Droso

This year, the Tall Ships Race starts from Ã…rhus, right in from of my doorstep. On Thursday, Anders, Brix and me decided to go for a walk and see some of the ships. Alas, before they reached me, the rain had started again and it became a short, and wet, trip. Yesterday, Fin came down and we met up. The weather had cleared and turned out to be very comfortable, but cloudy evening. Lots and lots of ships, including the worlds biggest sailing boat, Kruzenshtern from Russia. On board the mexican Cuauhtemoc, they put up quite a show, and in front of it, they made some of the best chilli con carne.
Sailing throught the harbour, gave some good views. Ever seen the Ã…rhus Ã… from the other side? Hey!, that’s where I live! Max Mols is quite a mouthful from down below.
My new camera also passed the test. Over a 100 pictures within the first day. Of course, a bit of playing around with the new features as well, but it’s not everyday you get this view from your living room.

As for the last 3 years, I’m again be working at the check-in for artists, press, and volunteers at the yearly SPOT festival. As always, hard but satisfying work, and hopefully I won’t be too busted tonight and see some music as well.

Yesterday, I had a nice walk up Mont Royal, which mostly is a park and not as high as the name might suggest. It was nice to stretch my legs a bit although the park wasn’t that impressive, but the best parts must have been leaving behind the city noise, local wildlife and the views, especially of the area I walked the day before (although you can’t really see much in the picture, one has to be there).

Today, I checkout at 11am and settled in the lobby to wait for Mark Linimon to cross the border and call, so we could meet at a metro station close to the highway. I had not turned on my laptop for more than 10 minutes when I got an email from him that he couldn’t call me from his phone and would be there in 30 minutes. Off to the metro, and after some initial trouble of figuring out how to buy a ticket (no machines, you have to interact with a human being) and use it (just drop it in the hole while you walk through, it’s not read and no reciept so you wonder why you need that piece of paper for), the metro took me to Lasalle and Mark arrived a couple of minutes after me. Getting back onto the highway was a very inventive U-turn like way, but we managed that without major problems. Of course, the computer printout told us to take the 40 to Ottawa, but there were no signs with either, and yes, we took the wrong turn. Getting of the highway immediately and driving through a residential area assuming “just follow east”, we mysteriously ended up on the right road, despite ourselves and outside of Montréal made good time to reach Ottawa.

Everybody else is starting to arrive as well, so let’s see what the turnout will be tomorrow at the DevSummit.

First off, always remember to turn off your phone when going to bed in a different timezone. If you don’t this might happen.

Arriving at Montréal Airport without any canadian dollars, the first thing I did was try to find a cash machine. No problem, there was one just besides the exit. Now, with the sky high per transaction rates of withdrawing cash at a foreign bank, one tries to get as much money out of it as possible, and PBS (the danish inter-bank clearinghouse and debit card monopoly) should be well aware of this practice. So when trying to get CAN500 was refused, I tried again with CAN200 and lo and behold, it spit out my money. And PBS duefully blocked my card as this clearly were suspicious transactions, and send a message to my bank.

As this was a Saturday afternoon, nothing happened. I got my money and was happy. PBS had blocked my card and was also happy. Until Monday morning. Danish time. After two days of walking around with a blocked card, they were happy to inform me that some suspicious behaviour was noticed and they’d blocked my card. At 5:30am, local time. They only wanted to check if those transactions might be me afterall. Being in canadian dollars at a canadian bank in Canada, could it be I might be in Canada? In a different timezone?

Thank you PBS. Because the bank will have to pay for wrongfull transactions, I guess false positives are cheaper than false negatives, don’t worry about letting people walk around with blocked cards for several days. They’re probably not in a hurry to pay the hotel and get to the airport and catch a plane home. Or embarrassed when the waiter returns with a cut card.

In short, always bring two cards, even better if they’re from different clearing houses.

I’ve been even more lucky with the choice of hotel than expected. I chose it as it looked quite close to some of the interesting areas of the city and had a metro station nearby, but it turned out that just about everything interesting to see if you only have two days, is within walking distance. With a temperature of 16-18°C (low 60s F), walking definately is the best way to get around.

Todays walk through the old town, Vieux-Montréal, shows a clear multi-ethnic society. Everywhere you look, you see influence from the english, scottish, irish, french, chinese, all while walking around a town that seems very american to ye european visitor.

Although I haven’t tried any mega-swill from the local major brewery Molson, part of the Coors empire, people seem to enjoy a good beer here. There are several brewpubs near the hotel, one of them a chain which also had a branch at the Vieux-Port which offered a set of samples of their four beers and another one that offered an Odense Porter, which of course I couldn’t resist to try and which chocolatty notes taste of more. Except for the french language, life doesn’t seem too bad here.

Todays pictures.

Tomorrow, I’ll be heading up Mont Royal to see the park and “mountain”.