Air Canada - II

-Vidhya Krishnan

Suggestion: Please read the ‘Air Canada –I’ blog first

After sorting out our rooms in ‘The Westin’ hotel, we got refreshed and the conference began at 9 am. As the day progressed, sleepless travel of more than 35 hours struck me. Nothing made sense to me. Although everyone spoke in English, it sounded like Greek and Latin to me. I decided to have a bit of sleep before I attend the poster session. There were two poster sessions. That particular day was fixed for our poster (that I prepared with my friends) and the next day was my PhD poster. I should say I was more excited for my PhD poster than the other one. Anyway, I put the poster up on the board for the viewers and I went to my hotel room in the afternoon to get a bit of sleep to sort my head out for the evening poster session. I went to bed at 2 pm. Suddenly, I was woken up by an alarm sound. For few minutes, I couldn’t understand anything. I collected myself back and saw the alarm clock in my room going off. I pressed the stop button and noticed 12.00 on it’s display. It was dark all around me. I opened the curtains and looked through the French window of the room. The city looked beautiful with all lights and huge buildings. The roads looked quite. I enjoyed the scene for few minutes and made a call to the reception. I asked the lady in the desk, “what time is it and what day?”. She said it is 12 am, Monday (I went to bed on Sunday afternoon). I said to myself, “Oops! The poster session must have been over” (I hope none of those friends read this blog ;) ). I went back to bed and slept. The next day really felt fresh and collected my poster and comments people posted for it. I enjoyed my PhD work poster session and the rest of the conference.

I went to few places in the city and had a nice time as well. I brought with me few maple syrup bottles as Canada is popular for Maple tree. One can see the maple leaf in the Canadian flag. It was time to come back to UK. Fortunately, our Greek colleague had to leave a day earlier than myself and my supervisor. Myself and my supervisor arrived at the Edmonton airport quite early and we checked in our baggage and roamed around the airport. This time there weren’t any delays and we flew to Manchester on time. We arrived at the Manchester airport and waited for our check-in baggage to come. We finally found out that it hasn’t come in the flight we came. I thought, “Oh! This time the baggage not the delay”. I have flown in many airlines and this is the first time I lost my check-in baggage. We filled in the lost-baggage form and described our baggage and left. Three days after the baggage arrived at door without fail. Fortunately, we didn’t lose the bags while going to attend the conference in Canada. Thanks to Air Canada - ‘the best airline of the year 2001’. J