Thursday, May 26, 2005

Quebec Trip

I went to Quebec City on Wednesday, for business, and here's how the trip went down:

The alarm went off at 5:00am. Unfortunately, it's my wife's alarm, and I never hear it go off, meaning that she had to wake me up. So the conversation went something like this:

Her: That's for you.
Me: What's for me?
Her: The alarm.
Me: What alarm?
Her: [nudges me]
Me: [starts to realize what's going on.] OH! Right. Sorry. [finally gets out of bed.]

Hopefully, after that, she was able to get back to sleep.

The flight to Quebec was uneventful.

When I got in the cab, to take me from the airport to the office where I was going, the first thing I told the cab driver is that I don't speak French. Then for most of the trip he carried on a very loud conversation with someone on the phone, in French, and halfway through I got paranoid, and thought "Maybe I should have been trying to listen to this conversation. What if they're talking about me?"

Him: I have this stupid English guy in my car.
Her: What a fool!
Him: I will charge him many dollars more than is required for this trip!
Her: Ha ha ha!
Him: Ha ha ha!

Luckily I didn't hear him laughing like that, or looking derisively in the mirror at me, so I'm hoping this conversation didn't actually take place. Also, they have some kind of law in Quebec that they're only allowed to charge $27.00 (or, as they say in Quebec, 27,00$) for trips to and from the airport, so he couldn't overcharge me anyway.

My morning was pretty productive.

At lunch we went out for sushi, and the waitress there had an extremely deep, raspy voice. I was mesmerized by it; I was delighted any time she came to our table to ask us how things were going, because it was so cool to hear that voice.

My afternoon was pretty productive.

I left the office a little early, and headed back to the airport earlier than I needed to for my flight. I had hoped to ask them if I could catch an earlier flight back, but the woman at the ticket counter was kind of nasty, so I didn't bother. Which makes me the fool, because while I was waiting for my flight, another flight to Toronto left, which seemed to be mostly empty, so I could have gotten on it, I'm sure. Also, while I was waiting for the flight, I finished reading my book, which left me with not much else to do.

On the flight back, they said that the plane was too empty, so to balance the plane properly, they asked if everyone could move, so that we were all sitting in the back half of the plane, instead of the front half. I'd never seen that before, so it didn't fill me with confidence.

The flight itself was pretty uneventful, except that I really noticed how small the plane was. It was bumping all over the place, and when the pilot was turning, you could really tell that the plane was turning. For a minute I thought he was going to barrel roll the darned thing. But he didn't and I got back safely. Plus, I had a bit of a nap on the return flight, which was much needed.

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