BC: Check!
This week we travelled to Vancouver, BC for the CFCM national conference. It’s been a great week so far for a few reasons.
First, the conference has been fantastic. There has been a good mix of speakers, all of which shared great messages.
Second, we’ve always wanted to travel further west and have now had the opportunity. Until this point we had travelled only as far as Alberta.
Between conference meetings we toured the area and snapped a few pictures off the coastline.
Click the link below to see our photos.
Funny street sign
This week we traveled to Toronto to have dinner with family. This sign caught my attention and I had to snap a quick picture.
Nothing invites someone to learn the English language more than a sign written in English.
Germany Wrap-up
With our trip to Germany complete, I thought it would be great to put together a compilation of our travel blog posts. In order of appearance, here’s our German-related posts. For those interested in the comic book version (i.e. just the pictures), skip to the last paragraph in this post.
- Trip to Germany
- ynamreG
- Update aus Deutschland
- Tour de Paris
- Lohr a.Main
- Munich, Salzburg, and so much more
Click the following link to see all the pictures we posted from our trip. Be aware that there are a lot of photos and the page may take a bit longer than normal to load.
Munich, Salzburg, and so much more
This week marks our last week in Germany. With Sophia off work and our trusty navigation system, Sue (read my last post for details) at our side, we travelled to a few landmark cities to take in some final sights.
Sue behaved incredibly well for nearly our entire time on the road. She did falter, however, on our drive back to the apartment at the end of the week. Opting to take the back-roads instead of the more direct route. This gave us an opportunity to drive across a dirt road, past a small cemetery (see the photos at the end of this post), and through someone’s farm.
Lohr a.Main
Lohr a.Main (or translated, Lohr upon Main) is the small town in which we’ve been residing for the last four weeks. (“Main,” for those interested, is a river.) As I’ve mentioned previously, Lohr is a nice place; and while there have been sunny days during our time here, until recently they have been the exception to the norm. As the weather cleared up for a few days we had a great opportunity to take a walk through the old town.
Before I go into details though, it’s important to explain the moments leading to this old town expedition. See, in Lohr there are no laundry-mats. Dry cleaners, yes; laundry-mats, no. In fact, the closest one we found was in a neighbouring city some 35-minutes away. Like most neighbouring places, there are several ways to reach said laundry-mat–all of which are confusing to the foreigner. Modern technology–and €5.31/day–graced us with a very reliable navigation system; thus easing the burden of navigating seemingly identical roads. This was our regular, uneventful, weekend excursion. Until this weekend.
Workplace Safety
Part of Sophia’s training during our travels in April has included an element of hydraulic press safety. Below is a clip from a safety video. This illustrates what I can only assume is a typical factory in China (note the lack of hardhats). These individuals are positioning and removing metal parts as the hydraulic press forms each piece. After seeing this, I think we can all have an appreciation for robots.
My personal favourite element is the individual in the centre (in the white shirt): I love how he has to really duck each time the press comes down.
Tour de Paris
Imagine two people, two days, one car, and more than 1200 kilometres and you have the Tour de Paris. Running from April 19 till April 20.
This weekend we made the moderately-lengthy drive to and from Paris, France. It was a whirlwind tour: getting up early Saturday and arriving back at our apartment late Sunday (early Monday, really). While we didn’t have the time to look at all of the city’s highlights, we saw quite a bit with the time we had.
We arrived in the early afternoon. Parking on the second level of a five-level underground parking lot, we opted to take the stairs to the ground floor since the elevators did not seem to be functioning at that moment (although they did work later). If odour could somehow be encapsulated in words you would certainly stop reading at this point. Regrettably the walk up the stairwell lasted longer than the oxygen supply in our lungs. Still, we survived the walk and headed down the street to check-in to our hotel.
Update aus Deutschland
Once again the weather held up its end of the bargain: raining consistently for days on end. I’m not sure if this type of weather is normal for Germany at this time of year (as it is in Canada). Some locals say it is; while other’s, it’s not. But as such, attempts to venture out during the week were mostly thwarted. I’m sure we’ll get at least few good days so we can take some nice photos of the town we’re in.
Most of our “adventures” this week revolve around the weekend. We travelled to Horb which allowed us to open up the Mercedes on the autobahn. The speedometer on the poor thing is only clocked to 240 km/h–what a shame. So far I can’t say we like Mercedes. I’ve never liked the look of them but always assumed they were nice cars. My hopes have been dashed as the one we have needs a bit of work. At 140 km/h it shakes so much you would think the panels are about to fly off. We pushed past that to 180 km/h–it’s quite nice not having speed limits on most of the highways–and the car rides bit smoother, but not much.
ynamreG
No, that’s not a fancy new German word I learned. It’s just Germany backwards.
After one week we’re starting to become somewhat accustom to our surroundings. We had the opportunity on the weekend to travel to some neighbouring cities. Our journey confirmed earlier suspicions we had: our apartment is an Ikea apartment. Everything from the bedding, to the furniture, to the glasses we drink from, and the little lamp that’s situated behind me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s all very nice, but at the same time, it’s somewhat humourous to walk through a single store knowing you can replace everything in about 15-minutes.
We’ve started to get into a routine for some day-to-day chores. Grocery shopping is an almost daily event because, in Germany, space is a premium. Fridges are smaller, cupboards are scarce, and owning a freezer is something special. Having to grocery shop every other day isn’t all bad, but it took us a week to find the stores we could frequent. All the grocery stores we’ve found so far could be defined as glorified 7-Eleven’s. I’m not exaggerating when I say that most of these have chocolate and candy sections that rival Wal-Mart on Halloween. (Again, not complaining about that.)
Trip to Germany
Over the next few weeks my wife and I are travelling in Germany. She’s travelling on business while I simply enjoy ride.
As is customary when we travel anywhere outside of our city, we experienced the usual challenges (I say usual because it happens all too often): our credit card was cancelled, and the airplane was overbooked and my wife barely got a seat (she was the last person to check in and we arrived quite early). Nevertheless, the flight was trouble-free and we arrived in Germany ahead of schedule.