Die Hard Three

I’ve been tying to collect some statistics on my fourteen-week trip to Europa. Everyone loves numbers, not just the Count. So here are the quantities along with a timeline because time is also numbers – just hard-to-visualize ones.

• Friday June 3 – Last day at work
• Monday June 6 – First day of French training (in Ottawa)
• Tuesday August 9 – Obtained my B-level French language written comprehension (that’s a pass)
• Wednesday September 14 – Had my oral comprehension evaluation
• Thursday September 15 – Left Ottawa for Europe
• Friday September 16 – Flew to Rome Italy via Siegburg Germany, Obtained my B-level French language oral comprehension (that’s a pass) – French language training is complete
• Tuesday September 20 – Took the train from Rome to Milan
• Saturday September 24 – Took the train from Milan to Munich and then to Berlin
• November 4 to 6 – Visited with friends in Lyon, Grenoble, and Bonn (train)
• November 12 to 20 – Flight to Helsinki with the gf and the rents, one day in Estonia
• Sunday November 27 – Day trip to Bremen (train)
• December 2 to 6 – Visit to Mainz, Mannheim, Neustadt, Siegburg, Eindhoven, Munster (train)
• Thursday December 15 – Day trip to Leipzig (train)
• Tuesday December 20 – Flight home to Ottawa
• Friday December 23 – Return to work

And the non-time numbers:

• Number of days away from Canada – 96
• People visited – 57 (SG, NS, BL, HW, AH, DH, JL, JL, JB, AP, TM, FG, EB, PA, NM, CM, LL, SH, DD, AS, GC, JR, AM, MM, NN, NS, DS, JP, JH, RH, BH, AH, FW, AG, FW, MA, SM, SM, TM, KP, SJ, KH, MH, KJ, EL, HL, LL, GG, LA, GS, BE, EH, AS, NO, KO, NT, JI)
• Pregnant friends – 2 (that I could tell)
• Classical music concerts – 3
• Four and a half hour operas – 1 (thank God)
• Days of train travel – 12
• Taxi rides – 4
• Number of flights – 6 (on 4 different days)
• Nights in hotels – 6
• Night on sofas – 46
• People that stayed at my apartment – 6 (14 nights)
• Countries visited – 8 (NL, DE, IT, BE, FR, EE, FL, AS)
• Jigsaw puzzles completed – 2 (1000 and 1500 pieces)
• Days where it rained – about 8
• Sick days – 3

Costs – $6 438 CAD

• Inter-city train travel – $850
• Metro passes – $350
• Flights – $700 (plus 60 000 Aeroplan points)
• Rent – $1863
• Taxi rides – $100
• Hotels – $500
• Museums, concerts, ancient Roman ruins – $500 (Roman Forum, Coliseum, The Last Supper, Paragon Museum, Checkpoint Charlie, TV Tower, opera, classical concerts, soccer)
• Laundry $25
• Gifts for $150 for the kind people who let me stay on their sofas
• German lessons $1400

Refunds / Shared Costs – $3 120 CAD

• Rent from Ottawa $2 000
• Hotel savings $1 120 (14 nights at $80 CAD per night)

Total Costs Minus  Refunds / Shared Costs

$3 318 CAD

Note: I did not include costs for entertainment, drinks, restaurant, food, mobile phone because these would have evened out anyway. I had a prepaid phone in Berlin but I canceled my Ottawa plan. Going out for drinks is two to three times more expensive in Ottawa than it is in Berlin. Case in point: at my local the day I got home I ordered ten chicken wings, a beer and a twelve inch pizza.

Wings – $8.40
Pizza – $12.25
Beer – $6.15
——————–
Sub-total – $26.80
HST1 – $1.65
HSTL  – $0.49
HST – $1.34
——————-
Sub-sub-total – $30.28
Tip $3.94 (13%)
Total $34.22

So this comes down to a per day cost of about $35.00 CAD. I think this is pretty awesome. I mean, how much does it cost to live in ones home city?

So I guess that’s it for the travel part of this blog. I will finish up by clarifying one thing, If I’ve written anything during my travel blogging that offended you, I want you to know that it’s just a reference from a Simpsons episode you have not seen.

Also, the viola is the big violin.

End transmission.

The Voyage Home

So my buddy Steve invites me to go see the Sens play the Flyers on Sunday afternoon. After I accepted he informed me that he won the tickets and we will be sitting in a one hundred-level box. Sweet: booze, beer, babes, butlers, Bryzgalov.

I, of course, am cheering for Philadelphia. I arrived at the stadium and, upon seeing the many Flyers fans and their orange jerseys, realize that my Dutch Olympic hoodie will safely remove any doubt surrounding which team I support.

No doubt.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to the Palladium – I mean Corel Centre – I mean Scotiabank Place – to see a hockey game. My how things have changed. The first thing I notice is that they’ve removed all the Nortel advertisements. I wonder what they did with all the old signs. If there’s anyone out there who wants to start a company you could call it No-tel and with a little detective work and some blue paint you could save millions in promotion-related expenses.

Some kid is singing the anthems. His rendition of the Star-spangled Banner is copied directly from Bleeding Gums Murphy – or so it feels like. For some reason they post all the lyrics for both anthems on the giant screen. I never realized O Canada had so many exclamation points and that the French parts were written before the Quiet Revolution.

So the Sens score the first goal and they blow that Goddamn train horn of terror. My involuntary reaction is limited to a flashback to when I was eight and, thank God, nothing else.

During the first intermission I join the masses in the concourse to try and secure me a slice of Pizza Pizza pizza. The patrons’ inability to form something even remotely resembling a line is causing me an unusual amount of anxiety. I retreat to the box to wait for the second period to start – I’ll venture back out when the game is on.

We only have fifteen minutes people...

The first intermission is my favorite intermission – they usually invite two teams of five-year-olds to play a game against each other. The kids can barely skate let alone hold a hockey stick. I’m enjoying the spectacle for the wrong reasons.

The Flyers’ number seventeen is African-Canadian. I wonder if hockey every had a colour barrier like baseball did. For many years Russians were not allowed to play in the NHL but I think that was more a problem with the management of the USSR than any specific policy of the National Hockey League.

The Flyers just scored again. I like it when the Sens are playing some of the older teams – they get lots of fans at the games. I have to agree with soccer on this one – the game would be much more interesting if all these Flyers supporters were jammed into a single walled-off section of the Scotiabank Place and then taunted and booed until my throat hurt.

We’re about to start the third period. The running total for food and drink is approaching the face value of the ticket. Three beers (seventy-two ounces total), one Coke Zero, a slice of pizza, and a cheese burger with fries = $54.25 CAD.

Absurd.

Spartacat is in our section for a photo op. I try and get him to join us in our box for a beer. I read once that cats are allergic to alcohol. The whole game Steve and I have been debating what the specific reaction is. He says they vomit everywhere. I maintain that they vomit everywhere all the time regardless if they’ve had anything to drink or not.

And there's only one way to find out.

The game is tied at four goals apiece. Each team is playing like the outcome actually means something. It’s really exciting. Ottawa scores with 1:11 left on the clock. They finish with an empty-net goal to shore up the victory. No Sens No!

We make our way to the parking lot to fight our way through traffic. They built the stadium twenty kilometres outside of the city centre. Does anyone have any idea what they were on when they decided on the location? I’m all for decriminalization but whatever these guys were smoking should be classified a dangerous substance (excessive use can result in stupidity).

You’ll never guess which movie I started watching yesterday before bedtime!

So I’ve decided to reduce the frequency of my blog posts from daily to weekly. You can think of it like I’m going from being the Sun Newspaper to the Atlantic Monthly (but hopefully with less nudity and more toilets). I’m unsure what the theme of the posts will be but I’m almost positive they will include infrastructure (residential, commercial, municipal, national, trans-national, spatial).

Being back in Ottawa has been like all Matrix and stuff. After living somewhere else (i.e. in a city / country with an apparently cohesive ideology for urban planning) I am now annoyed by the most basic things. Take walking for instance.

Back in Berlin I was never able to quite figure out why the sidewalks were so much enjoyable than in Ottawa. Sure I posted at length about their composition and maintainability but there was something I missed and I think I found out what it is: in Canada the Goddamned sidewalks are barely wide enough for two people to walk side-by-side.

They are perfectly designed if your city is populated by human-sized robots that always motolocate single file, but sadly, this is not the case.

Even this shortest journey that requires three people walking together is super annoying. Note: I mean post-Berlin it’s super annoying – if you’ve never known anything else (or never even thought about it) you’re not going to care. It’s annoying because one person of the three has to walk on the road (dangerous), on the grass (good thing it never rains in Ottawa), in front (this is not Saudi Arabia), or behind (this is not Saudi Arabia).  And invariably what happens during one of these sidewalks commutes, is one encounters another pod of human foot-travelers. Each group has to break up so the other can pass.

I’m not even going to go into the social aspects of isolating one person from the group of three – it’s too horrifying to think about.

And even if there are just two people walking there are problems. When humans walk they don’t move in a perfectly straight line – there’s always a small bit of meandering that takes place. These stupid Canadian sidewalks have forced us to walk in an unnatural manner. It’s subtle, sub-conscious even, but it is there, in the background, slightly increasing your stress level and you don’t even know it.

Because that's what what we need most right now: stress resulting from the most basic human function.

And if you don’t believe me, next time you see someone walking alone down the sidewalk, you will notice that they are almost always walking in the middle. If it was really easy and stress-free to walk on one side of the sidewalk, people would do it when they walk solo. They don’t.

It’s really depressing to me that Canada has managed to screw up the thing that first made humans human – walking. That takes skill.