What happen the next day was unbelievable, I got sick again with another flu. Had a fever for a few days and at one point, had a temperature of up to 39.9, I was HOT! We went to the Emergency and Accident at the hospital cause the clinics were closed at 9pm, but we left after not being seen for a few hours. Bo called the Alberta Health Link for information. Then he got me some Benylin for Flu 4, and I felt alot better after taking that. We were scheduled to fly to London (for work) on Sunday but I still felt horrible, so we changed our tickets to Monday instead...
