Van airport, pre-Shanghai

I have to say, I've flown many times through Vancouver YVR but have never been through international and it's beautiful! There's a massive fishtank, loads of duty free shops, and just yeah, had no idea all of this existed here!

Sitting online taking care of last minute business, which includes not getting all the pay I'm due from my last job so this will be difficult to take care of from overseas and an annoying headache, but also enjoying sitting at my computer here in the lounge looking out at the mountains. They're pretty clear too since it's not raining.

Just saw this video posted on fb by my friend Annie, haha, made me smile:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-oe2PvmFp8&featurea=youtu.be

(tried putting it as a direct link but for some reason it wasn't showing up once I publish the post -think I need to edit the colour of link text in my blog, I changed to this layout just this month, but will look into that later. You will have to tiresomely copy and paste the link into a new browser window :P )

Sad I can't hang around to watch the Canucks play tonight! Wonder if I'll be able to access online Canucks radio from China? I also missed Bones last night and hope I have a fast enough internet connection when I get there in order to stream on Megavideo -or if there's another site I'll have to go to? Or will all that kind of stuff be blocked?

Fly in the morn

Well, my flight leaves in the morning, transfer through Vancouver and then off to Shanghai. Will be a bit of shlepping because when I arrive I take a train to Hangzhou, stay there a couple of days for training, and then a train to Nanjing will I will spend the duration.

Prettyyyy much all packed now. Had a lot to take care of being leaving and now the sun is setting (or rather the light is fleeting since it's April 14 and it snowed ALL DAY here in Edmonton so just grey and I am NOT impressed!) on the last day in Canada for a while!

Might not get to travel at all once I get to Nanjing because teach right up until my flight, but the city is very historical (used to be the capital) so I'm sure there will be a lot to see! (Did I mention this in my last post? Can't remember, distracted watching the Office!)

China this week

Less than a week until I fly off to China to teach English at a college.

Volunteered at Rona Ambrose's election campaign headquarters today and am going to go back on Monday for a couple of hours to help out on the phones.

If it's any consolation to myself, I did get one response to my last blog post where I solicited for people to say hello, but the comment was on Gmail's "Buzz" so it didn't show up on here as well :P

Don't have too much to take care of before leaving. It's just a short term contract until first week of July, so if it goes incredibly wrong, it's not as though I have planned a year around it. Should be a pretty interesting experience though. I wonder if I'll be able to actually get to a functioning level in Mandarin.