Lydia, Amy, and Erika
Saying goodbye to all these people really sucks! I feel like I've only been in Canada for a couple of weeks, it went by so fast. It feels like I'm just going away for a bit but then I'll be back, but in reality it probably was the last I'll see of most of the friends I made. It is a big, expensive, long-term undertaking to get between NZ and Canada or vice-versa, and there's not much point in spending all that money on airfares and coming through a 16hr time change to only stay for two weeks. However, if I can get to the Rio Olympics (my next big plan), it's suddenly looking a little more likely that I will run into with some of them again. Even more incentive to keep training while I'm travelling!
Not that I've done any training so far.
Anyway, as always, I didn't leave myself enough time to get organized before I left, and ended up spending my last day running round like crazy trying to finish up everything that I needed to achieve. Other than that, overall I had a pretty good last few days in Edmonton.
Amy
My last day at work, Friday, I spent with Amy and Ting and Anna Liza, and lots of regulars to say goodbye to. There was one who I had a bit of a crush on, who came in specially to say goodbye to me… I really thought he was far more interested in Amy than in me, but the look on his face when he walked away made me think that maybe I was wrong.
We went to Calgary on Friday night for a regatta the next day, and I spent half of Saturday in an almighty fouler because I got there to discover that my doubles partner was a 15 year old who'd never raced before and didn't actually seem to know the best way to carry a boat, and nobody had asked me or spoken to me about it, even though there were several others in my crew who I could have raced with and it meant that I was giving up any chance of a medal in one of my two races. (Ali - I'm over it now!!) Poor Neala had to calm me down and get me on the water, no easy job when I had steam coming out my ears and was saying things like "I really don't care if we miss the start". But I really enjoyed the rest of the day - we raced our quad through waves that were coming over our riggers, the deck of the boat, the gunnels, our hands, and on one occasion, my shoulder, but we all thought it was HILARIOUS, and over a 6km race we came second by 1.5secs. We totally thought we'd won so we were a little surprised when someone else got the medal at the ceremony. Because there were about 30 crews in the race, they were setting us off one at a time with 30 sec between each crew, so we'd misjudged the time difference between us and the following crew crossing the finish line.
Jenny
I had a group of people over on Sunday evening for potluck, mostly rowing people (Neala!! and Tim and Amanda and Jenny and Kelsey and James and Leanne and Kris and Marion) and Pam my flatmate and Amy and Anna Liza from work all contributed as well. Pam brought the best brownie ever, I was so impressed…… Actually she was really hungover from her birthday party the night before, so when I went to the supermarket she told me to get something that I liked the look of and she'd pay me back. Rest assured, I teased her about it all night. And Anna Liza actually wasn't there for dinner, she showed up an hour and half early, dropped off a beautiful Phiippino stirfry and a present, hugged me, patted Brody, and ran out the door again to a different party. Such a socialite!
Anna Liza
Monday, the day before I left, I was meant to pack my bag and start ticking things off my page-long list of jobs to do, but really I pulled everything out of my cupboard and drawers, made yet another pile of stuff to give away or throw away (I really did accumulate a lot of stuff in a year), had lunch in front of the tv for 2.5hrs, went to help unload the trailer from Calgary, went home, had dinner, and at 9pm I discovered I needed a visa for Cuba.
Panic ensued.
Everything I could find on the net said that I needed it organized before I arrived in Cuba. I sent Zane a message (he went to Cuba a few months ago) and he said that he and Warren had organized theirs in NZ before they left. Pam was there with me and she was trying to calm me down and help me figure out a way that it could be organized. She text a friend who lived in Toronto and worked at an embassy - not the Cuban one, but we figured she might be able to at least advise us on whether there was a shortcut - but she said I probably needed to organize it through NZ. I rang the NZ Cuban embassy, and the woman who answered the phone literally said well there's nothing we can do. She did at least suggest that I try the Canadian one. Embassies are only open short hours on business days, so I emailed a couple of different addresses for Cuba embassies and help desks to see if we could do it by email or fax. I looked at changing my flights to make time to go to the embassy in Toronto, but it's only open 10am-1pm so even if I got on the next flight I couldn't get there, and there are only 2 flights to Cuba per week with the airline I was travelling with, which would've meant I'd be in Canada beyond the end of my visa, which would then mean that I probably wouldn't be allowed back into the country. I had already been through so many different sets of plans for this trip, the thought of changing my plans again, not going to Cuba, and losing money on the flights and accommodation I'd booked was all too much, and we ended up with a bit of a meltdown.
Josue and Pam
Eventually Pam went to bed, and since I couldn't be bothered moving the mountain of crap off my bed so I could get into it, and I wouldn't have slept anyway, I lay down on the couch and turned on the tv. At about midnight my phone beeped, and even though I figured it was Mum or Dad misjudging the time difference, curiosity killed the cat. It was Zane saying he thought they gave out visas for Cuba onboard the plane on the way there. He knew of two airlines that definitely did, but I was flying with a different one. So I got on the internet and did another quick search, and from what I could see he was right, I could get it on the plane. Talk about relief. And more tears.
I think I only got about 3.5hrs sleep, I was awake again before my alarm went off at 430am for training. I figured I should go, because it's going to be several months before I see the inside of a boat again. I'm glad I did go, we were doing 20 strokes on, 10 strokes off, up and down the river for an hour and a half (that's not why I'm glad) and I was in a single and I was actually beating one of the boys in his single and two of the girls in their double. One of the girls in the double, Leanne, has the fastest erg score of any woman I've rowed with - 7:05, for those who follow erg scores. My current fastest is 7:45, so really she should be beating me hands down, whoever she's in a boat with, so now I think I'm pretty clever all round. I've also spent next to no time in a single ever, so I had several strokes where I had one blade in the water and one in the air, or where I pulled harder on one side than the other and turned corners where I didn't intend to, and I was still beating them, AND I didn't fall in the river. HA! It's a good training session to remember.
Edmonton Rowing Club W8+, Royal Canadian Henley
Usually I would try to get at least a half hour sleep in after training, but I had so much to do that I just carried on. I did my washing, packed my bag, packed up some boxes to send home, cleaned my stuff out of the kitchen, had my favourite veggie rolls in rice paper from the supermarket in town for lunch, with coffee from my favourite coffee shop, booked buses from Montreal to Toronto and Toronto to Chicago (for when I get back from Cuba), booked a hostel in Montreal, printed out bus tickets, wrote down all the addresses and phone numbers of all the accommodation I had booked, and went in to work to drop off my last cellphone bill and my keys and uniform and some espresso machine parts and tools I was carrying around. The girls had all bought me a beautiful bunch of flowers!! I LOVE getting flowers and I'd just been whining to Neala two days earlier that nobody ever buys them for me, and this was the second bunch I'd had since then - some of my rowing friends (Jenny, Kelsey, and Amanda) brought me some at the potluck. I did really mean no nice young men ever buy me flowers, I guess I just need to be more specific next time…
Then I rushed off again, picked up my last pay cheque, had second lunch (all you rowers and Amy understand), went home, repacked my bag and boxes, went to the post office and put four parcels in the mail (one with birthday presents for Kim, Sarah, and Roxy, one with a birthday present for Heather which I've been carrying around since her birthday in October LAST YEAR, and two full of clothes and shoes and a birthday present for Dad, whose birthday was in May), banked my cheque and talked to the lady about the best way to manage my money and my account while I'm in the States, filled my prescriptions for anti-malaria and anti-Delhi Belly meds, went home, had dinner, did my last load of washing, finished packing my bags, cleaned my room, and was actually done and ready to go by 730pm. Then I had two hours to fill in before Neala came to take me to the airport.
Alex and Neala
Jeff
There were only two people who I felt really sad saying goodbye to, Jeff (my boss) and Neala. And Brody, Pam's Fluffy Pants dog. Maybe because they were the first people I met when I got here and the first friends that I made, and obviously with Neala she's by far my closest friend in Canada. It was probably a good thing that she couldn't hang out at the airport with me, she just hugged me, gave me a card to take with me, and left. Otherwise there would've been a lot of tears. I'm sure I will see her again, in Rio or at Master's Worlds or somewhere like that. If she gets her job at the Alberta Museum maybe she and Paul can save up and bring their girls on an educational trip to NZ!! Paul can hunt for snakes, since he's convinced that there are some there that we just don't know about. It was weird though, even though I said goodbye to everybody and had a lot of down time at various airports and very little sleep on my way to Cuba, the first time that I felt like I'd left and it hit me how many awesome people I was saying goodbye to, was when we touched down in Varadero, Cuba. Even the airport is so different to Canada or New Zealand, there's this wooden fence 100m from the side of runway which marks the back boundary of the airport, and the terminal is small and rough round the edges and brightly painted and there IS only one terminal, and even though I was really excited and everybody on the plane was cheering and laughing, all of a sudden I was really sad too, and that was when I finally got teary.
Goodbye Edmonton!!
Beth
Steve and Sheila
Tim
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