Back home in Canada

I am back home at my old apartment after a long day of traveling and making awesome new friends.

It started at my apartment in Emeryville, then a BART trip to SFO, then I paid for my overweight luggage (hehe that sucked) and then met a friend from Waterloo who was working in Palo Alto for the term and he told me about his time out in the Bay area. Then we got bagels and drinks and hung out for a while as the plane was delayed about 1 hour and 15 minutes. Then we boarded the plane and it was awesome as it was not packed as usual, so me and the girl sitting in my row of 3 seats had a seat between us so we could spread out our carryon luggage and stuff. It was fantastic.

Even crazier is this insanely cool/crazy coincidence, turns out the girl sitting in my row knows some of my friends from high school. Crazy! We chatted for a bunch of time and she was totally awesome, yyeeeahh new friends! :)

So the plane ride was great and no worries for the delay. When I got to Toronto an Airporter picked us up reasonably quickly and I met a dude at the baggage claim who looked a LOT like a Waterloo Co-op student, haha and he totally was. Turns out he was at Sun Labs and it sounds like he had an AWESOME term out there, wow it sounds like a cool place to work I think. He is a Computer Engineer so he pretty much does Computer Hardware only, so it was really cool to hear about the kinds of classes he is taking, since Computer Engineering was my alternative to Computer Science and I could have decided to go for that instead. Sounds interesting and cool and stuff but I am definitely glad I am rockin' the Computer Science vibe, since it rocks kindof a lot. :)

The Airporter was fast to get home, and the bus driver was hilarious. He said something soon after we got into the van about how "It has been real nice this week, up to about 18 or 22 degrees" (ahh, FINALLY back to temperature in Celcius), and how "it is probably going down to 0 tonight." "Well", he said, "I guess there might be one disadvantage to living in Canada" haha. Awesome.

So I am now sitting on my old couch in my old apartment in Waterloo, no one else is here, and I am sitting here. I say nothing helps you reminisce about an amazing wonderful awesome time in California than an entire box of KD (Kraft Dinner or Kraft "Mac and Cheese" for my American brethren in the crowd), and a couple episodes of Chapelle's show. Sweet.

It was an awesome time in California and I sure loved it out there. The trip home today went well and was overall much less stressful than last time... plus I got to chat to lots of nice people along the way and that made it pretty darn enjoyable. It is although, pretty sweet to be home.

As I was walking around with my stuff in the Toronto Airport, I saw a 4-wheel airport cart drive by me, with a flashing light on it. It was a Toronto Airport employee driving around some older people with their baggage after their long flight back to Toronto. They were smiling at me so I waved at them and gave them a thumbs-up and said, "That looks like fun!" They seemed to agree with me. The best part is the "horn" on this little courtesy vehicle... in true Canadian fashion, it was a little, tinkley bell. "Ring ring, ring ring" was the noise from the "horn" of the vehicle as the driver was driving through the terminal. "Ring ring, ring ring", as if to say, "Excuse me, kind sir. May I please drive my vehicle around you in a polite and pleasant manner?"

It's nice to be home.