Blessed by the Potato

I made it to Victoria safe and sound, and the flight, even at 5 hours, was pretty decent. I had my worries at first because there was a small baby seated across from me, and I had nightmarish visions of screaming and crying, but she was actually great and didn’t cry at all. She’d even smile when I turned over and waved.

I was starting to drag a fair bit when I got in though because I just couldn’t quite get to sleep on the plane. I completely spaced about the shuttle bus (~$15) from the airport and just grabbed a cab instead which set me back $55. In my defense, I was swayed by the fact that the cab was a bright yellow Prius. In fact, Victoria seems to be something of a hybrid mecca: virtually every cab is either a Prius or a Camry hybrid, and the ones that aren’t are Yarises (how Toyota got such a lock on the Victoria cab market I can’t really say). That is, of course, how it should be given how much of an improvement hybrids make to cab-like driving. The trip in from the airport averaged about 5.8 L/100 km. Even the “regular” cars seem to have a higher proportion of hybrids and smaller cars; hardly any SUVs at all.

I went for a nice long walk when I first got in and the weather was great. After that it was nap time. When I got up, I was surprised to see the sun still shining since they were calling for rain tonight. I went out for another walk in search of dinner, but came up empty-handed. Apparently Victoria closes at 8, even in Chinatown. I spent nearly an hour walking around trying to find an East Side Mario’s that I swear I had seen close to the hotel when I was walking around earlier, but never did find it. After checking the Yellow Pages, it looks like it doesn’t exist, which makes me wonder if I dreamed I saw and East Side Mario’s, and if I’m tireder than I think I am.

I just checked the schedule for the conference, and I don’t have anything until 6 pm tomorrow, so I’m trying to decide what to do. I found a place that rents bikes, but now my legs are hurting after over 2 hours of walking today. It also looks like the car rental place across the street has a Prius, so I might see if I can rent it and go on an extended test drive and trip up into the mountains of Vancouver Island, maybe find a beach and have a pic-nic or something. If you’ve got any suggestions, leave them quickly (I’ll be making up my mind around 12pm Ontario time).

There were three separate accidents on the 401 during my drive back to London last week. The worst one happened in Guelph, which is out of the usual coverage range of 680 News, so when they reported on it (even though it was just a brief “hey, you’re fucked eh!”) I knew it was going to be bad and after sitting in stop and go barely crawling traffic for over 20 minutes I pulled off into the rest stop as soon as I could see it (with only a little bit of driving by the jam on the shoulder… hey, I had to pee!). I decided to kill some time there and let the accident get itself cleaned up, and listened to the radio in my car for a bit to try to get an update (though I could plainly see that the traffic was still just crawling by the rest stop). Eventually they said that the accident was near the “highway 8” overpass, which didn’t actually help me any. While I know many of the major interchanges and landmarks on this route that I travel essentially every week (twice every other week, that is), I had no idea where exactly highway 8 crossed the 401, or how far from where I was that accident then was. I knew that there were a number of decently high-speed highways/rural roads that I could have taken to detour around the accident, but not specifically which ones.

Fortunately, there was a map in the rest stop and I found the information I wanted. The side roads get a little complex around Guelph and Cambridge, so it would have required memorizing quite a few turns, so I decided to just wait it out in the comfort of the rest stop rather than try to navigate around based on a memorized (or hand-drawn) map.

In the end, the traffic started clearing up within another 10 minutes or so and I was back on my way, but the experience made me realize for the first time that a GPS mapping device might be handy. Of course, I don’t want a GPS device since I don’t want to have to remember another thing to take with me, or another charger for another thing, and because even on sale they’re fairly expensive.

Part of why they’re expensive though is that they have a GPS locator in them. It’s been a long, long time since I was ever so lost I didn’t have a clue where I was, so I don’t really think I need a GPS locator; I just need a good set of maps. So far, I’ve had a lot of good success with Mapquest and/or Google maps, printing off maps for anywhere I’m going in advance. But for situations where I unexpectedly get stuck, maps might be handy. And, since I almost always take my laptop with me on long trips, some mapping software seemed better than a giant map book.

Enter Microsoft Streets & Trips 2007. I just finished installing it on my laptop, and it has maps. Maps of Ontario, maps of Quebec, and maps of PEI. I’m set. At full-price for this year’s version (with optional GPS transponder so you can have your laptop bark out voice-guided navigation just like other GPS nav systems) it’s a little pricey for that, but at bargain-bin cheap-as-free for last year’s version, I’m pretty happy just to get maps on my laptop. Some of the other features I haven’t looked at yet include a list of “points of interest” such as parks, gas stations, and hotels (which must already be slipping out of date). What I would really like to see is a list of 24-hour drug stores and drive-throughs, but I doubt that kind of information is in it. Another neat feature which I haven’t tested myself at all yet is the ability to plan a trip, include your vehicle’s fuel capacity and estimated mileage, and it will add refueling stops to the route plan. Not much of a selling point for me since my car has a bigger bladder than I do, but maybe that turns your crank.

So the first thing I did when I got back was to get a pizza. I missed pizza so much over there… 10 days isn’t much to go without pizza, and I’ve done that many, many times in the past completely without noticing, but going without the possibility of pizza starts to erode the psyche. It makes their whole society seem like its a hollow sham, waiting to fly apart at the seams into unbridled anarchy. After all, where can a society expect its members to function normally when they must live each day without the security blanket that is knowing good pizza lies just a phone call away? Of course, they probably think the same thing about our society and the lack of good train/bus service.

They might be right.

The flight home was ok: completely packed this time, so we didn’t have the luxury of the empty seat. We were getting awfully sick of fish and rice, though. I mean, I don’t even eat the stuff yet I was sick of seeing and hearing about it. The dinner on the plane was fish and rice (we were aware of the fact that chicken and pasta was also an option, but it looks like everyone at the front of the plane opted for that so they were out by the time they got to us), and it reeked. Breakfast on the plane was… fish and rice (or a nasty-looking omlette and a sausage that even Dave wouldn’t eat). Our lunch/snack was an assortment of tiny sandwiches, and a giant seaweed-wrapped concoction of fish and rice.

Today’s featured Facebook gift is a paper crane. LOL, I can’t escape!

I slept 14 hours last night. It was pretty good — it would have been better if the fan at my parents house didn’t have an auto temperature detector/shutoff that made it cycle on and off all night. Stupid electronics trying to be smarter than me…

At least three times now I’ve meant to go out for ice cream (once leading an expedition for it), and three times we’ve found all the places we could find closed up. Today I finally went to the place that had the fancy crepes and ice cream, and got myself a tiny bowl. It was much more expensive than I thought: 300 Yen (~$3) for a tiny, tiny little scoop. It was really good orange ice cream though (not quite sure if it was sherbert, gelato, or something else… I think its closest to a traditional sherbert), so I think I might go back this afternoon before they close on me again, or maybe tomorrow morning, and spring for the 1100 Yen crepe + 2 scoops + toppings. Plus I probably should try the green tea flavour (thankfully this particular store doesn’t trade in whale flavour).

Yesterday, Dave completely lost his mind. Too many nights in a row drinking and not sleeping, and all of a sudden he was giggling like a madman at anything. As he was trying out the TMS stimulator, he was giggling uncontrollably. At dinner, he nearly lost it laughing over the picture of the sausage in the menu. This, I assure you, was not a normal giggling fit, but clearly one that bordered on madness. Actually, it lay on the madness side of the border, so I should say it bordered on sanity. Despite desperately needing to sleep, when he got back to the hotel he stayed up until dawn (which, to be fair, is at 4 am here — I don’t think they’re in the right timezone for their longitude) uploading photos to facebook.

Facebook, meanwhile, has started to scare me. They have all these stories, pictures, information on links and relationships between people, and chintzy gifts. The only purpose I can see for all this is that they aim to slowly replace us with robots, or perhaps pod-grown versions of ourselves, and this information is necessary for the first wave to fit in without drawing undue alarm.

For dinner tonight we found an out-of-the way Italian restaurant that was fantastic. It only had two tables and seating at the bar for about 6, but the food was really quite good, even by Canadian standards of Italian food. I had a plain penne with arrabiata, and Gen had linguini with salmon and I think a pesto sauce. The proprieter was a very friendly old woman who spoke 4 languages (including passable English). Like many places, we had a bit of trouble walking out with a receipt: it seems to be a pretty foreign concept here, at least for food.

For all those who doubted its existence, behold: bacon bread!

Well, the conference has ended, I’ve taken a nap, won 3rd place in the poster competition, and now I have to figure out what to do with myself for two days. About half our group is heading to Kyoto, perhaps to climb mount Fuji, and the other half is already in Tokyo. Presently, I’m leaning towards going to Tokyo, if only to make my trip home an 18-hour one instead of a 24-hour one.

Tonight, we went looking for dinner down one of the many long, winding alleyways. We found yet another, smaller, dodgier alleyway off of that one, which was barely wide enough for 3 people to stand abreast, and where the roofs were below Dave’s head. So far we’ve done okay ordering off menus with pictures, even where English was completely lacking. At the end of that alley though, we weren’t feeling quite as adventurous, so we went to another place on the main street that was kind of interesting. Before going in we thought it would be sushi and the like, but instead they had a variety of other things. I ended up getting fries with a strange spice/flavouring on them, while my travelling companions Dave and Carlos got large shrimp, chicken, seaweed (plus lettuce and some other stuff) salads.

The last day of the conference was quite interesting. I got to participate in a live demonstration of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), and watched as my motor cortex was involuntarily stimulated and my hands jerked. It was especially interesting because I had read somewhere that the scalp nerves were painfully stimulated at the same time. I mean, it just makes sense that that would be the case, since the induced fields that are activating the brain are even stronger in the scalp… but surprisingly, it didn’t hurt at all. When my arms were being stimulated, it felt like being electrocuted (I’ve never been seriously electrocuted, but we did have a short in the lab that sent a bit of a tingle up my arm, and I have touched the electric cow fences in PEI).