Eating out

G'ma's Christmas present dinner out this year (last year, but this Christmas) was at Dockside on Granville Island. Unfortunately Hannah wasn't there but it was a good outing anyway. The food wan't as historic as last year's at Blue Water but the atmosphere and ambience were right up there with the nicest ever.
Next on the list is a Thai restaurant in Singapore. No idea what it was called but its in the Mall down the road from the School. No beer! I must have drank a hundred litres of water. We went there an hour after I arrived from 36 hours of travel. I think I look quite human considering.

2009 and all that

I may love Air New Zealand but Lufthansa is going down, down, down in my estimation. Maybe its the recession. The 747 from Frankfurt to Singapore must have been the original rolled out in late 1968. I know these things last forever if they're serviced correctly but they are usually sold off to Air Zimbabwe or similar after 20 years or so. If this one was sold off it was probably to Lufthansa and from Richard Pearce.

The 'entertainment system' was archaic. Remember those tiny little (superfluous diminuation I know) T'V's perched up in the ceiling which play a film of Herr Lufthansa's choice then go blank for an hour or so then play something else also of Herr Lufthansa's choice? Now, honestly, when was the last time you remember those on a long-haul flight? No airline has them any more. Well, maybe Air Zimbabwe has but at $7,559,934,292ZWD for the ticket (at the time of writing but you may have to add a few zero's by the time you read it) no one could afford to experience the nostalgia.

We got Mamma Mia! which was fine even though I'd watched it from Vancouver to Frankfurt. It's that kind of jolly singalong, ABBA's (how do you get HTML to reverse a 'B'?) compositions and arrangements never cease to amaze and I could watch shots of Skopelos and Skiathos forever. But, and here you have to imagine you've suspended disbelief with the best of them and you're engrossed in a delightfully jolly fantasy so its a BIG BUT, what is worse than the usual intervention of the pilot during a good film merely to tell you that you're about to be thrown out of your seat by an atmospheric disturbance so best to buckle up? I'll tell you what's worse; right at the climactic resolution of Act III the film stops and is replaced by Flyrobic, that's what's worse. Even though cute little Tony is a marvel of animation I don't want to know how to do exercises in my aircraft seat! I want to see three geezers who can't sing sing their way to accepting one third each of one of their daughter's. (Not, you will note, 'one of their daughters'). The daughter of one of them, whatever.

Eventually the complaints won the day and Flyrobics was temporarily sent to the trash can (we got it later). Did they have a 2009 style solution to the restart and were able to go directly to where they'd left off? Nein! Nein! A thousand times Nein! They 'fast-forwarded' at x2 speed from the very beginning. And remember we were at the resolution of Act III - where the wedding is about to take place and Donna has told the congregation that Sophie's dads are present. It took forever but we got there eventually, a marriage took place and we got to see the best bit of the whole film, the take-outs of the cast singing in 1960's ABBA costumes.

And, ... (dot, dot, dot) the drinks were very small, the food was bad, the air hostess was miserable and my seating companion was an Irishman from Liverpool!

By the way we were over The Ukraine when we transitioned New Year.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

Grouse Mountain. Tom wanted to snowshoe so off we went with G'ma in tow. Lots of Christmas traffic and lots of snow and ice on the roads. Lots of all sorts of lovely Christmassy things but no power. Nothing was working on the mountain. The disembodied voice over the loudspeaker system (well, some things were working) reassured us that things would be 'good to go' in no time at all but the 100 or so people squeezed and locked in the gondola waiting to climb to the summit didn't look as though they believed that. We aborted the day.
The next day we went again, this time substituting Laurel for G'ma. Laurel is a much more experienced snowshoer than G'ma and also brought electricity with her so everything worked. In fact the snow was working overtime and even Santa's Workshop was in danger of fading out of 2008 before its time.













The buses had stopped trying to get up the mountain so we thought we'd have difficulty getting down but it was actually a nice adventure with no real problems. A white Christmas indeed.

I'm Clive, Fly Me

I love Air New Zealand. 'Good evening Mr. Rushton, welcome back.' That's got to put you in a good mood hasn't it?

Esther at Flight Centre hadn't put my frquent flyer number in the booking system so I started scheduled for seat 60D which is somewhere aft of the tailfin on a 777. The lovely Wellington check-in girl with amazing Sideshow Bob hair couldn't access another seat so when I got to the lounge in Auckland they found seat 30D which was row one of cattle class; much better than trying to sit in the slipstream.

We boarded and I settled mnyself in. Then the Chief Steward came over and said,

'Good evening Mr. Rushton, welcome back. Could you come and chat please?'
'Are you going to throw me off?'
'No, no. We have a lady we need to move, would you mind moving forward to seat 4D?'
'Not at all, that would be very nice.'

So off I went into ultra-super-dooper class with those diagon-ally facing fully reclining bed things. Added to that another stewardess came and said,

'Welcome back Mr. Rushton. We'd like to give you a bottle of wine as a present. Do you prepare pinot or saugnon blanc?'

'Pinot please.'

No one else got a wine present so i have no idea why I did but, hey, Gibbston Valley Pinot Noir 2006 is great and retails around the $45 mark.

The flight was good and, very unusual for me, I slept! Fourteen hours of flying over water later, coming into Canadian airspace the Captain came over the intercom and said,

'There's been a further dump of snow in the Vancouver area and they're trying to clear the runway so we can land. We have to go into a holding pattern for some time.'

No problem until a little later when he announced,

'Due to the fuel situation we have about four minutes to get the all clear to land otherwise we will have to divert to San Fransisco.'

That's about two and a half hours due south and past around a dozen airports which can take a 777 so a huge collective groan from everyone on board. Anyway we got the all clear and down we went. All the markings on the runways were snowed out so we took forever to get near the terminal. Then the airbridge was frozen so it couldn't be manouvered onto the plane. Now Air New Zealand are terrific but Air Canada and Vancouver ground crews are pretty useless. If we'd been in Montreal the snow and ice would have been a mere trifle of a problem but the high-tech solution here was two slow guys with one shovel. They took 75 minutes to get it moving and off we went.

Then the bags took an hour and, insert a conspiracy theory here, the very last bags to come off were ALL for the first class cabin.

Merry Christmas :)