I've left Montreal over a year ago...it doesn't quite feel like that long, time just flew by….I just came back from a few weeks in Montreal, to visit the city and the people that I've been missing lots. To sum it up, we had an awesome time, but it was too short an excursion. It was great to see family and friends and much fun has been had, but I feel like I didn't have time to do even half of what I would've hoped...I'll be for next time.
It's been a rollercoaster ride here down under, full of crazy travels that made us discover awesome Australia, mixed together with the ups and downs of trying to find a job and having a sense of settling down and belonging in a new city. At first it wasn’t all easy, as our visa was not the best looking one to find a decent job, but after many many applications and interviews down the road, I did it, and got my working visa valid for another 2 years! Success! So I’ll still call Melbourne home for now, we still like it here, and we still haven’t exhausted our Australian adventure, we’ll see how long that takes...
My work has been quite accommodating in granting me four weeks off , which brought us to Montreal for 3 weeks via Fiji, and then back to Melbourne via London. Then I'll have conquered the globe! To fulfill my long obsession I’ve had since childhood to go around the globe someday.
We had our first stopover in Fiji, to get a few days of lazy leisure, and get some color back on our skin after our Aussie winter, and no, it's not always warm and sunny in Melbourne. We went back to the Octopus resort in the Fiji Yasawa islands, the place we loved so much the first time around. We indulged in the regular sun destination activities, swimming, laying in the sun, reading and eating. We also went night snorkeling: the ocean is a big place, and it's damn dark at night, and when all you see is where your flashlight beam is pointing, it’s a bit scary, but pretty anyways. We also hiked a rocky mountain, which was pretty cool and showed us an amazing view of the area. I still give props to our guide, who hiked barefoot.
All went well...until we showed up at the airport to catch our flight to LA that we had booked a couple of months ago. We got off the taxi to what looked like a deserted airport, not quite what you'd expect when it's supposed to be check-in time for a flight to LA. We made our way to the check-in tellers, in the empty room, and they told us the flight to LA was cancelled a while ago. We were clearly the only one in the airport, except for a handful of people who were in the same situation as us. We were never warned of this cancellation, even if Air Pacific had both our mobile number and email, so they just rebooked us to the following day's flight. Lovely! The problem is that we had a connecting flight LA-Montreal to catch, which proved to be quite problematic!
The guy at the help desk really did feel sorry for us, and was also very helpful, so he lent me a mobile phone to call Air Canada to see what I could do about rebooking the ticket. What a nightmare! The girl on the phone was not the most helpful, no compassion whatsoever, and all she could do was to rebook me on the next available flight, which would leave 4 days after my arrival in LA (yuck!!). The next day, the employees working at the Air Pacific's help desk would not let us use their phone for international calls, and were so unhelpful and so oblivious in the finer points of good customer service. They told us to buy our own calling cards, but it's hard to communicate with the outside world when it's 3$ a min to call Canada! After many emails, everything worked itself out with the help of our lovely travel cuts agent, who booked us in a connecting flight to Montreal via Calgary (where I got To see Dan and Marie-Andree :], a very pleasant unsuspected stopover!)
The good part of this was that to wait for our next day's flight, Air Pacific put us in a quite decent fancy-resort-hotel for the night, where we took full advantage of the all expenses included. As we went back to board the plane, the nice guy from Air Pacific who helped us out the first night felt so sorry for us, he provided us with a VIP lounge ticket, where you can wait for you plane comfortably with complementary boozy drinks and snacks, and further provided us with an upgrade to first class for the route back to LA. If only I could travel like that all the time… So the 12 hours plane ride proved to be quite luxurious, with real cutlery and glassware, and plenty of food and drinks, and the most comfortable seat-bed ever. Since everything worked out for the best, this cancellation was a pretty good thing.
After Montreal, our London stopover was great fun too (and I posted some pictures in the photo gallery). But this vacation came to an end, as I was back to work 10 hours after landing in Melbourne.
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