For pictures from Mendoza, click here. Quick final post. I´ve got 20 minutes to wrap up this blog, pick up my laundry at the Bubbles Lavados up the street, and meet the group for supper, and a briefing on tomorrow´s activities. We arrived early in the morning to this beautiful city. Jody and I opted out of any city tours or any responsibilities. Instead, I got some laundry together, and explored the city on my own. Local busses, trolleys, and just plain locals in general. I´m really enjoying practicing communicating down here. I ended up getting a private tour of the city hall by a security guard, who took me to the roof of the building for some very impressive views and chit-chat, even though we were both out of our language comfort zones. It was quite cool. I then went to a very large park honoring San Martin, the man largely responsible for liberating Argentina. There is a mountain-top monument to this, the greatest of National heros. The location is known as Cerro Saint Gloria. It was a nice view, and nice moment. Then, local busses back here, and now I´m writing you. It was a bit funny, because a lot of the tour group opted to take a bus tour of the city, paying a bit of coin for it. My personal city tour, using local busses and my own two feet, was almost the same thing, but cost me 3.5 pesos, instead of 25+ pesos paid by the rest of the group. Of course, I didn’t go quite as far, but I still saw most of the main sights, and even crossed paths with them twice! Well, gotta go. Just realized it´s October 31st. Hope everyone´s having a spooky night, and I guess we´ll see you in less than a week now. Till then, enjoy the week!
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Well my friends, here it is. A worthy blog post about travels within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Not only would Jody and I be undertaking internal flights, but we were actually bound for Medina, which is one of the two holiest places for all Muslims. In fact, the city centre is completely forbidden to entry by any non-Muslims. Luckily, the airport is located outside the city, and our transport would be taking us all the way to our hotel without ever entering the city. Of course, the actual purpose of our traveling to this area was not to visit a holy Muslim site, as that is a very bad idea. We were bound for two very special places, one known as Al-Ula, and one known as Mada’in Saleh. These are areas of archeological and historical significance. Mada’in Saleh in fact has just recently been declared a UNESCO world heritage site, the first one of its kind in all of Saudi Arabia. We would be visiting these two sites together on the same day, but I would argue that each of them on its own is worth a blog post, so that’s how I’ll write them up and present them to you. For your pleasure, I have of course put up a whole boat-load of pictures to check out on flickr. So why don’t you do that, then read my story?
Howdy all! I guess it’s high time that I write a bit about my recent last-minute vacation down to the Caribbean, isn’t it? As I mentioned in my last post, as a result of changing jobs, I decided to take a week off between the two jobs to refresh myself. Incidentally, for those of you who are wondering what this new job is, well, let’s just say I opted to stay in the Government for now. I received a promotion in the CRTC, and as such moved up a few floors, got a coveted window cubicle, and have an entirely new workload. Whereas before I was a Senior Analyst, dealing with applications and tariff filings, I’ve now moved into a Network Evolution Policy role. This means that I’m much more self-directed, and will be researching and reporting on a range of interesting topics such as net neutrality, digital rights management, new media, and so on and so forth. As you may imagine, this is much more interesting to me than what I was doing before, so I’m cautiously optimistic about this new post 😉 Staying in the CRTC has also guaranteed that I can still go ahead with my plan to take a leave of absence and head to New Zealand. However, there have been a few high-level changes to it. First, I’m only going for 4 months instead of 6 months. Second, I’ll be leaving at the beginning of December, rather than the beginning of September. Regardless, it’ll still be an awesome trip no doubt, and will carry me through the cold Ottawa winter! Anyway, I’m rambling on about work, when I should be telling you about Puerto Plata. Read on!
09/01/08
Howdy winter folks! ActiveSteve here, reporting from Tongariro National Park. Today’s bike ride was more or less a highway to heaven sort of thing. It was a steady all day climb, where we started at 380m, and ended up at 1140m, in a little place called Whakapapa Village, which is near one of the busiest ski areas in the North Island. Of course, it being summer over here, the town is a little more deserted. Basically, anyone who is up here is here for one reason alone. To do some hiking in the National Park area. Were there not so many clouds hanging out right now, I’d have a pretty splendid view of Mount Tongariro and Mount Ngauruhoe. Not to mention Mount Ruapehu, the tallest of the lot. So, what’s up now you ask? Well, read on and I’ll spin you a little yarn.
Click here for pics from the last 2 days in Buenos Aires and the flight home. Last day in Buenos Aires left. We started the day getting all our bags ready so that we could check out before deciding what to do with our last 6 hours. By 9am, we had our bags packed, and left behind the counter. We hit the hotel restaurant, where we hooked up for a final breakfast with most of the group. 2 of the group had left the night before at 2am, heading off to Rio. Lucky for them, they had more vacation left to enjoy. Sadly, Jody and I were facing work in under 2 days. The last weekend. Boo. We had to make a decision on what to do. We had a little bit of shopping left to do, but we were also interested in visiting a world-known landmark, the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. This is arguably the world’s best opera house. It has a long and storied history, which I couldn’t possibly get into in this brief post. We’d heard it was beautiful, but on our first weekend in town, had walked by it, and thought it wasn’t open, due to construction. We’d later learned it was in fact open, you just had to find the right entrance. The only obstacle in our way was that we hadn’t made reservations, and heard you really need them to get in. Oh well, it was our last day, and we wanted to take the chance. Read on…




