Friday, July 11, 2014

Vancouver

My trip stated with an unintentional stopover in Vancouver. I was only supposed to connect in Vancouver and then go into Portland. I had thought the original connection time was short, around 90mins. But then my flight out of HK was slightly delayed. I thought it took them forever to board everyone. There was a lot of people on this flight. 

My journey actually started Thursday morning with me catching the shuttle to the Airport Express station outside one of the nearby hotels. This turned out to be a really bad choice since the hotel I got on was the first hotel on the route so we had to get people from all the other hotels. So maybe this was where all the delays started. I got to work pretty late after dropping off my luggage. Actually taking the airport express from work isn't optimal either since there's really no good way to get there. I ended up taking a taxi.

Always taking these photos now. Such an HK thing.

So I arrived at the Vancouver airport and a lady at the gate said that there was no way I could make my connection and that I should just had over to the US customs. I knew this would happen and was hoping to get on the next flight out at 8pm. But i was really worried about this since the only planes that fly between Vancouver and Portland were small planes that can only hold like 20 something people. So I rushed over but I forgot to pack a pen with me so I had to stop to fill in one of those customs forms. There was a huge line at a counter in front of the customs area, which turned out to be the reticketing counter. I went around to get in line for the security check only to find that other people in line already had rescheduled flights. So I went back to the counter and found that they had already printed another boarding pass for me for the next day. There's already 5 people on standby for the 8pm flight so there was no way I could get on. So I gave up at this point and went to collect my bag. Had to go through Canadian customs and got another stamp on my passport. 

The guy at the baggage counter found my bag. Apparently they take photos of all the bags and they found mine pretty easily. I had to go up to the ticketing counter to get my hotel voucher. It's really a good thing that there was easily connectable internet at the airport and hotel. The hotel voucher came with 3 meal tickets. I used both the lunch and dinner one in one go. They really didn't give us very much money and food at the hotel was not cheap. 
Weather is really nice!


Dinner of salmon burger and fries. Enjoying the long sunsets. Really miss the long sunsets. The sun goes down too fast in HK.

Breakfast. Had to pay extra on top of the voucher. Good thing Discover doesn't charge foreign transaction fees and they took it.