My flight to Ottawa this summer has been booked for July 4 to July 13. Well technically I’m only booked to Toronto since I’m using air miles from Korean air, but will be booking the Toronto to Ottawa portion of the flight in the next day or two. My wife booked for me, but doesn’t remember the exact arrival times and I have to wait until she gets back to the office tomorrow before I know them.
In any case I’ll be in Ottawa July 4 and will fly back to Toronto on July 12 and spend one night there assuming I can connect with some friends I have in the area. One thing I’m looking for in Ottawa is a cheap place to stay while I’m there. Cheap and clean is very important, however I don’t care about how small it is – a closet will be fine as long as there are no roaches. I had a line on a good place, but turns out it’s already booked up at that time.
I’m also going to be renting a car and if anyone can point me to a good car rental place that i can get a good deal on I’d be very happy with that.
Finally if you live in Ottawa and would like to meet up, please let me know since I only know one person and expect that my evenings will be free. I do have a large number of things to get done during the daytime, but after business hours I will be free.
“Our company-level pricing study for the highest-speed offers in the countries we observe here locates all of the Canadian companies but one in the cluster with the slowest speeds and highest prices,” said the report from the university’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
I really don’t like this at all considering I pay about $35 for very high speed internet. Several articles over the years have pointed out the that South Korea has the highest internet speeds in the world here Jan 19, 2010, here Feb 2, 2009here Feb 20, 2010 I regularly download files at 5-8mb/s – I can get a full DVD downloaded in less time than it takes to burn it.
Too bad I’ll be moving to Canada and plodding along on an overpriced and slow internet dirt road.
Here’s my latest speed test – it’s a lot slower than usual, but still okay.
The last couple of times I went out to visit my in-laws I took some video of the various highway rest stops here in Korea. In my almost 14 years in Korea I’ve always enjoyed the rest stops here and have thought them far superior to those in Canada. At least the ones I’ve seen in Western Canada during the 80s and 90s – who knows maybe things have changed.
What I remember of highway rest stops in Canada is that it’s usually a single restaurant with a gas station along side the highway and not much else. The toilets were usually disgustingly dirty and there were few cars and the food was usually better than I expected based on what I’d heard from friends. Each rest stop in Canada would have a few big rigs parked and anywhere from zero to five cars depending on the time of day and if it was a holiday. Also the rest stops are very distant – at least 2 hours between them.
Here in Korea, it’s much different. There are rest stops every 15 to 30 kilometres. This may seem excessive but it’s not when you consider the volume of traffic along the highway here. The traffic on a regular weekend will be very crowded with sections of several kilometres dropping speed down to 40-60kph for unknown reason. Due to the heavy traffic driving 210km to my inlaws takes anywhere from 3 hours to 4.5 hours on a regular weekend – no holidays.
Rest stops here can easily hold 20-30 limo buses and 200-400 cars depending on the size of the stop. The washrooms are generally clean and very very large, there’s usually a food court, a single stand alone restaurant, a gas station, a playground for children, a gift shop, and a car accessory store where you can buy anything imaginable you’d want to pimp your car out with. – I forgot to do a walk around this shop, but it’s large and extensive. Along the outside of the main building there will be several shops selling CD/DVD/Cassettes (yes they still sell cassettes), magazines, newspapers and books, and finger food including donuts, chicken shiskebabs, and various unique Korean food stuffs.
This past weekend was Lunar New Year, also known as Chinese New Year and is one of the two biggest holidays in Korea where everyone is expected to visit their family. This leads to extreme traffic. This year it wasn’t so bad for us, it only took 6.5 hours to drive 210 kilometres. There was one year it took 14 hours and that same year it took us almost 2 hours just to exit the rest stop. We needed to use the toilet again even before we made it onto the highway.
Anyhow enjoy the video.
Korean Highway Rest Stops
A short video of a few rest stops along Korean highways. This is the first time I added an audio commentary over video at home. Please let me know if I should have lowered the volume on the main sound track some more.
Eventually I made my way to this page with the sponsorship documents to download. There are a total of eight pdf files to download plus an additional guide to filling out all the forms. Could it get any more difficult? There’s a further four forms and a guide on the immigration process. Sponsorship doesn’t include/guarantee immigration? must read more.
Delicious
Facebook
Last.Fm
Library Thing
LinkedIn
Twitter
YouTube
Comments(5)
