Stephen Young

22.8.06

EUROPE 2006 - Chapter 1 - Toronto to Amsterdam!

Last Thursday, Bernice and I left Pearson Airport in Toronto around 10PM, bound for Ireland!

We booked the cheapest flight we could, which happened to land in Shannon - in the south of Ireland. Strangely enough, the flight actually landed in Dublin (west Ireland) first, and then after quite the wait for refueling, we headed off to Shannon. Our flight was scheduled to land at 11:00AM, and we had booked another connecting flight in to London at 1PM... little did we know that our flight wouldn't actually land until 12:30PM...

It went down like this: 12:30 land, 12:35 waiting for luggage, 12:45 still waiting for luggage - Steve runs to checkin area to get boarding passes, 12:47 steve is in wrong line, 1:00PM Bernice finds luggage, 1:05PM gate has closed.... we missed our flight!

After recovering from the shock Bernice and I went back to the Ryanair (a discount airliner) counter and asked about other flight options. Interestingly, west Irish accents are really really heavy and I had a pretty hard time understanding anything that was being said... especially on the loudspeaker. Very polite lady, with a heavy accent told us that the next flight would be to London Stanstead at 4PM and would cost us another 60 euros. So we took a nice knap outside and waited.

We arrived in London at 5:30ish at located a shuttle into town - Stanstead (spelling?) is well outside the city. Around 8PM we were passing through the city on the shuttle. A nice older gentleman provided commentary to all the sites and pictures we were taking. We arrived at Victoria Coach station around 8:30PM, explored Buckingham Palace in the dark, and then met up with Kristen, Mark, Simon and Shruthi.

At 10PM we got on an overnight bus bound for Amsterdam.

So ends chapter 1.

More to come! I'll try to put up some pictures soon... although I'm not sure if I can.

Take it easy,
Steve

6.8.06

Random websites:

http://pactprogram.ca
http://resiliencecanada.ca
http://kiwanisfoundationcanada.org

-Steve

Companies I might want to work for:

So next summer I'll be looking for a job... so I wanted to write out companies I might want to work for... and what better place then in a blog no one looks at!

List:
  • SNC Lavalin
  • Bridgespan
  • Mckinsey & Co.
  • TD Securities
  • Apple
  • BMO
  • Bain
Ta da.

-steve