Another Crazy Night

So we had another one of our infamous nights last night.

The night started off at the hotel bar. We started off as 6. I was the new guy on the turf and the others had been working here for about 6 weeks. They are all the blue collared types and are all huge, rough looking guys, so they are definitely the type of people I'd want when walking around at 3am in Bogota. The 6 of us all met up and then found some other English businessmen and had a drink with them. One of them was named Ziggy and apparently they drink a few beers in the taxi on their way home from work every day. Anyways they gave us a good laugh and kept us entertained for a little while.

So we started getting bored of the hotel bar and wanted to find something fun to do. We asked the bar manager, who was happy to make some suggestions and asked if he could come with us. Having a local is always a good idea and this guy seemed like fun so we said yes! Next one of our friends had found himself a girlfriend in his 3 weeks here so he called her up and two more of her friends. So.... 6 Canadian dudes and 4 Colombians.
(sorry about the pink, I think my camera has almost had it).

We found a neat restaurant downtown. It was 9:00 at this point, so it is a good thing that we had that bar guy with us because he was able to talk his way into getting a table for 10 without reservations. I had no idea what to order so I asked him to get me something Columbian. He ended up ordering some sort of bite-sized fish fillets covered in a spicy vinaigrette kind of thing for appetizer and then some sort of pulled meat, with really good potatoes, fried banana and avocado for dinner.

During dinner, the music was a little louder than it would normally be at a restaurant and I noticed that it was run by a DJ on a balcony. They were playing 80s music and after a few drinks these tough Canadian guys started singing along with the songs and moving to the beat. I have to admit, I may have joined.

Before I knew it, the music was so loud that we couldn't speak, no one was sitting down anymore, and the place had turned into a night club. I have to admit, the music in South America is so much better than it is in North America, it is a lot more fun! So after a few more drinks and a few hundred thousand pesos we closed up the bar (yes, we were the last to leave). The one guy said goodbye to his short-term girlfriend with lots of tears (as he left the next day) and half an hour later we found ourselves in the cab on the way home. We arrived back at around 3:30am.


Now the next morning was a bit of a panic for me. I woke up 10 minutes before our shuttle left for work and had to run. I made it on time according to my watch, but couldn't find anyone. I called the guy that missed out on the night before and he informed me that I had arrived about 70 minutes early. Somehow during the night I must have set my watch 70 minutes fast (possibly in an attempt to make it in the same time zone as my wife). Anyways, that is another mystery.

Arrival in Bogota

Hi All,

I'm back and in Bogota, Colombia. I've been here for about 12 hours now (including sleep) and I haven't been mugged once! Arriving at the airport was pretty standard except that the line for immigration was about the length of the terminal. Fortunatley those guys were fast and I was out in 10 minutes.

I was a little nervous getting into the taxi as there were two drivers. The taxi had my hotel's name on it and they were both wearing suits so it seemed legit. I was expecting them to turn around and mug me once we got to a sketchy area. I think one of them was there for security.

Security here is funny, About 25% of the people you see on the street are dressed like soldiers and are carrying M16s. One of the guys I am with said that if I don't see a soldier nearby, I should not go to the ATM. Fair enough. The other funny thing I saw was an add for tourism in Columbia. The slogan was "The only risk is wanting to stay". Oh man...

On the drive we went to the complete opposite side of the 9 million person city, but only went through about 2 or 3 traffic lights and made it in less than 1/2 an hour. I love how places like this seem to manage their traffic without lights better than we can with lights. I noticed a few other funny things about driving here while we were on the road. For example, all drivers and passengers on motorcycles wear this bight yellow vest which has the licence plate on it. Also, all commercial vehicles have their licenceplates on the back, painted on the sides, and painted on the roof, but not on the front. Strange?

The city itself is quite nice, It's surrounded by mountains and is way up at around 8500 feet. I want to do some more exploring, but I probably shouldn't leave the city. There is a funicular somewhere around here that would be fun to take up one of the mountains.

As I continue the trip, I'll keep you posted!

Malaria

There is a blood drive at work today, I tried to give but they wouldn't let me! Apparently I have Malaria. Everyone who has been to China in the past 364 days has Malaria. I don't feel like I have Malaria. But if I have stepped outside of Hong Kong in the past 364 days then I have Malaria. I tried.

I have a potential trip to Columbia, if I step out of Bogota, I will also have Malaria for a year. I'd better not go!

Dallas

Hi All,
I'm just finishing a project in Texas and I've been incredibly busy to the point where I haven't updated this site recently.

I've had a few interesting weekends here but as a whole, Dallas really isn't that exciting. I went to the Fort Worth stock yards with my uncle Bill a couple of weekends ago which was interesting. We saw a few texas long horns which you don't see in my home province of Alberta. We also went to a bar for a tequilla shot. This bar had these cool saddles instead of barstools.

A few nights ago was our qualification. We went to a Brazilian restaurant where we had a massive all-you-can-eat meat night where the waiters would come to your plate with skewers of meat. Later in the evening we had a few beers around the pool and I brought out my guitar. We sang until about 3am.

Last night we went to see Star Trek in the theater. I was disappointed that there were not many costumes there, but I was not disappointed with the movie. I'm spending my weekend watching all of the first ten movies now.

My trip is coming to an end, but I'll keep posting next time I get somewhere interesting.

Playing with photo stitching

Okay, I am not anywhere exciting yet, but here are some panoramic photos from 2006 that I finally stitched together tonight: Click the images to see them bigger.

Spencer took this photo. If you really zoom in, you can see where we parked on the highway.

This one is on the island of Capri in Italy.

This is from a snowshoe trip.

The last one here is a work in progress. For some reason I can't get my right arm to show up. I swear I am actually there.


I head to Dallas in a couple of weeks, I'll keep writing then!

Hong Kong

After my trip from Macau I was exhausted and as soon as I checked into my hotel, I fell asleep. Once I finally woke up, I surveyed my surroundings to figure out where I actually was and decided to go check out the country.

First of all, I've never seen so much crammed into such a small place. Everywhere you looked you could see reflections of this. Even my hotel, which was the best one they had (top floor, corner) was tiny! It was definitely just a place to sleep and nothing else. Walking around the city, I got the impression that people tend to spend their time outside. There were tons of people everywhere.

The city itself I didn't find that impressive. There were buildings, buildings and more buildings. It is a city that has been built up instead of out due to geographical constraints I tried to take some pictures of the scenery, but they all turned out the same. There are two things to note in this picture. 1) Double decker buses, it goes with the saving space theme of the city. and 2) they drive on the wrong side of the road. It is a former English colony and the influence is still present. Unlike mainland China, people here actually spoke English which made things much easier for me even though I was expecting to hear nothing but Cantonese. Even the street names reflected this. Causeway bay, Russell road, etc. These are not typical Chinese names.

After exploring a while, I came across a meat market. This is not the same thing as we would expect in Canada, they actually sold meat. The funny thing was, it was all sold outside on hooks. No refrigeration, insulation or anything of the sort. I had to take a picture. I'd like to dedicate this photo to my vegetarian sister Tara. I could tell the meat was fresh, because out of the seafood, half of the fish were still flopping around. Another trick that I learned when I talked to someone was that when choosing your meat, take the one with the most flies. This is the freshest. If there are no flies on the meat, then it is past its prime.

Unfortunately I didn't get to Mount Victoria and I didn't get to take the starlight ferry as I didn't have much time in Hong Kong. I headed to the airport that this point. I loved the airport and it was probably my favorite part of Hong Kong. It is right between the two runways and there are tons of windows so you can watch aircraft taking off and landing. Being the airport it is, there are also a ton of large aircraft to check out. I looked and didn't see any A380s. Too bad!

Well that is the end of my trip to China. Two months was a long time and I am glad to be home. I will be heading to Moscow in Russia for a week at the end of March. I'll continue my blog then.

Che Che!

Macau

I finished my last night shift in China and decided to go to Macau right afterwards before I left to come back home to Canada. To get to Macau was easy, I just had to take a taxi to the underground market and then walk across a bridge and through a few checkpoints.

Macau is essentially the Las Vegas of China. It is similar to Hong Kong in that it is a foreign colony that has been recently handed back to the Chinese government but isn't integrated into China yet. It was a Portuguese colony and everywhere you look you see things written in both Chinese and Portuguese. The architecture looks somewhat Spanish and there are other races there other than just Asians. Many of the people look like they are part Asian, part Portuguese.

When I got to the other side of the border, there were a ton of free buses to the various casinos. The first place I went was the Venetian. This is supposedly the second largest building in the world (sq ft wise). I left my bags with the concierge and tried my luck at the tables. Now I am not too familiar with the value of the Hong Kong dollar which is used there, and it was my first time in a casino, but it seemed like a high rolling place. I was expecting to spend around $20CAD which is a bit less than $200 HKD while I was there, but then found out that the minimum bet at any table was $200 HKD. Anyways I played the minimum bet for a little while and by the end of my stint on the roulette table, I had won just over $1000 HKD.

While I was playing roulette, two guys came up behind me and each placed $5000 HKD on the table. They placed their chips. One guy lost it all in one round and the other guy increased his amount ten-fold. Not bad!

I walked around after that to explore the building and it was huge. The thing which I thought was the coolest, and maybe this is just the engineer in me, but they had spiral escalators! I can't even imagine the design that was required for that.

After that, I figured that the best public transportation to get around Macau was the free hotel buses. So I grabbed my bags, headed back to the border and then took the MGM Grand hotel bus. The MGM was nice, but exactly the same as the Venetian. There were big halls and lots of card tables. The minimum bet here was $50 HKD so I guess the Venetian was a little crazy.

After this I went exploring a little more. There were more casinos and stores that were expensive enough that they didn't need price tags. If you have to ask, you can't afford it. Sorry, Katie, I didn't get you anything from the Gucci, Prada, or Mont Blanc shops. In the photo on the left, you can see the Wynn hotel and the MGM grand is in the backround.

The last place I went to see was the Grand Lisbon which is the tallest building in Macau. I have two pictures of it below. One was taken from the base of the building and the other was taken from the van on our drive home from work. We literally had to drive around Macau to get to work every day. I couldn't go earlier because I didn't have the multiple entry Chinese visa.

By around 4 o'clock I had been awake for 24 hours and was exhausted. I headed to the ferry and sailed to Hong Kong.