Blame Canada!

I’m here in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. In fact, as I type this up, I’m looking out my hotel window at the Saint John sign, up on a hill in the distance. Similar to the famous Hollywood sign, but trust me, far less spectacular.

Getting here was quite fun. Landed in Toronto, and was put through customs, and immigration. Apparently it’s the wrong answer to say that you are coming to Canada on business. That only opens the red leaf covered lid on the box of annoyed immigration employee questions. The thing that I found amusing was that all over the airport I saw workers who were from the Middle East. In fact, the woman at the immigration window was Middle Eastern. Wrap your turban around that chunk of irony.

I had a bad feeling approaching the immigration window when I saw that I was the only person heading that way. No one in line, and no one in sight, save the aforementioned Middle Eastern woman. Said woman greeted me with the enthusiasm of a comatose quadriplegic dog. She seemed to take pleasure in deriving a new question from every response I gave her. Once I thought that I had reached a point of finality in this exchange, she asked me to produce a copy of the sales order for the equipment that I am up here to install. Not happening. I had no such thing in my possession. Finally, with what I am sure was great joy on her part, she got the opportunity to scold me.

She explained to me in far too much detail, that I needed such a document when entering Canada to do business. Okay. What else would I be coming to Canada for? Anyway, she gave me a long gaze of disappointment, then stamped my customs document and let me go. I felt like it might have been easier to declare on the paperwork that I had a hundred Ziploc bags of cocaine shoved up my ass than to answer her absurd business questions. I just hope that if she ever decides to visit the US one day that our customs agent assumes she is mujahideen and puts a Patriot Act style Guantanamo beating on her ass.

Okay, enough of that. I finally get to Saint John, and get off the plane to be greeted by freezing temperatures accompanied by what feels like a 50 mile per hour north wind. Nice. I arrive at gate 1 of 2, and the entire inside of the airport resembles someone’s garage. The people are fairly nice though, and I get my rental car to be off on my way. Of course I have no clue what the temperature is outside because everyone either displays or reports it in Celsius. Furthermore, speeds are in kilometers per hour, and so on and so forth. I forget that in the past Canada went the way of the lemming and signed on to the metric system. I agree that is a better system overall, but I don’t care. I want what I am accustomed to.

The drive to the hotel is fairly uneventful, aside from the constant feeling of being lost, thanks to the rural path from the airport to the city. I really thought that I was screwed when I passed a massive oil refinery surrounded by vast regions of nothing, but I was on the right road. Got to the hotel and didn’t go to sleep until after 3AM thanks to the fact that this is Atlantic time here and I’m two hours past my time back home.
Today was better, got to check out several things in the vicinity of the hotel. It’s a pretty nice town overall. That’s all for now, but I’m still here so this will be continued…..