Calgary Hotel Break-In

I arrived in Calgary on Tuesday night and I am thrilled that it is a balmy -10c! Now, business travel is typical bland and boring. More often than not, nothing overly exciting happens when I travel for work. Sometimes, I will go to dinner with my counterparts at the other office or have a business dinner with counterparts at competing firms. It’s mostly shop talk with the occasional polite questions about how your family is doing and the like.

Well during my visit to Calgary, I decided not to have such dinners. I was looking forward to spending some down time on my own. One night I wanted to find a few new books to read so I headed up to 8^th Avenue to a quaint bookstore called McNally Robinson Booksellers. The store is nice with a café upstairs. I was delighted that I could leaf through a few books while having a nice, quiet dinner. After my enjoyable meal of sun dried tomato and pesto tortellini, I purchase my books and start walking back to the hotel about 8 or 9 blocks away.

Accompanying me on my walk is my trusty Blackberry mp3 player. I love listening to music while I wander around. Good tunes always make things much more pleasant and enjoyable for me. As I strolled through the streets of downtown Calgary I was completely and elatedly enthralled with the music that I am certain I was singing out loud, and likely singing badly. I didn’t care… I was enjoying myself and I didn’t care who knew it.

I continued to trot along until I arrived at my hotel. Needless to say, I was still in a great mood and listening to music very loudly on my headphones. At this point the music has been so stimulating that I am pretty much strutting! I strut into the hotel and gleefully dance to the elevator heading back to my room. I am looking forward to delving into my newly purchased books. I will tell you more about my book selection in my next blog because I am truly disgusted and disappointed with myself. Anyway, I get off the elevator and skip down the long hallway still entrenched in the music playing between my ears. I pull out my keycard to open the room door. Nothing happens. I try the keycard again and the door does not open. I quickly wipe the magnetic strip on the back of the card onto my jeans in hopes that it was a bit a dust or something. But no, the key doesn’t seem to be working. Of course, I am still enjoying the music playing loudly from my mp3 player and I’m not at all frustrated by the fact that I can’t get the door open to my room. Like a fool, I must have been standing the for a good 30 seconds cramming the keycard into the keyslot and wrenching on the door handle while pushing on the door.

All of a sudden, the door swings open and there is sweaty man standing in my room wearing a bathrobe looking somewhat tired and perturbed! I was so startled that I let out a little scream! I think my scream scared him. My first thought was “who the hell are you and why are in my room?!?” Well, it turned out this was NOT my room. The man said to me in an annoyed tone “I kept asking who was at the door and you didn’t answer.” Of course I didn’t answer, music from my mp3 player was playing way to loudly for me to hear anything! At this point all I could do was laugh. I literally laughed out loud and apologized profusely to him. Even though I had a huge grin on my face as I walk to my room giggling to myself, I was truly sorry I had interrupt his Thursday evening. My room was at the opposite end of the hallway. I turned the wrong way when I got of the elevator. How embarrassing.

Wrapping up Yellowknife and Off to Calgary

On my last day in Yellowknife I had the pleasure of experiencing -42c weather and seeing snow actually blowing upwards! It was great! In the morning, the walk to the office is a mere 5 or 6 blocks but in this kind of weather it has it’s challenges; especially for a mild weather dwelling Vancouverite like me. As usual, I bundled up in wool long johns, layered myself in thermal sweaters and such. This particular morning, I had decided to wear my glasses instead of cramming my contact lenses into my dryballs… err I mean eyeballs. This was my first mistake. It’s a mistake because I forgot about my need to breathe. Let me explain further…

As we walked out into the cold to trek to the office, I pulled up my neck dickie up to cover my face from the wind and cold. Of course, need to do this thing called breathing. Apparently, it’s the thing that separates the living from the dead. Anywhooo… because I have this need to breathe, each breath I took steamed up my glasses. I tried to breathe less intensely taking short breaths. That did not help. My glasses continued to steam both on the inside and the outside of the lens. Of course, it being -42c with the windchill the steam freezes and a thick layer of ice start to form on my lenses.

My second mistake, my glasses are metal framed. So as the steam formed into ice on my glasses, it is also caused them to literally stick to my face! I don’t think it helps that my nose bridge is pretty much non-existent. I am Asian after all and I accept that I have flat face and a flat nose. But in this kind unbearable, extreme cold, metal framed glasses that sit snug against a flat face instead of resting nicely on a nose bridge is just a bad idea!

Now remember, this is only a 5 to 6 block walk and all of this managed to happen within block number 2 of the walk! Needless to say, by the time we arrived at block 3, where Dean felt the need to stop and take a photo of us in front of a sign that displayed the temperature, I could not see anything! I could not see through my glasses nor could I see peering over the lenses because my vision is so crappy. I’m literally as blind as a bat! Good thing Dean was around to be my seeing-eye-person!

NOTE TO SELF: when in temperatures below -20c, wear contact lenses as glasses will freeze to your face.

Dancing Aurora in Yellowknife

My co-worker Dean and I arrived in Yellowknife mid-afternoon and so far I have to say that I like this town. I know I have been here for less than 24 hrs and I am probably jumping the gun a bit in saying that. It was sunny and warm for this time of year at a mere -18c. I could be singing a different tune if it had been -40c. It's likely to get colder tomorrow so I guess I'll see how I feel tomorrow. But nonetheless, -18c is still somewhat cold with the windchill (maybe -23c or so today) if you aren't dressed appropriately. Your tongue would definitely stick to metal in this sort of weather as I quickly discovered. No, I did not purposely stick my tongue to a metal parking meter or anything like that! But rather, I have these special mitts that have a zipper along the side so you can slide your hand in-and-out just in case you need to use your fingers... you know for things like taking photos and such. Anyhow, I forgot that the zipper on my mitts are made of metal and when I attempted to use my mouth to open the zipper, my tongue froze to the zipper latch! I tore a small part of my tongue onto the zipper of my mitt! Ouch! *Note to self: do not use mouth on metal zippers!*

The trees here are short and watching from the plane during our descent, Yellowknife looked like snow and ice covered by fuzzy moss. Apparently as you head north toward the tree line, most of the trees are about 3 feet small. I would look like a giant at a staggering 4'9 1/2" next to those trees!

A Sunday night in Yellowknife seems to be fairly quiet. Dean and I decided to have dinner at a Vietnamese noodle joint and I'd have to say that it was the most expensive bowl of Pho I have ever had! When I was in Vietnam in June I paid the equivalent of $1-2 CND for a bowl of Pho with all the fixings - mint leaves, basil, bean sprouts, etc. Here in Yellowknife fresh herbs are hard to get and they are very expensive. So I ordered a bowl of Pho with beef balls and rare beef and it was $9.95 just for the noodles and beef! No fixings. Just a few chopped green onions and that was it. I couldn't even get beef flank or tendons as I would normally! Oh well.

After our less than exciting but very pricey bowls of Pho, we decide that we should walk around town and see if we can see the Aurora Borealis a.k.a. the Northern Lights. So we wander around the parking lot of the hotel and wander down the highway and low and behold we see a light stream of green light bending and curving in the sky. At first it was very faint but gets brighter from time to time. Nothing too spectacular because there was too much light pollution in the city. So we decide to head out on to a frozen lake to get a bit further away from the city lights. We tread through a foot or so of powdery snow on the lake and the Aurora Borealis look brighter. But still, I was not satisfied. Dean suggests we look for a cab to take us outside the city limits so we head back to the highway in hopes of finding a cab.


Within about 5 minutes from when we get to the highway, a cab drives by and I wave it down. The cabby is a Francophone named Gilles from Quebec City and he drives us out about 10-15 minutes outside of town. We pull off the side of the highway where it is dark and as we get out of the cab I see one of the most spectacular things of my life..... dancing ribbons of light across the night sky! Strings of green and some with hints of pink and red! And they do dance! They danced in waves and ripples, flashing red and green marching in and around the starlit sky. It was absolutely stunning and literally took my breath away for a moment. But after that brief breathless moment (most of you know that I can be quite chatty), I was overwhelmed with glee and felt deeply fortunate to have the opportunity see such a wonder of nature. All I kept saying was "This is beautiful! I can't believe how spectacular this is! This is fucking beautiful!"


Well, I'm off to bed as work awaits me in the morning. I hope the weather is nice tomorrow night as well. I want to see more of this amazing phenomenon and will take every chance I get to do it!