Once again I seem to have found myself in Vancouver International Airport (49 11 44 N 123 11 00 W), waiting to board the first of a series of flights that will take me from Vancouver to Rome. I am not taking my laptop on this trip, so I have been forced to pay for this hour of Internet time at one of these godawful kiosks scattered throughout the terminal. This kiosk consists of a computer with a display smaller than my laptop’s 13-inch screen, a bolted-down keyboard with a broken space bar, a trackpad located to the right (naturally) of the keyboard (judging by the distance between the keyboard and the trackpad, I would judge it probable that the designer of this kiosk had a right arm as long as the Trans-Canada Highway), no obvious way to make clicking motions or gestures with said trackpad, and a bare metal stool that makes the fabric-covered slabs of steel that Air Canada euphemistically calls ‘economy-class seats’ look downright luxurious by comparison. A few metres from me there is a gaggle of pre-teen girls with matching T-shirts loudly ordering coffee in heavily accented English from Starbucks while giggling and yapping even more loudly to one another in French, obviously thinking that nobody nearby can understand them. There’s still an hour before my flight boards, and I’ve run out of ‘useful’ things to do on the Internet that I’m now reduced to bored blogging. Sad.
At any rate, I’ll be more or less out of contact, unless by some miracle I manage to get some Internet access over the next week. I’ll be returning next weekend, hopefully with lots of good photos of Rome to spam all over this little corner of the Internet. So for now, ciao, and take care!
