Sorry about the dearth of posts recently (and the lack of photos in this one—my camera was in for repair during this trip). I have been rather busy with my job. In fact, I spent three weeks of March in Leduc for business. Leduc is a small town of about 30,000 people just south of Edmonton. If you fly in to Edmonton International Airport, you actually fly in to Leduc, and then have a twenty minute drive into the city.
But I digress, I visited the US for four days this past month to attend the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) Conference hosted in Portland, Oregon. I’ve never visited the city before, though I did skirt it about ten years ago en-route to Grants Pass (near the border with California). Portland is a really easy city to get around, thanks to its excellent public transit system. It costs $2.50 for a ticket and there is a train that goes directly to the city centre from the airport. The city centre is quite nice too, very green in comparison to Calgary. Even after the rain that we’ve been having in April, it was still much greener back in March in Portland. I suppose they have a much more moderate climate because they are closer to the sea and at a much lower elevation than we are in Calgary.
The conference itself was alright. There weren’t very many presentations that were particularly enticing to me, but I did get lots of interest in my project, which is excellent! Next time, I’ll have to progress to a proper paper presentation instead of doing a poster presentation. But, it is nice to get a feel of how conferences are run, and how much pressure you feel before jumping in to a proper presentation.
Unfortunately, the weather was not particularly good for the entirety of my visit. It rained every day save one. As a result, I spent a lot of time in restaurants with my supervisor. We did manage to find a couple of nice restaurants: Bijou Café at 132 SW 3rd Ave, and Murata Restaurant at 200 SW Market St. The former is an excellent breakfast place, and the latter is a more expensive Japanese establishment, but both had very good food.
All in all, it was a very nice trip. In the past, I haven’t had good experiences with US Customs, but this time they were actually friendly! It was nice to escape the routine of work for a few days and get out of Calgary. It is important to take time for yourself (even if you are presenting) away from the daily norms as it really is quite rejuvenating!
One last note: as I was preparing to leave Calgary, I did my usual thing of checking in online about 24 hours before departure only to find that I couldn’t. I thought that was kind of strange, but I just gave up eventually and said I would do it at the airport instead. When I got to the airport the day of my flight, I printed off my boarding pass from a kiosk and noticed that there were four characters printed under Remarks: SSSS (see the photo below). Having never encountered that before, I just proceeded to security, where I was informed that I would have to undergo a more thorough screening than usual because the airline had “randomly chosen me to undergo secondary inspection). All that really entailed was me having to go through the body scanner (which I am used to from traveling through Schiphol airport) and having my shoes go through the x-ray machine. I suppose that this may have been caused by a late ticket change (about three weeks prior to traveling), where I changed my departure airport from Toronto Pearson to Calgary. I suppose there probably aren’t too many people who do that… and may have aroused suspicion… The important thing is to get the CATSA stamps on your boarding pass (if in Canada), otherwise I was told at the gate that I would have been denied boarding.
notna鸭 