DanT1999

I went to a business meeting for 2 days in June 2005 in Hartford, Connecticut, on the east coast of the USA about halfway between NYC and Boston. Hartford is known as “insurance city”, as over 40 insurance companies are based there. I hadn’t been to the east coast since I was a teenager, so I was pretty excited about going back. Let me tell you though, if you ever plan a trip to the east coast of the USA, avoid Hartford like the plague!! Stay in New York or Boston, but don’t go to Hartford! For being such a prominent city for the business of insurance and the capital of the state of Connecticut, I was shocked to see how run-down the city was, and I didn’t feel that safe walking around there in the evening. The capital building was nice, but it’s hard to find anything else redeeming about the city. It is very poor, and there seems to be a gang problem, and there are police everywhere. There are no good restaurants and all the shops seem to close by 7PM. The summer weather is even very hot and unpleasantly humid. I feel fortunate that most of my time in the city was spent in the safe, air-conditioned conference room of a hotel. Lots of people work in Hartford but most of them live outside of the city (and I don’t blame them at all!) and commute there to work from the suburbs. The nice, talkative taxi driver who took me back to the airport (I remember her particularly because she said she couldn’t believe I was 27 and that I looked like a teenager and too young to be going to Hartford for business… this was the highlight of my trip) said she felt bad that Hartford is the only encounter many people have with Connecticut since Connecticut, she said, is actually a beautiful state… I don’t doubt what she said because from the parts outside of Hartford that I did see, I get the impression it is a very nice place with green everywhere, and I hope that in the future I will have to opportunity to explore the rest of the state…

My first time in Schiphol was in July 2000. I was 22 years old, and it was my first time traveling abroad. My pen pal Volker in Berlin, who was the same age as me, had invited me to spend a couple of weeks with him as he had just gotten his first apartment of his own. Since, I myself had been working in my first real job out of university, for the first time I actually had money to travel so I was excited at the opportunity to see another part of the world and to finally meet someone whom I had only known through letters the previous five years.

The best price I was able to find for a flight out of LAX to go to Berlin was on Martinair Holland to Amsterdam with a connecting flight on KLM to Berlin with an hour layover in between. It was my first time traveling so I didn’t realize then how foolish it was to leave such a short time between connecting flights. I started getting nervous in LA because the flight was delayed about half an hour before takeoff. Plus, I didn’t realize that I would have to go through customs in Amsterdam and recheck my luggage before going on to Berlin.

When I did arrive in Amsterdam, I though I might have just enough time to catch my connecting flight. The line through customs moved more quickly than I had expected. I had never been through customs before. The lady at the desk, who spoke English (I was worried about having language difficulty), just asked me what the purpose of my trip was and then stamped my passport with its first stamp. It seemed too easy. I proceeded to the baggage claim area where I realized there was no way I was going to make my connecting flight since it took forever before my bag finally came out. While waiting, I heard an announcement requesting that the passenger from Los Angeles report back to customs. “Which passenger?” I wondered to myself briefly. I may not have been paying full attention to the message since I was worried about rebooking my flight to Berlin and what Volker, who was supposed to pick me at the airport in Berlin, would think when I didn’t arrive on the flight I told him I’d be on. Since we never met before, I wondered if he’d think that I just stood him up.

After I got my bag, I went to the KLM desk and booked the next available flight, which would leave in a little over an hour, and rechecked my luggage. There were KLM flights from Amsterdam to Berlin every two hours. The ticketing agent didn’t even ask to see my ID or anything when I was checking in, which kind of surprised me. I felt relieved and thought the next thing I would do is try to call Volker, whom I had never called before, at the number he had given me and let him know I would be late. I also checked that I had all my documentation in order, including my passport. Suddenly, I was overcome with panic. I couldn’t find my passport anywhere!

What do you do when you lose your passport? The first thing I did was go to one of the information desks in the airport. When I asked the woman behind one of these desks if she spoke English she seemed almost offended. At that time I didn’t realize just how widely spoken English was in Europe and that the Dutch in particular pride themselves on their linguistic abilities. In any event, she told me that losing my passport was a very serious thing and that I needed to report it to the police. She told me where the airport police station was.

I was beginning to panic that I would be stuck in the Netherlands or have to pay a huge amount of money resolving my passport issue. It seemed like my trip was ruined before it even really started. I was a grown adult, but I still felt like a helpless teenager. When I got to the police station, there were two young officers behind the desk. One was a handsome young guy who looked typically Dutch and the other was a black guy who didn’t speak English as well as the other. I didn’t appreciate the ethnic diversity of the Netherlands at that time. I told the officers I had lost my passport. They asked me when and where, and I said I wasn’t sure but I thought it was probably when I was coming out of customs. Next they asked me my name and where I was from, and I told them. Then, much to my amazement, they pulled out my passport and returned it to me. I couldn’t believe that someone actually had the decency to turn it in. The white officer told me that I was an extremely lucky guy because US passports are very valuable on the black market and warned me to be extra careful with it and to try not to lose it again. I said for sure I would be guarding it with my life. I felt as if I could have kissed him, that’s how relieved and grateful I was.

The rest of the time I spent in Schiphol before my flight to Berlin was pretty uneventful. I couldn’t figure out how to use the pay phone in the airport to make a call to Germany and let Volker know I was going to be late, and I was too shy to ask anyone how to. Fortunately, when I got to Berlin Volker was there. He was surprised and a little nervous when I wasn’t on the original flight, but the KLM agent, who wasn’t allowed to divulge information about passengers, implied to him that I would be on the next flight in…

I went to Victoria in July 2001 with my friend Dennis, whom I had actually just met a couple of days earlier in Vancouver. We hit it off unusually well, even despite the fact he was 14 years older than me. He was going to a town called Duncan on Vancouver Island for his high school reunion and didn’t have anyone to go with so he asked me if I wanted to tag along. Duncan wasn’t too far from Victoria, so I could explore Victoria while he went to his reunion…

Here are just some random memories and ramblings on my first night in Victoria:

The first thing I remember doing in Victoria is going to Eaton’s searching for clothes that could make Dennis look young at his reunion. A woman laughed when he came out of the dressing room wearing a bright orange shirt with navy blue cargo pants as he obviously looked like someone pretending to be younger than he was; he kept the pants but ended up getting a more conservative albeit colorful and bright blue shirt (he wore the shirt the first day he came to see me in California a couple of months later)... We went into a Bank of Montreal branch where Dennis had once worked at so he could make a withdrawal. He really got a kick out of showing me part of his past since he loved to talk about himself. We also went to a London’s drugstore to get shampoo and dental floss…

We found accomodations at the St. James Bay Inn, not far from the legislative building (Victoria is the capital of British Columbia). Dennis, having spent several years as a customer service manager at a bank, had an usual ability to deal with people in that fake sort of way customer service managers have of being sincere without really meaning it, so he was able to negotiate a good price (about $20 lower than listed) with the outgoing young hotel manager. The room we got was actually two connecting rooms, each with a separate bed and TV…

In the brief time we had before he had to board his bus to Duncan, Dennis gave me a whirlwind tour of the legislative building that rivaled that of an annoyed young female Asian tour guide who told him to be quiet since he was drowning out her presentation. At the time there was a drought on Vancouver Island, so the lawn in front of the building was yellowish. Dennis also showed me the main touristy streets near the harbor so that I would know my way around and get an idea of where I wanted to go.

After Dennis boarded his bus, I went out to explore the streets. It started raining and I had no umbrella since I absent-mindedly left mine behind on the ferry on the way over, so I had to buy a new one; I also bought postcards and a souvenir shot glass for my sister… I was hungry but couldn’t decide where to eat; I just went to a sandwich place to get something to bring back to the hotel room since I was tired and didn’t want to be out in the rain; I was still very sore and exhausted from all the walking I had done the days before in Vancouver and Edmonton during the first leg of my Canadian vacation…

Back at the hotel room, I took off all my wet clothes and got into bed and watched lots of TV, mostly Canadian programming I couldn’t see in the States or cable shows like “Sex and the City” that I couldn’t see at home since I didn’t have cable, before drifting off to sleep. I woke up around midnight upon hearing pounding on the door; I had to put on my pants, which were still wet from the rain and pulled a miscellaneous t-shirt out of my bag, as I climbed out of bed saying “Hold on, I’ll be right there!” I had put on the dead bolt locks on both doors as Dennis had told me to do when I was alone. When I opened the door, the night manager was with Dennis, and Dennis asked “What were you doing?” with big eyes and curiosity more than anything else. He had been knocking for several minutes, and I wouldn’t answer. I told him I was sleeping and that I was a very deep sleeper, which I am.

Dennis told me his friend Bert, who drove him back and who also attended the reunion, wanted to meet me. I wondered to myself why. Bert wore khaki shorts, which I thought was strange attire for a reunion and for the cool, rainy weather. The three of us ended up sitting/lying on one of the beds with me in the middle. I still had a sleep line across my forehead which I found embarrassing, and one of the guys said that it looked like I needed more sleep. Bert touched my hair when Dennis told him that I reminded him of their old friend Kevin, who had hair similar to mine. Needless to say, I found that weird. Bert lived on Vancouver Island and worked doing something for the government; he seemed older than Dennis although he was the same age. I talked about being from LA and found that he was unusually knowledgeable about southern California. Bert also commented on the Edmonton t-shirt I was wearing and said he thought Calgary seemed nicer (although he had never been to either city) and that perhaps he would like to go to Alberta sometime. When Bert decided to leave, Dennis and I walked him out to his car, and it was only lightly drizzling then.

On our way back to our room, we made small talk with the night manager at the front desk, an old man who had once been a science teacher but took the job at the hotel upon retirement about a year and a half earlier to be with his wife who had preceded him in retirement with a part-time job in Victoria…