The story thus far...

It's been a pretty crazy week, and as you can tell, I've updated an ton (ahh sarcasm, is there no medium you transcend?). I suppose this is good practice for me. I have no idea what my internet access will be, but I figure it could be days or a couple of weeks between updates. I'll continue to write, but there will be larger, less frequent updates I'd imagine.

Anyway, last Friday was a lot of fun, and Saturday turned out pretty good too, got to catch up with a lot of people before I left. So the hard stuff, packing, visas, etc. could begin this week. Starting with Monday's revisit to the Indian embassy. What I hoped would be a fairly smooth and quick transaction, turned out to be an 11 hour ordeal. The system is soooo slow, and there is no incentive to improve the customer relations at all. If you don't want to wait in line and pay your $62, there's a billion other people waiting to take your place...

The rest of this week was spent tying up loose ends and getting things I'll need for my time there. I've still got a lot to do, but I just wanted to test out this new blogging system I'll likely be using. W.Bloggar is an offline blog tool. This'll allow me to write and save posts, then upload them when I finally get to an internet connection. Can't say that it does everything that I need, but "beggars" can't be choosers. I apologize for the lameness factor on this update, but there is much to do, and as you can guess, I haven't started doing it yet.

Oh yeah, I can't stress enough how good Amazon.ca has been...travel books like the Lonely Planet series and Rough Guides are like $40-$50 in the book store. I managed to snag a couple online for less than half the price. Plus even with the free shipping, I got it in my hands within two business days. Quite impressive. Which segues nicely into an sidebar I was noticing while shopping for books. Why the hell is the exchange rate printed on like the barcode...with the dollar soaring (up at like 84 cents US), the Canadian prices are completely skewed. I watched a report this week dealing with the same topic, and the suggestion a bookstore owner gave was to "buy it online from the US." Why not just use the US price and do the conversion at the cash register? I'm sure there's a reason (and I have a sneaking suspicion the report may have given an explanation...), but I can't be bothered to think right now. No time for that.

update: A combination of blogger, a flaky router, and a laptop I'm setting up to take with me prevented me from posting this earlier. I'm sure this bodes well for me when I'm halfway across the world in the jungle trying to send an email...

Mississauga