Finally: A Post On The Canada Blog That Is Actually About Canada.

This took a while longer than expected, but: We made it!

We had a reasonably comfortable flight and learned a few things along the way. 🙂 Albert was great and a real sunshine, except for the very last hour. Getting the work permit was painless, if a bit slow, and getting to the apartment was actually a pleasant surprise. And now: the long version. 🙂 (It’s really long. Just saying.)

We got up around 5 a.m. to finish packing and moving boxes. Of course, we didn’t manage to get everything done. The fridge was still half-full with food we thought we’d still eat. I think there’s a just-opened bag of chips on a shelf in the living room, because I figured we’d take a break some time Tuesday night and sit down and treat ourselves to a snack. Ha, the naivete! (Let’s hope the painters found it and choked on it, but that’s a different story.)

Lena, our neighbour, got up early to send us off. We all had something in our eyes, really weird. 🙂 But then, it might just have been the time of day. 🙂

We did what people do on airports: got there early, had breakfast and went to the gate. Here’s the first thing we learned: with KLM, it’s not the Senators and Frequent Flyers that board a plane first. It’s the babies. Yay! Albert, having gotten up with us and being reasonably tired, snuggled up to Agnieszka and was asleep before we even knew it. He slept all the way to Amsterdam. That was our plan: let him sleep on the way there, then the first and last two hours of the flight to Vancouver. That way, he would basically take two afternoon naps and not suffer from jetlag. It was an ambitious plan but, so far, it seemed to work.

Here’s the second thing we learned: Dutch people have a seriously fucked up understanding of what parents and children want to do on an airport. We asked the lady at an info point about family services, and she directed us to the “Baby Care Lounge”, between terminals E and F. “It’s very comfortable there, very quiet. You can just sit and relax and give the little one a rest”, she said. That sounded nice enough. The reality, then, looked a lot like the following photo, only a lot dirtier and with an unhealthy stink to it:

“Put your baby in the filthy, long un-cleaned green fake leather crib, pull the curtain and enjoy… nothing, really, while the next cleaning army marches right past the ‘Lounge’ and takes extra care that future visiting families will be just as disgusted at the dirt and smell in there as you were.” Albert crawled three meters from the filthy couch to the filthy changing table and had such a thick layer of dirt all over him, we had to wash him in the sink. And make sure he didn’t actually touch the sink, because there was stuff in it that I decided not to take a closer look at.
In a word, the room was disgusting. Next time you’re at Schiphol, go there to snap a few closeups of the filth. They’ll make for excellent scares. “If you don’t eat up now, we’ll go THERE!” – “nom nom nom nom nom nom nom!”
We left as fast as we could. Albert was happy, too, because he got to take a proper look at planes, instead.

We were happy to leave Schiphol behind. And here’s where Albert decided to one-up our ambitions and not go to sleep. Not for the first two hours. And not any time later. He just crawled around, flirted with many passengers and most of the crew and had a blast. He got a little tired as we approached Vancouver (when Agnieszka and I were barely able to keep our eyes open) but all told, we had a really painless and comfortable flight.

We were totally knackered by this point, so we decided to throw our money-saving train ride plan over board and took a taxi downtown. We picked up the apartment keys at my future employer, and were at the apartment around 5:30pm. It was a pleasant surprise. It’s small, but has a reasonably sized living room for Albert to play in and the bed is also (almost) large enough for us three. And we can see the sea from up here, I guess that counts for something. 🙂

Two days later, we’re still busy getting over the jetlag, but I think we’re almost there, now. We took a long walk along the beach yesterday and another through Stanley Park today. We’ll settle in some more, now. See y’all soon!