Christmas in Sin City

We know that it sounds like a strange choice, going to Las Vegas for Xmas, but we wanted to make it down there while we are here and the middle of winter seemed like the time to do it. Besides the off season meant that the airfares and accom. were fairly reasonable, and we were pretty sure that Santa could manage his delivery without us being around.

We had booked our flight from Buffalo, just south across the US border from Toronto, because flights within the States are about 30% cheaper than direct international flights out of Canada. With our flight leaving Buffalo at 6am we decided that driving down to Buffalo to afternoon before and staying overnight in a hotel was the best way to go. We left Oakville with about a foot of snow still covering the ground and arrived in Buffalo about 90 minutes later where they were clearing about another foot of fresh stuff from the hotel parking lot. Buffalo is south of lake Ontario and east of lake Erie so it gets heaps of snow, much more than Toronto. They call this the ‘Lake Effect’, the least snow is north of a lake with locations anti-clockwise from there getting progressively more snow. The hotel was okay, but some noisy neighbors annoyed us a few times, walls must have been made of paper. You’d all be amazed to hear that the whole family was up and out on time after a 4:30am wake up call and we easily made our flight after a long wait in the security queue.

While we were seated in the hotel’s transit bus I (Jo) had a funny sense of deja vu as I watched Andy trying to close the door to stop cold air getting in. When I was ten she went to New York with her Mum and Dad and kept locking the van door after every stop (Safety Girl) much to the annoyance of the bus driver who got progressively angrier at each stop. Man did I make that guy work for his tip. So when Andy was playing around with the door buttons he accidentally locked the drivers door and I watched in amusement as the driver flapped around with the buttons. Dad do you remember that?

We arrived in Las Vegas to find slot machines greeting us in the terminal as we came through the gate from the plane, so we knew that were in the right place. It was good to get to our room on the 26th floor of the MGM Grand; and when we looked out the window were delighted with our view that only improved as the daylight slipped into darkness. When we checked in it was only one o’clock so that gave us time to explore a little... well explore the pool area, a sure winner with the kids. It certainly refreshed everyone as we all began to relax. Check out the view from our hotel room in the panorama below, from the left the hotels are the Mandalay Bay, the Luxor (the pyramid), Tropicana, Excalibur (with the Camelot turrets), New York New York and the Monte Carlo. Out of shot further to the right is the Bellagio, Flamingo, Caesars Palace and the rest of the strip down to the Horseshoe (where the World Series of Poker is held).

The pool water was about 18 degrees and the air temp was about 14 but it was a welcome change to sub-zero and the sky was almost completely blue so in the sun it was really nice. We then decided that a walk down the strip to see the lights and sights was in order. Man what a walk! The kids were real troopers too and they needed to be with the next three days seeing us covering heaps of the strip mostly by foot. All the theme hotels are very cool and the attention to detail is pretty impressive. In the evening we found our way to the Mirage and watched the fake volcano errupt, it was pretty cool and the kids really enjoyed it. They call Vegas Disney for adults and they’re not overstating it, the number of street hustler trying to pull people into casinos with lures of freebies was staggering. Having the three kids made us pretty immune to this, and the guys pushing other sorts of nocturnal fun gave us some room too which was good.

We spent Friday taking it a little easier as we had booked tickets to see Ka, a Cirque de Soliel show at the MGM theatre. The show was absolutely amazing, we’ve never seen anything like it before. Just from a purely technical stand point it was awesome, the seats had stereo speakers built in to provide every audience member with their own surround sound setup and it worked brilliantly. The main stage was actually a huge pit that you couldn’t see the bottom of and mobile platforms moved and twisted through this space as the story played out. During battle sequences people would be thrown off the platforms and would simply fall head long into the huge pit never to be seen again. The main platform would twist from flat to completely upright while the performers were still on it creating for the audience a moving camera effect so that it appeared we were viewing the action from above as the performers were suspended on wires. Then add the incredible acrobatics and pure death defying stunts (many without wires) and we were left open mouthed for more than 90 minutes.

Well that’s all we’ve got for now, much more to tell about Vegas and our trip to the Grand Canyon, but that can wait for a day or so, cheers!

You're as Cold as Ice, and Hard Too!

Now I know what elbow pads are for. The skating is going really well, Cam can hammer around the whole rink on his own now and not look like falling over. The girls are looking more graceful and Jazz likes to try double spins and Jo has the backwards glide starting to work. Me, I like falling down and doing it hard and often. My left elbow has a bruise the size of a tennis ball on it and I’ve fallen on it two weeks in a row, talk about lucky. Actually I’m doing pretty well if I do say so myself, I can move around pretty quickly, stop with the side on slide (really cool!) and cross over my feet (going left works nicely, going right needs more work). With the weather really starting to bite and daily temps below zero all the time it wont be long until we can hit the local ponds. We bought Cam a hockey stick and puck and the girls have got their wish and now have figure skates and cute skirts. The temp today was -14, -24 with the wind-chill and and ‘extreme cold warning’ is in effect for Toronto over the next few days. We’ve had snow since a 15cm dump last Friday and it hasn’t melted at all. More snow is expected before the end of the week and this has the locals saying that we’re in for a brutal winter to match the extremely hot summer. Everyone mentions global warming.

I put up the Xmas lights outside the house, 4 strings of 70 LED style lights that are all the rage over here this season. A nice mix of gold and blue that simply doesn’t come close to matching the major efforts that many of our neighbours have gone too. Having said that there are houses with no lights at all so we’re certainly not the plainest house in sight. Jo also got a Xmas tree, real one, and the kids have decorated it with paper chains, beads and some lights, it looks great. With us being away in Vegas on the 25th we’re all hoping that Santa will remember to visit us so the kids have some presents to come home to later that week.

Work is really busy with our first real Design/Buil phase underway. Most of our requirements are pretty well detailed and we have assembled a decent team of senior people, mostly contractors, to perform the technical design and build work. Hopefully we’ll be in okay shape against our schedule by Friday so that the Monday and Tuesday of next week can be taken a bit easier prior to breaking up for the year. The end of year means two weeks of time off for me so after we return from Vegas I hope that we’ll get in some downhill skiing and skating outdoors.

I took my drivers license written test a couple of weeks ago. Man it was nerve-racking! I got my forms (2 x 20 questions on loooong sheets) and sat down in the exam room with maybe 6-8 others at varying stages of completion. Sitting in a chair with a small attached desktop I ran through the questions without too many problems, after my intense 1 hour study of the local rules book, until I reached a section that covered regulations for Learner and Probationary drivers (known here as G1 and G2 class). It just so happened that I didn’t read that section, sheesh! I had four multiple choice questions on the subject and was sure that I’d be able to guess the answers fairly well. I handed in my forms and returned to my seat to await the verdict and watched a steady stream of other hopefuls (most of whom looked and sounded like english was a second or third language) receive the bad news...

Examiner : Fairly quietly - “I’m sorry sir but you haven’t passed today”
Driver : ‘Keh?”
E : A little louder, the front row of the ‘class’ can clearly pick this up - “You failed sir, you’ll have to come back tomorrow and try again”
D : “Pass?”
E : Audible to all in the room - “No I’m afraid not sir, too many wrong, you must study again”
D : “Good! Drive now?”
E : Heard across the street - “No pass! No good! Come back tomorrow!”

As it turned out I had also screwed up nicely and got 3 out of 4 of those G1/G2 questions wrong (didn’t know until I got home and re-read the rules booklet). I was lucky to make it through that section needing 16 out of 20 to pass, I just scraped through. Got all the signs right though... so I’m not a complete half-wit :-).

I’ve now booked in for my practical driving test on Friday and am nervously awaiting that with my work collegues doing their best to scare the crap out of me... ‘Oh and make sure you signal during your three-point-turn, if you don’t it’s an instant fail’...’Check your mirrors and speedo every 3-4 seconds’...’The examiners never smile and wont respond to any small talk, they aren’t friendly at all and are just looking for an excuse to flunk you’. Yeah, I know, nice huh? It’s been nearly 20 years since I last had to do this so I’m preparing in the only way I know how... optimism and prayer. Wish me luck.

Oh the weather outside is frightful

You know how the song goes and with Christmas around the corner the fire certainly is delightful here. Not getting many days over zero now and flurries are predicted for just about every day this week. However a white Christmas is not an absolute cert. according to the locals, apparently it often snows 2 or 3 times before the end of December and then might dry up for a little while. In any case we’ll be in Vegas on the 25th so it wont matter either way, hopefully the fat red guy can manage without us cos the kids wont see their presents until the 28th. The houses in the neighbourhood are starting to be dressed up for the holiday with just about everyone choosing to hand lights outside. Some go further, the 6 foot hight inflatable snow globes with vacuum powered snow being blown around inside are a hoot, they’re about $200 at Canadian Tire but I haven’t been tempted yet :-). I hang our lights yesterday as there wasn’t much snow around (don’t want to slip off an icy ladder) but it was hairy enough in gusty -10 degree winds and some flurries. I had my cold weather gear on and it was hard to hang the lights off the guttering with my gloves on but the alternative was probably frost bite.

We had our first snow storm of the year about a week ago and I had to drive off to work in it. Getting to the office wasn’t too bad (took an hour rather than 40mins) but it continued to snow throughout the day so the car got covered. Luckily Jo had gone to Candian Tire the day before and bought a snow scraper so I had a nice ‘Fargo’ moment (without my gloves) cleaning the car before I drove off. Anti-freeze washer fluid is worth it’s weight in gold I can tell you. The journey home sucked with the 403 jam packed and everyone doing 5-10kph turning my 25k trip into a 90 minute crawl. I guess that’s better than seeing everyone try to drive at 100 in it though, that would have scared me. So it was snow shoveling the driveway and salting the paths on Saturday, you’ve gotta keep that accumulation down as the bottom layer turns to ice and it’s almost impossible to move. We’ve paid to have a guy come out throughout the season and clear the drive way after storms. It’s a pretty common thing to do here and costs about $300 for the whole winter, if there’s more than 5cm then he’ll be here before I leave for work and have the driveway cleared with a plow.

Oh yeah, when the Commonwealth Games is on next year whatever you do don’t drink Hardy’s Nottage Hill while you watch it. The buggers are sponsoring the Canadian team! Fricken cheeky I reckon.

Skating is going really well, it’s amazing how a few lessons really tidies your technique up. Jo and I are now pretty confident on our blades and I’ve almost got that cool stopping maneuver (side on blades showering ice everywhere) worked out, awesome! But going backwards is doing our heads in, Jo’s much better at it than me, I have no clue at all. Cam is getting much better too and can get around by himself fairly well, we’ll see how he goes today as we have a free skate session planned for the afternoon.

Does this Donut make me look Fat?

I’m drinking lots of coffee, much more than I used to... Jo and I are a bit addicted to Tim Hortons coffee. And of course it wouldn’t be coffee without a donut, now which one to have... the Honey Kruller? Maybe a Boston Creme... oh bugger it I’ll get a Blueberry Jelly one. Don’t tell me how many calories it is, I just don’t want to know [puts fingers in ears and says “I can’t hear you” over and over]. Timmies, as it’s locally known, does have good coffee. Lattes are not on the menu here although they do have an English Toffee Cappuccino just in case your donut doesn’t have quite enough sugar in it (or on it :-)). While at Timmies the kids will usually push for us to buy a box of Tim Bits... I know it doesn’t sounds good but get past the name and you get a box full of 20 (or 40) donut holes in a mixture of flavours like cherry, strawberry jelly, honey, maple, glazed, chocolate, blueberry and the list goes on... it’s turning into a bit of a family favourite, but to be truthful about it it’s a once a week deal, I’ve not actually put on 20kg’s... yet. Jazz prefers a Boston Creme, Abs sets her sights on a strawberry jelly and Cam ends up with it all over his face and comes up grinning.

Yes there is a lot of fast food over here but unlike home where there’s a Macca’s on every corner here there’s more variety. Harvey’s has outstanding burgers and onion rings, Licks would probably place second on my best burgers-list with Wendys and Burger King bringing up the rear, haven’t been to Dairy Queen yet...[mental note to self - go to Dairy Queen to continue research]. Sadly, although it’s the home of Pizza Hut and pizza appears to be a Canadian favourite, we’ve yet to actually have a pizza that we’ve really enjoyed... naturally we’ll keep trying.

We’ve sign up for whole family in skating lessons. After buying ourselves some 2nd hand skates last weekend (for about $30 a pair) we hit a local rink for a free skate on Sunday afternoon. The girls did a great job, we think that the small amount of roller blading that they did back home set them up nicely. Jo was a little less certain on her feet and Cam was completely lost of course, poor little guy. Jo and I didn’t really have a chance to get our feet and we had to hold onto poor Cam while he vainly tried to move by pushing his feet back and forth (of course not moving at all). So we took it in turns to handle Cam and did get him to hang onto a couple of witches hats that were provided for the kids in a roped off area, but he didn’t really enjoy himself so off came his skates after about 30 minutes and he played in the stand while we kept skating. I didn’t have too bad a time of it, but of course did well enough to get completely cocky and fell on my butt heaps of times. So lessons look like a good idea. The season actually started 5 weeks ago but we can join in late with lessons continuing right through until March (15 more weeks). The girls go on at 16:50 and Cam and us (in separate classes) go on an hour later, so I’ve arranged to get off work early every Monday so we can make it in time (still only got one car). Hopefully we’ll pick up some skills and start to really enjoy ourselves.

Some of our new local friends have told us that there’s skiing only 20 minutes drive away. It’s not double-black-diamond runs but will be more than enough for us given that other than Jo none of us have downhill ski’ed before. So as soon as we get a decent dump we’ll head off to Glen Eden for some ‘bunny-hill’ action, next stop Banff and Whistler I’m sure. And it’s not far away, we had snow flurries during yesterday and this morning woke up for find about 1cm of snow covering everything, xnlt! It’s 1 degree outside though... brrrrr! And that’s just the start of it...

Halloween and Pennsylvania

The last two weeks have flown by. Halloween was a hoot and I was able to make it home from work on time to prepare for the onslaught while Jo and the Kids got into the trick or treating action. Jasmine looked awesome with a green face and a wart on her nose, it’s a pity she didn’t have a costume :-). Abbie kitted out as a wicked purple pirate and Cam was making bad-guys shake in their boots as mini-Batman. With bags in hand, and Jo pulling the trusty wagon behind they set off at about 6pm just after the sun had set. Our pumpkins looked the part, especially the spooky tree design that Jo had chosen, I was pretty proud of my execution on that one. Jo had also set up a gravestone out the front complete with a green blow-up alien and combined with our cardboard skeleton we were good-to-go. Some people go all out, even weeks before the big night we had started to see graves dug in peoples front lawns, witches attached to the front of cars (as if they had been run over, looks hilarious!), scarecrows, heaps of carved pumpkins and lots of other freaky stuff... imagine the streets in Melbourne that go nuts with Christmas decorations and then convert it to a Halloween theme and you’ve got the idea.

Jo had set me up with a huge bowl of candy (ok, they’re lollies but I’m getting into the spirit) and I dealt with a steady stream of visitors all costumed up and ready to scare, I think around 30-40 groups of kids helped me offload the contents of the candy bowl. I did suggest to a few that I’d prefer a trick to a treat, just to see what they’d do, but most looked at me blankly and held out their hands for goodies so I guess that the trick part of Halloween is pretty much dead.

After being out for about an hour Jo returned with a tired Cam and a whole wagon filled to overflowing with sugar and starch, outstanding! The girls were keen to keep going so Cam stayed and helped me man the door for another 45 minutes or so and by around 8pm the stream of kids had pretty much stopped. On their return home all the loot was piled up in the lounge and the kids chowed down, we gave them a time limit though and they gladly trudged off to bed completely exhausted before 9pm. A pretty successful night all round and I think that it lived up to the kids expectations.

Last weekend we were invited to visit some new friends we had made while staying at a hotel just prior to moving into our home. Dan and Joyce Ballesty, and their tribe of Erin, Elise, Liam and Declan, are from Wattsburg Pennsylvania, near the town of Erie in the USA. We had a great time when we first met, staying up late and talking each others ears off. After successfully getting home from work just before the kids at around 3:15 we planned to set off straight away so avoid the weekend traffic which was expected to be harsh due to the unseasonably good weather. And it all would have worked out if I had been able to find my passport! After some frantic searching it turned up tucked in the back of the glove box in the car, man I was sweating for a while there. The drive to Wattsburg would take us past Niagara Falls, over the Peace Bridge into the US, through Buffalo (the capital of New York state) and then down Interstate 90 to Erie. A three hour drive turned into 4 due to a one hour stop at US immigration which was a bit of a drag, but now we have 3 month visa’s so we can slip straight through next time.

We had a great relaxing weekend with the Ballesty’s who spoiled us rotten and we hope we can return the favour soon. The weather was really mild on Saturday so we mostly spent it outside where I showed Declan how to kick a footy aussie-style and Dan wound up his arm with some well aimed flat passes NFL-style. We went for a walk at the local school, which has 3 campus’ for elementary, junior high and senior high, were Dan, Dec and I kicked an NFL footy around on the grid-iron field (complete with stands and lights, quite a setup). We also had a great stroll through the woods where the amber leaves had pretty much all fallen and laid out an incredible carpet. Needless to say a fair few leaves where picked up and thrown :-). The country side there is beautiful with rolling, green hills and small farms compete with those typical North American style barns and silos, magic stuff. In some ways it reminded me of the rolling hills of Silvan and Seville back home. Joyce and Dan told us that there is a pretty large Amish population in Pennsylvania and we hope to be able to get back there soon to see how these people live in the 21st century as though it was the 18th.

Sadly after a rainy Sunday we had to head home, but not until after Joyce and Dan stuffed us with pancakes, eggs, breakfast sausage (mmmmm sausage) and crispy bacon, luckily a heart attack forced me to lie down afterwards, truely awesome :-). The trip home was pretty easy and as is usually the case seemed to pass a lot faster than the outbound journey. Of course immigration at the Canadian border was a snap, the guy asked me a couple of questions and didn’t even open our passports. One thing that is interesting is the switch between Metric (Canada) and Imperial (US) measurements, the car has a button your push to switch when you go over the border and the speedo changes to suit, so if your going 100kph and hit the button to go to mph the needle just drops to indicate 60 and a dash light tells you that its now showing mph. Almost got picked up by a New York state cop for speeding... doing about 72mph in the 65 zone on the interstate... almost.

We finally made it Downtown

It’s getting colder each week and the leaves are really falling fast. The Weather Channel shows a two week extended forecast (more like a guess I think) and they show the average temp expected over that 14 day period. Every time we see it the two-week average is a degree lower :-), I think it’s still double digit, but only just. I hope I’ve mown the lawn for the last time this year, there’s not as much to cut as in Monbulk, but it’s a bit fiddley so it still takes a while. The leaves are turning awesome colours all around us, but it seems that every time we have a camera handy the light hasn’t been too good so no decent photos of natures display yet and time is running out.

This weekend has given us two great days with the sun nice and warm and few clouds around. Yesterday we decided that it was about time that we visited downtown Toronto so we packed up fairly early... okay we left at 10am but you know that’s pretty good for us. An IBM colleague, AJ a young bloke and developer on the project, had recently moved into an apartment on the harbour and had generously offered us parking if we came into the city. We hooked up with him, parked the car in his building and he walked us to the ferry terminal. We wanted to get over to Centre island, the main of the Toronto islands, but we found that the only ferry running was to Ward Island, looks like everything is starting to shutdown for the winter. We had to wait about 45 minutes so we went for a quick walk and went through a short section of the PATH, a series of linked underground walk ways and malls that can take you for 14klms under Toronto without you having to go outside. I expect that this is a very good thing in the middle of January. We made it back in time for the ferry and took a 10 minute ride over to Wards island. We had a nice stroll along the boardwalk and saw a few squirrels (the kids still go nuts when they see one :-)). Unfortunately there wasn’t that much to see, more indications of winter on the way, and with the ferry running only once an hour we didn’t want to get stranded there for too long. Next stop, CN Tower, after a 15 minutes walk broken by a stop for hot dogs. Nice dogs too with each one of us having our own combination of toppings ranging from olives to spicy pickled peppers and sauerkraut to sliced tomato.

The CN Tower is the highest freestanding structure in the world and dominates the Toronto skyline, you can see it from just about everywhere and because the surrounding landscape of so flat you can spot it from a long distance. Up close it doesn’t disappoint either really putting a crick in your neck and you strain to look straight up at it. It’s easily 1/3 taller that the tallest building in the CBD standing over 550m high. My Lonely Planet guide has this to say about the CN Tower - ‘its primary function is radio and TV communications, but relieving tourists of as much cash as possible is another priority.’ and they got that right. It cost us C$120 to get the family to the top. Being fair we did ‘spurge’ and pay around $5 extra each so we could visit the SkyPod, the highest viewing platform at 447m or an equivalent 140 storeys up. It was an amazing view and a great day for it although some haze meant that we couldn’t quite see the southern shore of lake Ontario, still fantastic stuff. Sadly photos and video just aren’t going to do justice to the experience, especially the GlassFloor which is pretty freaky. The glass panels are laminated and look like inch thick windows, apparently they can hold over a tonne of weight, but I didn’t see anyone trying to prove this by jumping up and down on them... I’m sure we all trusted the design and construction teams, but we’re not completely stupid :-). Naturally I showed my considerable nerve (read lack of judgement) by walking on the glass panels, but man it makes your heart leap when you look down... over 300m straight down! Of course Jo and the kids all had a go and were also freaked out a bit. We ended the day, after waiting for ages to get the lift back down, by stopping off at Tim Horten’s, a franchise coffee and sandwich store, on the way home for donuts. When I woke up this morning my legs were stuffed from all the walking, and Cam-carrying, I’d done the previous day, I don’t know how the girls managed, their walks to school much be toughening them up a bit... their Dad is getting a bit soft.

So Abbie has gone off to a birthday party today and Jo volunteered to help out so I’m amusing the other two kids (between typing this up). I’d say that we’ve pretty much settled in now, there’s only a few minor things that we’re missing (like bedside tables). I’ve got my Xbox running after buying a voltage converter and a wall in the lounge usually has TV projected on it every night. The wall is pale green in colour but you’d be hard pressed to tell with the projector doing a good job in fairly dodgy conditions. Even got a little/cheap 5.1 surround sound system, so you know that my inner-nerd is pretty happy. I swapped the rental car the other day as the GPS was costing me $10 a day and I can’t claim that expense through work. We generally seem to know where we’re going now with Toronto’s grid-like road layout being similar to Melbourne. If you know a few big East-West roads and a few big North-South roads then you can find your way around without much hassle. The new car is a Pontiac Grand Prix, and while the previous Buick was a bit quieter and smoother, the new car has a lot more power and is a bit sportier, nice. All-in-all we’re all feeling very at home here and all loving the experience, Toronto is a great place to be.

Enough already! Stiffy signing off ‘til next time.

Beer!

It’s not what I’m used to... if I want a beer in Melbourne I just go to the liquor department of the local supermarket, or a local bottleshop or pub. In Ontario there are only two places I can buy beer, and really there’s only one unless I want to pay an arm and a leg. All booze is sold through a government owned and operated chain of stores called the LCBO... Liquor Control Board of Ontario. If you want wine, spirits or anything alcoholic you have to go here (no competition does make the prices a little higher than I might have expected). They do sell beer at the LCBO but your can only buy in six-packs, if you want a slab you buy 4 six-packs and pay 4 time the price, no discount. If you want beer you do have another choice, you go to The Beer Store, another chain of stores, this time owned by the Canadian breweries. Here all you can buy is beer (nothing else, hence the name), and lots of different types, well over 100 brews. The LCBO buys their beer from the Beer Store... so the higher prices at the LCBO.

So far I’ve bought and enjoyed Steam Whistle, a nice pilsener, Sleeman Honey Brown, a dark golden lager, and Moosehead. The local staples, Lablatt and Molson haven’t had a go yet but they’re next on the list. Some other interesting local customs are -

1. Calling a slab ‘24’. As in ‘$24 for 24, plus deposit’.
2. ‘Deposit?’ I hear you ask... you remember when we were kids that you got money for returning softdrink bottles... they still do in SA right? (Remember that Seinfeld episode with Kramer and Newman crossing the border with a mailtruck full of empties?) Well empty stubbies have a bounty attached, you pay upfront a deposit per bottle and get it back for returns... I’m considering getting a ute :-).

Matter a fact I’ve got it now....

Brain Dump

This is gunna be a big brain dump... forgive me if I crap on forever, it's been as busy a week as I think we've ever had, this email could be an insomniacs dream...

The 14 hour flight from Melbourne to LA was pretty good, of course you're racing away from the sun so it goes down nice and quick ( it was dark at about 14:00 Melbourne time). The food was awesome, Jazz got most of the way through a smoked salmon salad which was pretty amazing. Neither Jo or I had much to drink, except for plenty of water. The flight left an hour late and they told us that they would make it up in the air, of course they didn't and we landed in LA with about 50 minutes to catch our connecting flight. This would have been okay except that despite the fact we were only transiting through LA to Toronto we still had to go through customs and immigration (Jo and I had our finger prints and pictures taken by our big US brothers), pick up our luggage (all 11 major items plus our already impressive quantity of cabin baggage, luckily the Qantas ground staff took pity on us and got us a porter with a huge trolley), x-ray and re-check our baggage in [sheesh!], get our boarding passes, clear out-going security and then get to the gate lounge. I can't understand how I didn't lose a boarding pass, passport or limb during this process. Safe to say that we made it onto our connecting flight, but the aircraft door hit me as it closed :-).

The 4.5 hour flight to Toronto from LA wasn't so bad, we'd all had between 1.5 and 3 hours sleep on the x-Pacific flight and despite this I think only Abs had a snooze. The flight, rather than go in a straight line from LA, went almost directly east to Kansas before heading north. Hurricane Rita was in Texas and we skimmed around the northern edge of the system, wasn't really even bumpy, we kept our distance. It was pretty funny hearing the head hostie on the flight, unlike the Qantas announcements which were always very polite, the American Airlines tone was quite the opposite 'Now look, I've told you more than once, stay in your seats unless you really need the bathroom, we're trying to serve the refreshments here and you're making our lives pretty difficult.' Hilarious.

We were met at Toronto airport by the IBM BCS partner, Pierre, who had arranged the assignment. After landing at around 17:00 we finally cleared customs and immigration around 19:00 (much longer than in LA cos we had to get our work and study permits processed). A porter charged us CA$24 to transport our luggage what ended up being about 200 meters and then had the cheek to tell Jo, while I was getting the hire-car, that the $5 tip (we didn't have any coins) was not enough. Jo told him not to push his luck. There is a new law here in Canada that kids under 30 kg's must be in a booster seat, luckily Pierre had bought a couple along (he has two kids himself) so we loaded his SUV with our luggage and resolved to follow him to our apartment. Pierre drove off expecting us to follow while the Hertz drone decided that I needed to produce my ID again before letting me out of the car park (despite clearly having the key to the car and all the signed rental contract. By the time we got out of the car park Pierre was no where to be seen... We thought we'd give it a go, after all how complex could the roads be, and this driving on the right was a piece of cake right? Yeah good one. After 5 minutes of fruitless driving in a multi-level maze of interconnecting flyovers we called Pierre on the mobile... took us a while but we managed to find him again... of course we didn't have the apartment address handy (in our haste it was in some of the luggage that Pierre had taken) so we couldn't use the cute talking GPS unit in the car.

The apartment, at 285 Enfield Pl, Mississauga looked fine by the time we had made 3 or 4 trips from the sub basement 3 car park to the 11th floor transferring luggage. Sadly the next morning this feeling faded as we actually looked upon it with fairly clear eyes (we'll we all woke up at 2:30am for a few hours, fricken jet lag). The white tile floor of the kitchen was covered in hair of various lengths, from short and curlies to longer suckers. Frankly I don't want to think where it came from, animal or human, uugggg. The kitchen walls a nice butter colour nicely disguising the food splatters/stains, the ripped show curtain, the semi-functional air conditioning, the broken plastic vertical blinds, the hair caught in the lining of the master bedroom mattress, the vacuum cleaner that actually deposited more gunk than it sucked up... anyway you get the picture, it was a real honeymoon spot and we had paid $700 for the week. Before moving out we needed an alternative and that took me three days... IBM here simply didn't know anywhere, amazing. The relocation consultants in Canada frankly aren't much good for anything except ensuring my tax details (for equalisation through Ernst and Young) and a multitude of forms are filled out. So my searching was pretty much limited to the web while at work... oh yeah I rocked up for work on Monday of course and have worked every day this week with a couple of slightly early days. The deal over here regarding serviced apartments seems to be that some guy buys a dozen apartments in a condo, advertises them on the web like it's a professional corporation and then rocks up with a key when you turn up at the front desk. It's been a fun week :-).

Starting on Sunday Jo and I contacted the real estate agents we had been researching and emailing before we left. 99.9% of homes are rented unfurnished so we planned to use about 2/3 of our budget on rental and the other 1/3 on renting furniture. A the first house we saw in Mississauga (pronounced 'missy saga') looked ideal and the kids saw their first squirrel (much excitement I can tell you). We had pretty much decided that we would
take it and Jo arranged to check out the local school the next day (Monday). The school was okay but nothing special. We checked out another agent and he had the deal of a lifetime, really. Fully furnished 3 story home, 2 gas log fireplaces, home theater all wired (minus components) already setup in the basement, patio setting and umbrella in the backyard including a great bbq. Beds for all the kids etc and on our budget, it was the agents next door neighbors house and she was getting married to a guy with a bigger house and more furniture, we were almost freaking out the house was awesome. The next day though Jo checked out the school and it didn't have a very good academic record (you can go to a government website and view the results of their mandatory year 3 and 6 testing over the last few years). So we put it on hold and thought we might find something in Oakville, which is the next suburb to the west of downtown Toronto and is known as the place that CEO's live and expats and long term assignee's like to rent. Jo found a few places and a great school but at the last moment the Oakville agent was called by the guy who painted her house who wondered if she leased fully furnished homes... not normally she said but she had had an Aussie in just that day looking for exactly that. The rest is history, we sign the lease tomorrow. The guy who owns the house is a Scotsman who lived for 7 years in St Kilda and is planning on spending the long cold Canadian winter in Durban, Sth Africa. We hope to move in next Thursday, but we have to get the $6800 security deposit from IBM is Australia first and that might take more than a week so we might be delayed. I'll send some photos once we're setup finally.

The IBM crew over here have been great and know their stuff, so far I'd say that the PM is one of the best I've worked with. The project is going to be challenging... I'll tell you if we're succeeding next week :-).

All in all Toronto is a nice place, the Autumn (read Fall) is good, today was 24 degrees (Celsius :-)) and sunny. But apparently it's going to get cold quickly and that will last from last December to early March at least, so far the weather has been pretty good to us. We haven't really made it to see anything yet, saw the CN tower from about 10k's away the other day, just been too busy focused on finding a school and permanent digs. Maybe Niagara Falls this weekend, or off up Lake Ontario to visit Jo's Uncle Max in Belleville... we'll see, the kids are keen on 10 pin bowling (the new apartment has broadband, a theater and 4 bowling lanes in the building :-)).

Our hire car is a Buick Allure and it's pretty cool, just has the steering wheel on the wrong side. The GPS unit is funky and has been a savior a few times but we don't want to rely on it cos we'll never find our own way around if we do. I've seen one police car this whole week, and we have been driving a lot. The speed limit on the expressways is 100kph but most ppl drive at around 120-130... this is normal apparently, Jo and I have kept close to the speed limit for the most part. We're thinking of buy a couple of cars while we're here but that'll depend on the financials, although cars are pretty cheap here, had my eye on a 2002 540i BMW wagon for Jo, only $29K. Strangely Subaru's are quite expensive here, a 2002 Outback was around the same price as the Beemer. This is weird given the stories we've heard about driving in winter, I would have thought everyone would want 4WD in a sedan over here. Mostly everyone has rear wheel drive cars and some of them are pretty big (althought not as many of these as I suspect are south of the border).

It's Thanksgiving Monday -week and we get the day off, Jazz is looking forward to Halloween later this month, apparently it's a really big deal here and everyone gets into it pretty seriously. They also have a big Xmas parade in each town in late November (before it gets too cold for the kids to be out for extended periods) so we're looking forward to that.

Okay, so I've crapped on long enough, I'm sure that any future updates wont be anywhere near as boring or lengthy. We'd like to say that we're missing you all, and we would be if we had the time... cheers!

First impressions

Just some quick comments after a few days here...

1. Jo and I are getting used to driving on the wrong side of the road :-). Thank god we have a talking GPS unit in the hire car, although once we get used to the street layout it wont be too bad, mostly it's a huge grid.
2. The temporary apartment we are in is not very good, I am trying to arrange a nicer one and if I can get one we will move in there on Saturday.
3. We have seen a couple of houses but one stands out from the rest. It's in our budget, is fully furnished (really nice furniture), backs onto the Credit River (which has a nature reserve either side of it with walking trails etc), is fairly close to a new elementary school and is very nice to look at (stylish). The owner is currently in it so we have to confirm that we want it and then wait a week or so before we can move in (she has to move out).
4. The weather has been variable, generally high humidity, but it rained yesterday (was the end of Hurricane Rita coming up from Texas) and today it's beautiful, about 22 degrees and blue skies. The locals tell us that winter is damn cold but it's not as bad as 30 years ago, in fact it gets milder each year... global warming...
5. We haven't touched base with Max or the rest of the Rhodes/Gordon side of the family yet, we've been too busy to really think about much else but housing, schools and work. Just finding supermarkets and other basic stuff has been time consuming.
6. Sleeping has been a bit of a problem, a combination of jet-lag and sickness (Abbie and I are still not over our colds). I know that Jo is very tired, poor girl.
7. The flight was very nice, Jasmine ate her way almost all the way through a smoked salmon salad, that girl will try anything when it comes to food! We had a nervous few moments in Los Angles when we had to transfer from Qantas to the American Airlines flight to Toronto, almost missed the plane (Qantas was 1 hours late into LA).
8. Haven't had any real fun yet, just getting by and finding our legs, but hoping to get to Niagara Falls on the weekend.