I had such good intentions of blogging about St Catherine's a week or so ago and now here it is, my final night, before I leave tomorrow at 5.3am to get the shuttle bus up to Toronto airport to fly to Chicago.
So I shall do my best to do some catching up, now.
After I left Singapore I flew to Hong Kong where I transited, boarding my flight to Toronto. Now this was a good moment because it when I was upgraded. Seriously, Air Canada upgraded me to business class. All I had done when I was at the check in counter was simply ask for an aisle seat if possible and when the woman handed me back my boarding pass she said that they would try their best but couldn't guarantee that they could. I thought this was a tad odd until I looked at the boarding pass and it didn't have a seat allocation. I was mildly disconcerted by this.
When I got to the gate I told them that I didn't as yet have a seat allocation and was told that they were working on it and to come back in 15 minutes. And then another 10 minutes. Well all I can say is that it pays to wait patiently. Because when they did eventually hand me my boarding pass the seat as 10A (a window)...Now I was chuckling away to myself thinking how funny the whole thing had been and I still didn't have an aisle seat when it occurred to me that 10A seemed to be awfully far up the front of the plane. I examined the boarding pass more closely and this time saw the word 'Business'. OMG! I thought of course that there had been some terrible mistake and as I handed the boarding pass as I was about to enter the tunnel to the plane someone grabbed it off me and took it away. 'Hmmm I thought' this is where they will come back and very apologetically explain that a working class lad like me could never fit in business class and that it had all been a dreadful mistake. As the Air Canada person came back towards me I steeled myself for the inevitable anticlimax when she whispered to me 'we've upgraded you. Have a great flight'.
The smile was on my face until I was half way across the Pacific!
I won't bore you with the champagne upon arrival and champagne whenever I asked for it...or the menu from which we selected our meals...or the comfortable full length bed that my seat became...or the amazing attention from the flight attendants....but it has definitely spoiled me!
Arriving in Canada almost three weeks ago, I was whisked off by shuttle bus to St Catherine's a city of about 120 000 people about 75 minutes south east of Toronto and located in the Niagara region. Indeed Niagara Falls is only about 25 minutes down the road. I visited these a couple of weeks ago. What a strange, crazy place - with the stunning falls, the beautiful parklands and the tacky, kitschy, sideshow alley-like roads leading down to the Falls.
I have been based at Brock University, in the Department of Tourism Management where I was given the title of Visiting Scholar and had my own office. It's been a very enjoyable and productive time. I've been working on the analysis of some of my Singapore data as well as mapping out a couple of projects with a colleague from Brock.
I've been living in a lovely all, vast home which is a ten minute bus trip (plus another ten minute walk to the bus stop) from Brock and the neighborhood is full of interesting birds and squirrels.
The Canadian people are oh so polite and genuinely so and it has been a lovely few weeks. On Sunday I caught a bus up to Lake Ontario which is at the northern extremity of the city and spent a few hours exploring an 'eco-park' and also Port Dalhousie. I left Brock today at about 1pm, came back home, did my washing and then started packing before strolling into 'downtown' a 20 minute walk, to Gords, a bar with a lovely beer garden, where I had a couple of pints of raspberry ale and a California burger. Life is good!
And it gets even better when I meet up with Steve in Chicago and we begin Our Great Big American Adventure!
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Sunday, August 24, 2014
Just some random pics from Singapore
Singapore then Canada
OK, so I'm very late with my final Singapore posting. What can I say, I've been busy! So my five weeks in Singapore was very good. I managed to collect sufficient data from my observations at the various captive and non-captive wildlife tourism settings which of course was my reason for being in Singapore.
I ended up catching a nasty cold virus the second last week I was there which really knocked me around well and good...I don't think it was the flu, just one of those nasty viruses that give you sore throat, runny/blocked nose, horrible productive cough and saps all your energy. By the end of the five days my bed and my room and I came to the end of our reasonably friendly relationship...well I suspect that the bed and bedroom didn't have any position on me, but I did of them. The sheet and doona cover must have had a high polyester component because they just didn't feel soft against my skin...I had been able to tolerate this while not sick but the sickness accentuated my discomfort and so my last week or so on the bed was awful. The pillows were way too thick as well...but otherwise I'm not complaining, of course.
Once I began to have an appetite again it took me several days before I could stomach anything remotely spicy - which made things rather difficult to find a reasonable meal around where I lived, but I managed.
Some highlights of my stay were camping on Pulau Ubin, a small island off the coast of Sinagpore where my mate Kumzy and I hired mountain bikes and cycled around and across the island....though being hauled out of our tent under torchlight by three police men at around 9.30 at night to check our ID was a little disconcerting - particularly as I had no ID. But they seemed happy with me writing my Australia address on a piece of paper, so the incident didn't end in tears - or an overnighter in a gaol cell. What else? I visited a frog farm; I visited the (Barely) Live Tortoise and Turtle Museum - this was not a highlight - indeed a lowlight. At least a thousand tortoises and turtles most of which were not kept anywhere near at a standard that they should have been kept. Very sad indeed. And the place had something close to 40 pig nosed turtles which is incredible! I suspect there would be nowhere else in the world which has that many individuals of that species (they occur in NT and in southern New Guinea - which is how these would have ended up in Sinagpore....smuggles out of New Guinea. Apparently hatchlings were a popular aquarium pet in Singapore in the 60s and 70s and so these guys represent the animals that managed to survive and grow into adults...and of course way too big to house properly in an aquarium I someone's flat....although having said that, each of these was confined to a three foot aquarium with about 4-6 inches of water depth....each turtle however was about 30-40cm long.
But easily the professional highlight was giving a talk at the Zoo to Zoo, Night Safari and River Safari staff about the findings of my research. An hour talk stretched into 90 minutes and at the end of the talk several senior staff (including the head of 'zoology') wanted me to repeat the talk to the senior executive. There was some talk of me coming back later in the year to do this. Then the education staff who missed my talk invited me to meet with them on my last day at the zoo and again we met for about 75 minutes. It was a lovely feeling to see how there was such a practical application of my research to zoo educative practice. So I was happy with that.
My last two days I spent in the city - doing some last minute research - like dangling my feet into a fish spa and having so-called 'Dr Fish' scrape off my dead skin cells - and also visiting a frog farm. I also visited the Kranji War Cemetary at the very extreme north of the island to locate the name of my great uncle who had died during WW1 on the wall of fallen soldiers. My cousin Jackie had asked me to do this and I am so very glad she did.
So after five weeks and observing almost 10 000 visitors at the various wildlife parks, I packed my bag for the last time and caught a taxi to the airport to head off to Canada.
I ended up catching a nasty cold virus the second last week I was there which really knocked me around well and good...I don't think it was the flu, just one of those nasty viruses that give you sore throat, runny/blocked nose, horrible productive cough and saps all your energy. By the end of the five days my bed and my room and I came to the end of our reasonably friendly relationship...well I suspect that the bed and bedroom didn't have any position on me, but I did of them. The sheet and doona cover must have had a high polyester component because they just didn't feel soft against my skin...I had been able to tolerate this while not sick but the sickness accentuated my discomfort and so my last week or so on the bed was awful. The pillows were way too thick as well...but otherwise I'm not complaining, of course.
Once I began to have an appetite again it took me several days before I could stomach anything remotely spicy - which made things rather difficult to find a reasonable meal around where I lived, but I managed.
Some highlights of my stay were camping on Pulau Ubin, a small island off the coast of Sinagpore where my mate Kumzy and I hired mountain bikes and cycled around and across the island....though being hauled out of our tent under torchlight by three police men at around 9.30 at night to check our ID was a little disconcerting - particularly as I had no ID. But they seemed happy with me writing my Australia address on a piece of paper, so the incident didn't end in tears - or an overnighter in a gaol cell. What else? I visited a frog farm; I visited the (Barely) Live Tortoise and Turtle Museum - this was not a highlight - indeed a lowlight. At least a thousand tortoises and turtles most of which were not kept anywhere near at a standard that they should have been kept. Very sad indeed. And the place had something close to 40 pig nosed turtles which is incredible! I suspect there would be nowhere else in the world which has that many individuals of that species (they occur in NT and in southern New Guinea - which is how these would have ended up in Sinagpore....smuggles out of New Guinea. Apparently hatchlings were a popular aquarium pet in Singapore in the 60s and 70s and so these guys represent the animals that managed to survive and grow into adults...and of course way too big to house properly in an aquarium I someone's flat....although having said that, each of these was confined to a three foot aquarium with about 4-6 inches of water depth....each turtle however was about 30-40cm long.
But easily the professional highlight was giving a talk at the Zoo to Zoo, Night Safari and River Safari staff about the findings of my research. An hour talk stretched into 90 minutes and at the end of the talk several senior staff (including the head of 'zoology') wanted me to repeat the talk to the senior executive. There was some talk of me coming back later in the year to do this. Then the education staff who missed my talk invited me to meet with them on my last day at the zoo and again we met for about 75 minutes. It was a lovely feeling to see how there was such a practical application of my research to zoo educative practice. So I was happy with that.
My last two days I spent in the city - doing some last minute research - like dangling my feet into a fish spa and having so-called 'Dr Fish' scrape off my dead skin cells - and also visiting a frog farm. I also visited the Kranji War Cemetary at the very extreme north of the island to locate the name of my great uncle who had died during WW1 on the wall of fallen soldiers. My cousin Jackie had asked me to do this and I am so very glad she did.
So after five weeks and observing almost 10 000 visitors at the various wildlife parks, I packed my bag for the last time and caught a taxi to the airport to head off to Canada.
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