Thus starts my new employment at CAD Link Europe, the European branch office of QBuild, which is situated in Toronto, Canada. And – as already mentioned before – they not only want to have me over for the yearly company meeting, but also keep me there for three whole weeks for training. Of course, international travel is complicated enough as it is, and with the Green Shnolz still ongong, in addition to the Electronic Travel Authorization (ETA) that I already had to get for my stopover in Toronto on my trip from Japan to Brazil (see Book III ~ Chapter 1 ~ The Bad Beginning), I now also need to install the ArriveCan app on my already full phone, as well as get a negative PCR test performed in Germany no early than 72 hours prior to arrival, which is a pretty narrow window.
With that in mind, the one day I have between my return from the centers of Germany (see Book IV ~ Bonus Chapter Part 3 ~ Back to Bavaria) and my departure on 2-Oct-2021 ends up being quite busy as I need to…
Test, Pack and Hasten
1-Oct-2021Today is my first day of work at CAD Link Europe, but before I get to the office, I need to make a PCR test for the flight tomorrow. It goes without saying that my home, the place where I can get such a test, and the office are about as equitrilateral as it gets.
My trip into the city ¬– which by all means should be routine – turns into an adventure as the S-Bahn regularly stops in its tracks due to signal errors at the Munich east station, the primary function of which is to serve as a critical and error-prone choke point for the entire S-Bahn service of Munich. Of course, I departed with some time to spare since I expected just such a thing, but even so I start getting antsy as the S-Bahn stops for minutes first before Laim, then several times along the main line, and finally in the tunnel between Hauptbahnhof and Stachus. When it finally stops at the Stachus and stays there "until further notice", I decide that I am close enough now to make a run for it. The test centre is near the Marienplatz, which is just one more stop down the line, and I have enough time left that I will make it for sure if I just walk there, as opposed to waiting in the train and hoping it continues soon.
As such, I arrive at the test centre just in time for my 8:00 appointment. Turns out this one is pretty much just an ordinary clinic, and I’m actually one of the first persons there, so it doesn’t take long for me to get my test taken and be on my way.
My next stop is the office, which is located in the commercial district of Steinkirchen-Planegg (“Stone Churches-Map Corner”). Getting there is quite a bit of a hassle, since it is inconveniently located about 10 STEPs away from the closest S-Bahn station, and the bus connections from there to the station amount to “walking is still faster”. Thus, I travel there taking the S6 to the closest station of Gräfelfing (“Count-let Caught”) – with what I should learn to appreciate as only a “slight” delay – and then walk from there to the office.
However, when I arrive, I find the door closed, and no one inside. I can see our sign at the door at the far end of the hallway, and I have indeed already been here once for my interview, but since today is my first day, I don’t yet have a key, and so I have to wait. After all, despite all the delays, it’s only 9:00 by now.
However, no matter how hard I wait, no one shows up, and so I eventually call Wolfgang – my new boss – to ask when someone will show up. That’s when I learn that apparently, they decided that since they, too, need to make tests for our upcoming trip to Canada, they decided that no one needs to come to the office today. They even sent me a mail about that, but since I haven’t had time to check my mails yet on account of just having returned from my latest trip yesterday, I didn’t get that notice. As such, I now get to go home and have all day to pack, and since that means I effectively have all day now I decide to take the scenic route home by taking the bus to the next U-Bahn station of Fürstenried West (“Lords Reed West”), and taking the U3 on an end-to-end ride from there all the way to Moosach (“Moss Stream”).
And then, it’s packing time. It has been some time since I prepared to travel full-gear, and as it turns out, it’s a good thing that I got all day now because the whole process still takes a few hours.
With that, all preparations are complete, and I am all set to…
Make for the Airport
2-Oct-2021Today is the day of departure. In the morning, I say my goodbyes to Jamie and Toledo, whom I’ll be leaving in the care of Gerlinde – a friend of the family – for these next three weeks, and then I gear up, ready to depart. With my trusted Backpack of Flames and my legendary coat Krevyasz at my side, I am as ready as I get.
Since the plane only departs in the afternoon, I leave home relatively late by my standards, namely at the crack of noon.
The first part of the trip is relatively straightforward: I have to get to the Moosach station by bus, and the only challenge there is stamping my ticket with all my gear attached. The bus, by the way, is pretty empty around this time of the day.
There are a few more people at the station of Moosach, but it’s still not anywhere near what I’d call busy there.
After a few minutes’ wait, the S-Bahn for the airport arrives…
…and while there’s definitely more people in there than in the bus, I’d still say that there’s plenty of space for everyone to breathe – even with the masks.
Now, I’ve already come this way twice before, namely on my way to New Zealand (see Book I ~ Chapter 1 ~ To Singapore, and Beyond!) and to Japan (see Book II ~ Chapter 1 ~ The Journey to Japan), but I don’t think I’ve ever covered this initial part of the trip before, so let’s do that now:
Ride Duration: 0:30h
Approximate Distance: 31km
Average Speed: 62km/h
The S1 line from Moosach to the airport was only completed in 1998, which means that I still remember a time in my life when it didn’t exist, and you had to go all the way through the city and take the S8 to the airport. The S1 still existed back then, but it only went to Freising (“Free Sing”), which is still kinda close to the airport, but also on the other side of the river Isar. Eventually, they completed a connecting piece of track between Neufahrn (“New Driving”) and the airport – complete with bridges and everything – and ever since the S1 has been the S1 for Freising/Flughafen (“Airport”), which gets divided into two separate trains at Neufahrn. That’s the route I ride today, and have also rode on my trips to New Zealand and Japan. And by now, it is also all within the territory covered during my petal rides.
The train trip to the terminal of Munich Airport leads past several suburbs and some fine forest, as well as across the aforementioned river Isar. A number of commercial districts and logistics centres are also along the way, and the rest is fields, which are all already abandoned around this time of the year.
Like at many other airports, the train station at Munich Airport is also underground.
The last time I was here, the airport building was bare as the day it was built. Today, however, it appears to be suffering a terminal case of advertorial auditis.
Inside, I am the first of my company to arrive, and so I take care of the check-in procedure while waiting for the others to arrive.
Fortunately, everything goes well. Seems like I did all the formalities right, and a short time later, I hold my boarding pass in hand – this time around with a big, fat GEPRÜFT (“tested”) stamp to signify that I have a valid negative test for the Green Shnolz.
My co-workers show up within the next 15 minutes, and after they suffer a bit of a hassle at check-in on account of not having noticed that luggage costs extra, we are on our way deeper into the terminal. Notably, the airport itself is already reasonably busy again, comparable to the last two times I was here, actually.
Well, maybe a little less, because the queues at emigration are notably shorter. Here, we have a little race: While my co-workers use the automatic border control, I try out whether I’m faster going past the clerk the old-fashioned way on account of him not having a queue. In the end, however, we end up coming out at almost the same time.
Once inside, we have ample time left, and thus decide to sit down in my favorite restaurant here, the Boconero, which I already admired once for it’s colorful wall design. Today, I also notice that you can actually watch the pizza being made while you wait too. Another point in its favor!
And now, let me introduce you to my co-workers. On the left, we have Wolfgang, who is my new boss, and to the right we have Tobias, who is my new project manager. Toby also plays in a band, while Wolfgang single-handedly built up the European branch office of QBuild that I’m working for now.
After a tasty meal (Weißwurst (“White Sausage”) for them and a Pizza Diavolo for me), we slowly head for the nearby gate, where our plane is still getting ready for boarding.
While waiting, I spot a very colorful plane belonging to the Arabian Etihad airline. I wonder if the winds will ever take me there.
Before long, it’s time for boarding. Regrettably, we didn’t manage to get seats next to each other, so this is where I must bid my co-workers farewell for the duration of the trip. Having booked my seat near the rear of the plane, I am among the first groups to get called, and thus make my way through the oxygen-colored jet bridge…
…and into the airplane.
It should still be some time until takeoff, but now that I’m safely aboard the plane, I can relax a little. My fear of airports, and something getting wrong at the last moment, will probably never leave me. Now, however, I am all set to be on my way. However, this plane trip should be unlike any other before, since this time around, it would be entirely…
A Masked Migration
Flight Duration: 9:00h
Approximate Distance: 6,800km
Average Speed: 756km/h
I hadn’t planned on making another plane trip until after the pandemic had ended, buuut…
…things happened, and now here I am, in a plane where every second seat is free – which is not too bad, actually – and where I have to wear my mask for the entire duration of the flight, which is quite annoying.
Anyway, this non-stop flight from Munich to Toronto will take us across the Netherlands, across the North Sea, over Scotland, and then across the northernmost reaches of the Atlantic Ocean south of Iceland and Greenland, before finally taking us into Canadian airspace.
But before we get there, we first have to take off. Thus far, all my starts from Munich Airport have taken me to the east, and even though this time we take off heading east again (in parallel with another plane), soon after the start, the plane takes a sharp left and starts heading north. As such, we soon pass the Isar just west of Moosburg (“Moss Castle”), and continue past the village of Oberappersdorf (“Upper Sunlit Village”), which is surrounded by woods on three sides. After that, my camera fails me. You see, I got a new model, and annoyingly, this one has an auto-focus function, which I also like to call the “auto-ruin” function, because it can’t be turned off, and randomly starts re-focusing on whatever picks its interest in the middle of a video, say, the badly cleaned window pane. I have already made a note to buy a better one once my budget allows for it, but at least for this trip, we’ll have to live with this “feature”. It is not until we reach the great Dürnbucher Forst (“Meagre Beech Forest”) that it re-focuses on something sensible again, and shortly thereafter, we already cross the Donau (“Danube”) on it’s way to the Black Sea. The speed at which we’re moving is truly astounding. With my trusty bike Jycily, I would need a whole day to reach the great river of Bavaria, but by plane, we’re across it only about seven minutes after takeoff.
We’ve picked a great day for flying, for the skies are perfectly clear, not a cloud in sight, so I get to behold many amazing sights as we pass across Germany. Most notably, I get a great view on several of the places Robert and I passed through on the way to our centre of Germany, such as Bamberg and Grimmenthal (see Book IV ~ Bonus Chapter Part 1 ~ Trawling to Thuringia).
And I can even sense where Eisenach would have to be, though that is now already far enough from our route of travel to be lost to the distance fog. Had the plane’s course taken us ten or twenty km further east, I now would have gotten a bird’s eye view on our entire hiking route from last week.
But even so, there’s plenty of things to see. Like solar panels! As it happens, we are flying at exactly the right place and time that I can observe veritable trails of reflective surfaces on roofs and fields as we pass them by.
And if solar panels aren’t your thing, we’ve got windmills too, at least now that we’re out of Bavaria.
As we head further north, a thin but persistent cloud cover starts blanketing the land, and as such there’s not much to see anymore outside until further notice.
Time to focus on the inside then! As a part of Green Shnolz measures, every passenger has been supplied with a set of personal protective equipment, which is a rather fancy name for a surgical mask, some refreshment towels and a small bottle of hand disinfectant.
And then, it’s lunchtime! Yes, technically, the pizza earlier was my breakfast today. Since we’re travelling in the direction of the setting sun, the meal timings are a bit weird today. Anyway, as usual, there’s the choice between chicken or some vegetarian dish. The latter turns out to be pasta, which I am happy to choose. In addition to it, there’s also some bread, salad, and evil KitKat from Nestlé. Can you feel the screams of the children being exploited on the cocoa plantations of the Ivory Coast? Thank you, Air Canada, for supporting such wonderful practices! And here I was wondering where I’d get my daily dose of evil today.
After that, I spend most of my time napping. After all, I have to compensate for a 6-hour time difference today, and napping is still my personal time-trusted recipe against jetlag. It is between Edinburgh and Aberdeen that we enter Scottish airspace, though on account of the cloud cover still persisting, we don’t really get to see anything of that.
It’s not until we’re well into the Scottish Highlands that the clouds occasionally let up a bit, and offer a glimpse of at least a little bit of Scottish soil.
Though among the few things we get to see, there’s also about a dozen Scottish windmills. Can someone who is familiar with norther Scotland maybe tell me where those are?
And as we leave Scotland behind after crossing the island of Lewis and Harris (and yes, that’s a single island. Look it up), the skies are all cloudy again.
It is not until we are well over the ocean that the clouds break up again and make way for a varied cloudscape, blue with white, in an ever-changing pattern, as far as the eye can see, for thousands of kilometres.
Shortly before the halfway point, we pass by Iceland at a distance of roughly 500km. Unfortunately, that’s to far for us to get even a glimpse of the volcanic island.
And now, for another neat feature of this plane. Technically, it’s still the middle of the day, and yet the plane is looking like this:
You’d think that all the window shutters were drawn, but that’s not the case! In fact, this plane doesn’t even have any window shutters. Instead, it has a curious technology that allows darkening the windows by some manner that I do not understand, controlled either locally by a button on the window or centrally by the plane crew. At its darkest level, the windows are as dark as solar eclipse sunglasses.
Anyway, a few hours later, we also pass by the southernmost point of Greenland – Cape Farewell – and this time around, I am not disappointed. Distant though they might be, I can still clearly see the snow-covered peaks of the world’s largest island jutting out of the blue sea. I think I might even have captured the mouth of the Prince Christian Sound there! Thus far, there seems to be still plenty of ice and snow on there, but then again, I don’t know how it must have looked in its prime.
Following that little spectacle, there’s not much to see until we reach the coast of Canada. We enter Canadian airspace over Labrador, just north of the Happy Valley-Goose Bay. Once again, however, there’s not much to see there on account of the Return of the Cloud Cover®.
And then, totally unexpectedly, we pass over one of my pet places. Maybe you have something like that too: Places on earth that you randomly stumbled across on the net or some book that you think are really, really cool. Well, one of mine is right here, and we pass right across: It’s René-Levasseur Island – also known as the Eye of Quebec – the world’s second-largest island-lake, and the largest artificial island in the world. Originating from a meteorite impact, this geological structure only became an island in 1970 when the Manicouagan Reservoir was flooded, and two previously separate crescent-shaped lakes merged into the annular Lake Manicouagan that from then on fully surrounded the newly-made island. It’s a shame that it’s still cloudy outside, but then again, since the plane is passing directly over the island, I wouldn’t have been able to see it anyway without cutting a hole into the floor, and I know that’s not smart. Also, I’m afraid I must have left my pickaxe back at home.
By now, we’re already in the air for about seven hours and are slowly approaching our destination. As such, the airline serves its passengers a little tasty pastry-out-of-the-box, which should also end up being my dinner for today.
It is somewhere north of Quebec that the clouds finally break up and open up the sight on fantastic primal Canadian river-, hill- and lakescapes, completely untouched by human hands.
But not for long! Because soon enough it’s time for the Return of the Cloud Cover 2®. Time for a little more napping.
This one should now last until almost all the way to Toronto, and I already fear we might have a cloudy landing. Eventually, however, the clouds break up a bit again, and we get to see the first glimpses of civilization since… uhhh… Scotland, I guess.
And then, we’re already in our final descent to Toronto. We harmlessly pass by the Toronto Buttonville Municipal Airport – which would actually be about an order of magnitude closer to our final destination for today but sadly doesn’t service international flights – and then continue to follow the run of the 407 Express Toll Route for a while. Crossing the expressway are long, straight streets, one of them (the one crossing the expressway near a small river) is Yonge Street, the longest street, longer than any other street ever™. Between that grid of streets and crazy-wide highways, it’s all urban sprawl, sometimes residential, sometimes commercial, sometimes industrial, dotted with parks and golf courses. There’s actually a lot of green in between, but at the same time, the city also reaches as far as the eye can see. The last time I’ve seen something like that was in the Radiant Metropolis (see Book II ~ Chapter 3 ~ Living, Learning and Working). We pass over the districts of Thornhill, Westminster-Branson as well as Jane and Finch among others, and shortly after crossing The Elms and he West Humber Parklands touch down at Toronto Pearson International Airport.
We’ve been chasing the sun all day, and now, by the time we finally get out – still wearing our masks, mind you – it’s already sunset’o’clock.
So, here we are, safe and sound in Canada. Wolfgang, Tobias and I meet up again once outside the plane, and prepare ourselves for the gauntlet that’s yet to come.
Because we’re still hours away from our final destination for today, and the end of this trip should yet turn out to be…
A Terribly Tedious Termination
Quiz Time! You’re operating an international airport during a pandemic and you need to process a large number of people at once, what do you do?
If you answered “Stick to long and tedious processing methods and end up with a hall crowded full of people”, then congratulations, you are correct! Because that’s just what we run into here! For some strange reason, this airport seems to have a really weird immigration process where you need to wait for a “self service” pillar to become available, then answer some really weird questions there, have something printed out, and then get into the next line, at the end of which an immigration clerk checks it manually again. I also have to answer some questions regarding the nature of my visit. Interestingly, although we start up at the same position in the queue, I end up getting through there much faster on account of an attendant who apparently took a shine to my cute mask fast-tracking me to an open counter.
As such, I get through to the luggage pickup area much faster than Wolfgang, and especially as Tobias, who has the additional bad luck of getting to a grumpy officer, who ends up grilling him for another fifteen minutes or so. However, even I, who got through the fastest of all three, only arrives at the luggage pickup area to find that the conveyor belts have long stopped and our bags have been moved to the floor next to the belts. Fortunately, this time around my luggage did not get lost at this particular airport.
I need to wait for about twenty minutes after clearing immigration before Wolfgang and Tobias make it out too. After picking up our luggage, we quickly make it through customs, and then out into the arrivals hall.
Now, we still need to get from the airport to our hotel, which is located at the border of Toronto and Markham. That’s about 26km away, which is approximately the same distance that my home is from the Munich Airport. However, although Toronto is considerably bigger, its public transport system doesn’t quite measure up to that of Munich, and thus Wolfgang and Tobias proceed to call an Uber, which is apparently the preferred mode of transport in these parts.
Ride Duration: 0:30h
Approximate Distance: 32km
Average Speed: 64km/h
This is actually my first time using an Uber, but in the end, it doesn’t feel much different than a taxi. As for the route, we head east on the Highway 401 for quite a while, and then turn north on the 404 Highway Not Found, which we then follow until the border of Markham. Our hotel is literally just on the other side. Also, it is almost exactly below the path of our plane’s landing approach, so we could have saved several hours by parachuting down there. The officials would probably not have been amused though.
By now, it’s already perfectly dark outside, and as such, there’s not much to see other than the roads. But then again, the roads are already a sight in their own right, what with many of the roads being bigger than most highways in Germany. And then, you should see the highways over here! An interesting thing to point out here is the speed limit: Even on the biggest highways, the speed limit is 110km/h, and on the transfer strips it goes down to 30 km/h. There’s even speed bumps to enforce the limit! I’d like to see that in Germany.
After about half an hour’s drive, we finally arrive at the hotel. By now it’s 20:30, and the three of us have been (more or less) awake for about 18 hours now. That’s not yet critical, but after a long day’s travel it’s enough for each of us to wish for a bed and little more.
Fortunately, the check-in here is completed relatively quickly, and so we’re soon off to our respective floors, which are conveniently located on different floors.
When I enter my room, my first thought is: “Big”. I don’t think I’ve ever been in this big of a hotel room before. AirBnb, yes, but all the hotel rooms I’ve stayed in thus far were significantly smaller than this, so I can’t help but feel just a little bit out of place. Fortunately, I’ve brought Emilious on this trip too, to help me feel a little bit more at home. After all, I’ll be staying here for three whole weeks, which is also yet the longest I’ve ever stayed at a hotel.
And with that, this day of journeying comes to an end. I have yet reached another new nation to stay at and make memories, but for now, all I want to do is sleep. What adventures yet await me here is a tale to tell in the next chapter of the Travelling Fox Blog.
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