When you are 39000ft above the surface of the earth, moving at 500miles/hour, and cramped in an economy class seat for 20 hours, what do you get? A seat in a bus stationed at the YVR Vancouver International Airport, headed to Whistler, 120km away. 🙂 😀 😉 .
The flight was really a tiring one, luckily no one was seated next to me in either of the flight from Bengaluru to Hong Kong, or from Hong Kong to Vancouver. And was enlightened by the conversation an Indian-American professional working in Intel! There was a 4 hour stopover at Hong Kong, which was enough to make me to buy a leica point and shoot camera, 14 mega-pixels of it! ^^
The tiring journey though did not suppress my excitement being in Vancouver, though there was a lull for nearly an hour where I’d to queued up for the immigration center to get clearance. After a burger-combo from the Burger King at the YVR Vancouver airport, I boarded the bus that took us through the bustling city of Vancouver, a city of 2 million people. And once out of the city, my eyes was blessed with beauty! There it was, formerly the World’s longest highway – the Trans Canada highway, winding on the side of the mountain with the sea on the one side with it’s waters ashore the snow peaked mountains. It was natural beauty at it’s best! The water had a tinge of green as it is fed by the glaciers. The bus whistled past the town of Squamish, one the rock climbers would love to visit! The driver would occasionally enlighten us with the info of the places and many other things. And oh yeah, the bus was filled with mainly the Europeans and other countries!
At 5 pm local time, 2 hours since we left the airport, we arrived at The Fairmont Chateau Whistler hotel, where I would make myself home for the next 3 days! And as I hopped out of the bus, I could see mountains, their peaks covered with snow, in every direction I could find! Ah that was beautiful! But my eyes finally began to drool over the exhaustion and all I remember was to get the card for entry into my room ( 351 ) and hit one of the two cosy beds.
I somehow managed to wake up an hour later, freshened up, and ventured out to check the welcome reception. It was in the rooftop restaurants, and was baffled to see lots of people chatting, with glasses, beer bottles in their hands! It was eat, drink and chatter all around as Mozillians greeted each other. I was finally able to meet the Red Hat guys ( 7 of them ) and another from IIT Kanpur, who helped me in getting my visa approved (Read the previous article). The reception went on till late in the night as I met new people and had lots to eat. As the place is pretty north, the Sun sets later that 10 pm! After all the merry, I climbed down the stairs to take a good night rest, and I find another room filled with Mozillians. As it turns out, the room is unofficially called the “Game room”. It had the PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii and the crowd puller XBox 360 with the rock band instruments! There was food and drinks 24/7!
Finally, I dragged myself back to the room, brimming with excitement of the next day. Can’t help myself thinking how wonderful it has been, something a sort of a dream, how lucky I have been. I closed my eyes only to see the many thoughts of the events next day and many new people to meet, especially my mentor for the GSoC project…….. Wait for ver 0.3!
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