Travel – Page 3 – Saving for Botox

Campañerang Cuba

March 1, 2019March 9, 2019by NikkaLeave a Comment

Dear Elly G,

I wanted to type this out to you using the portable, made in Japan circa 1969, piece of classic machinery I insisted on bringing with me, but my pretentious wannabe little self is doing this at five in the morning. Even though the good Lord saw fit to take away my hearing bit by bit, my neighbours may not be as fortunate. I know, I know, I should’ve factored in my weird circadian rhythms, but oh well. The day is young. I might just re-type this and mail it to you because we’ve already established that I can be pretentious as all get out.

If I really end up sending you snail mail, I wonder what the outcome might be. Will the Cuban government see fit to censor a letter? Will you get this with portions blacked out and redacted like it’s a top secret CIA case file? Not that there’s anything in here that may even be remotely close to threatening state secrets, but you know how my imagination works. Nabag-ohan! Because I’m in Communist Cuba and viva la revolución!

Jorge, our tour guide on the airport shuttle bus, asked “Who here is Canadian?” and was met with a loud chorus of yeah, and yays and what’s uuuuuppps. “Who here is American?” Complete radio silence. “Not a single one, eh?” he said, to a smattering of giggles. And then, “Thank God,” to outright laughter.

Sure, it was probably canned and he likely does this bit a dozen times over to a different audience flying in from Toronto day after day. That doesn’t make it any less funny to me. Speaking of cans, the shuttle bus came with a built-in cooler filled with the local canned beer, which Jorge was enthusiastically slinging. “It’s 3 for $10, but 7 for $20! Who wants some? Oh, 14? Great!” bagging up cans and enthusiastically passing them along to the crazy ones in the back. Methinks it’s non-stop drinking for everyone here but me, but what else is new? Some folks on the plane were drinking while waiting to board (me: wala pa gani!), they drank on the plane, and they drank on the shuttle bus to the resort, where I assume they drank some more. I lucked into a seat on the plane that was right next to the exit, so I got to disembark and get through customs quite speedily. I was the first one on the shuttle which was making scheduled stops at selected resorts (they have an impressive system in place, but more on that later), so I got to watch as the rest of the ones headed to my area of Varadero straggled in. Some came onboard holding cans of beer, but I lost it after at least three grandmas clutching green bottles of cerveza passed me by and started giggling like a lunatic. I think the couple a row behind me saw my reaction and started laughing as well.

One thing is for sure though. This is not going to see the light of day electronically until I get back to the mainland. Yes, “the mainland” means Toronto. I just liked the way “the mainland” sounds, because again, pretentious. They were right about the wifi; even the cell service here is a bit spotty. I read somewhere that Cuba (Cubacel) licenses its signal or whatever from the Italians. It’s so exotic and I love it. Anyway, being unplugged is taking a little getting used to. I had this idea that to be unplugged I wouldn’t use anything electronic, but again that’s hard to do at five in the morning with everyone sleeping off what is probably a massive intake of alcohol.

Pour one out for abused kidneys everywhere,
Nikka

Things I Get Myself Into

Arroz a la Cubana: Touchdown

February 28, 2019March 9, 2019by NikkaLeave a Comment

I had nightmares of getting mugged at the airport. The bestie had relayed a cautionary tale about a friend of a friend who’d set her bag down one minute, and found it gone the next. So there I was, in Varadero’s Juan Gualberto Gomez Airport, looking around furtively every so often like I was deep in the heart of Colon Street with a target on my back. I sometimes forget that if you’ve ever emerged intact from the bowels of old Cebu City, you can survive anything.

Still, it never hurts to be cautious.

Then again, I don’t remember the airport he had specified. Had it been Havana International? If it was, I was being overly cautious for nothing. Nothing happened. Everything ran like clockwork. The Cubans have the tourist machinery down to a fine art. Unlike Manila, there is no chaotic mess, no street hawkers, no shady characters lurking in the shadows, waiting to take advantage of you the moment you exit baggage claims. If there were, I didn’t see them. The whole process, from de-planing, to customs, to baggage claim to arrivals, is smooth, easy and fancy-free.

If you’re flying out of Canada, more often than not the price of the plane ticket includes the cost of the required tourist visa. The airline provides you with a tourist card (which is the visa itself) to fill out on the plane before landing. Be sure to read the instructions before writing anything down because erasures are not allowed. The lady beside me wrote the departure date instead of her birthdate and had to pony up $50 CAD for a fresh slip, something that upset her very much, because she spent a good twenty minutes berating herself while her husband tried to calm her down. Not a good way to start a vacation, that’s for sure.

At customs, the immigration officer checks your documentation – as always, it’s best to be sure your passport is valid for at least six months. Cuba does require proof of insurance. While proof of your provincial insurance (like your OHIP card) is acceptable, I took the extra step of purchasing extra insurance from the airline (Air Transat, $22 CAD) just in case. He didn’t ask to see the extra insurance, just took my picture and wished me on my way. You can speak Spanish if you like, but English is not a problem at admissions. Just in case, I’d recommend downloading Google’s Translate app. It’s only polite to try and speak the language, rather than expect everyone to know English wherever you go.

Anyway, after customers comes baggage claim and arrivals. Unlike Cebu or Manila, there are no aggressive hawkers waiting outside to get you to take a taxi or a dubiously priced rent-a-car. I had booked my vacation as a package – airline and hotel in one – which came with roundtrip airport transfers. (Highly recommended, if you don’t want to stress about how to get to your accommodations.) Upon exiting arrivals, you’ll find airline representatives – Air Transat, Sunwing, RedTag, etc. – waiting outside. They’ll direct you to the shuttle you’re assigned to, which turned out to be a big, air-conditioned bus that stops at pre-arranged resorts along the Autopista Sur, the main highway that stretches into Varadero.

I had wanted to get my currency exchanged at the airport, but there was no booth in the arrivals hall so I ended up doing it at the resort instead. Cuba has two currencies, the Cuban Convertible Peso (CUC) which is for tourists with a roughly 1:1 exchange rate, and the Cuban Peso, which is what the locals use. While it means visitors don’t get to pay the same rate the locals will for a specific item, I like how savvy it is when it comes to making sure they don’t get taken advantage of.

Things I Get Myself Into

How To Stay Alive When You’re Stuck in Economy Class for Fifteen Hours

September 16, 2018by Nikka3 Comments

Looking like you just got off the Paris runway is ridiculous if you’re ultimately headed for the cheap seats in the back. Wear a sports bra. All the support, none of the underwire. You’ll have enough aggravation going on without including uncomfortable underwear into the whole mess. Dress light, dress comfy, use shoes you can ultimately slip in and out of very easily, and for the love of god, wear socks. You don’t want to be traipsing barefoot through security checkpoints when they ask you to remove your shoes. Gross.

My go-to travel outfit is a long-sleeved sweater, lounge pants from Uniqlo and my trusty Adidas Superstars. If it was socially acceptable to travel in a Snuggie, I would consider it. For a few minutes. I’m not that far gone.

Pick an aisle seat. You’ll get a little extra wiggle room and getting out is easy. Watch those elbows when the food cart comes around, though.

Have a travel buddy? Great, you get to keep that armrest lifted for a less confined feel. You can also try to game the system. If the plane’s seating configuration is 3 x 3 x 3, choose seats that leave the middle seat between you empty. If you’re lucky, no one will book it, and you’ll end up with even more extra space, because no one likes the middle seat.

Fair warning, this doesn’t always work out. People flying economy rarely cancel intercontinental long-haul flights if they can help it.

Stand. Stand often. Deep vein thrombosis is not your friend. No need to be a jack-in-the-box, but try to stretch your limbs at least once every couple of hours, and a potty break is a great excuse.

Keep your socks on. Planes get cold. Fun fact: you can get free socks and a sleep mask for free if you ask!

Use shoes when you use the lavatory.

This really shouldn’t be a necessary reminder, but I’ve seen quite a few people traipsing up the aisle in their stockinged feet. Observe hygiene and common sense; an airplane is a giant, bacteria-filled flying bus. God knows what you’re picking up. (Hepatitis? Swine Flu? Foot and Mouth Disease? Gingivitis?)

Pre-load your phone/tablet/e-Reader with enough material to keep you occupied. In-flight entertainment may not always be ideal (Cathay Pacific – yay! Air Canada – boo!), and you’ll need something to make those interminable hours pass quickly, especially if you find it hard to sleep on planes. Otherwise, there’s always extra-strength Benadryl.

You know what, forget everything you’ve just read, with the exception of the sports bra. When all else fails, always go for extra-strength Benadryl. Sleep your way through a plane flight with no underwire digging into your ample curves, and you’ll be juuuust fine.

Jaded Hindsight Edition, Things I Get Myself Into

Magic Carpet Ride

August 25, 2018October 13, 2018by Nikka1 Comment

You know how it goes. Street rat in disguise woos princess away from her balcony with an offer to show her the world by magic carpet. She accepts, and it’s glorious. Fantastical. Amazing. Romantic, the kind of adventure a young girl would give her right arm for.

But I’m old and jaded now, and you know what? It’s a carpet. There won’t anything between you and the elements, no stable foundation for your backside, no one serving warm rolls and instant noodles, no inflight entertainment.

Economy class is a bit harder on the body. It’s a cattle car on a flying bus with a caste system. There’s the one percent – first class, with its hot towels and personalized care. Then upper middle class – business class, with its bags of warm nuts. Then there’s lower middle class – premium economy, the place where the more fortunate bob up from under, using their miles or squeezing the last drops of their life savings for slightly larger inflight entertainment screens and a bit more legroom. The rest of us ne’er do wells are in economy, herded together like a bunch of sheep hitching a ride to the slaughterhouse.

I personally enjoy nabbing the cheapest prices I can find, but you really do get what you pay for. It’s fine for short haul flights that take about two or three hours tops, but when you’re winging your way across the Pacific on a flight that lasts for forever in the middle seat and unable to stretch your legs (and really, much of anything) it’s an exquisite sort of torture. Exquisite because I know I’m going to end up somewhere nice, like Silliman University’s Founder’s Day celebration (yay!). Torture, because it’s fifteen interminable hours of being in one position, praying the passenger in front of you isn’t a jerk about reclining, that the people you share seats with won’t come with a squalling little human and that the stranger behind you doesn’t treat the touch screen monitor like a punching bag.

Worst of all, airlines never let you forget how much better you can have it if you just pay more. Why else do we peons get a glimpse of the business class section on our way to the back of the ~~bus~~ plane? With its roomy seats that turn into recliners, ample legroom and enough space to for others to respect your own personal bubble, business class is a glimpse of heaven on your way to hell. Wish you were here! It’s awful.

So to everyone who’s flown in to catch SU’s 117th anniversary and did it on an economy fare, I salute you. Loyal shall we e’er remain, indeed. Happy birthday, Silliman!

Image Disney/Aladdin

Flashbacks, Things I Get Myself Into

One Chilly Evening

April 22, 2018May 1, 2018by NikkaLeave a Comment

You fall in love with some places instantaneously. For some, it’s New York City. Others, Rome. For me, it was Amsterdam. All it took was a single stroll.

Falling in love is something one does without conscious thought, and, more often than not, without any expectations. For a city that was never on my bucket list, Amsterdam surprised me. It was a place I’d mentally pigeonholed as a city people went to for sex and weed. But like so many other sister cities with a rich and varied history and culture, Amsterdam transcended that narrow-minded view. I loved it from the moment I found myself lugging my suitcase down a warren of narrow alleys that were at once claustrophobic and thrillingly mysterious, feeling a little lost, wondering what was around the next corner, and finding rows of red-lit windows in the early hours of the morning. Without consciously meaning to, I had found myself in the middle of Amsterdam’s infamous red light district, struck by the realization that business never stops. I loved it. I loved the matter-of-factness of it all. There were cheese shops and crepe shops, sex shops and weed shops all within minutes of each other; flower shops, antique shops and a restaurant with an old carousel in the middle. It was weird, welcoming, unapologetic and wonderful. I loved what Amsterdam was trying to say: that humans love sex just as much as they love cheese, so why treat one with any more shame than the other?

Amsterdam is a city that marches to the beat of its own drum and allows everyone else to march to the beat of theirs. If there’s anything I can appreciate, it’s that. It’s an old city, built on commerce and art and I loved everything about it. I loved that it had charm. I loved that it had big fat french fries with mayonnaise and rich, buttery slices of apple pie that sat like a stone in your belly. That it had sweet little poffertjes dusted with icing sugar, and flavourful black licorice. Best of all, that they had FEBO, an automatic “restaurant” with all sorts of strange sounding krokets, and you never go wrong with whatever you pick even if you have no idea what it is, because everything in FEBO is just so damn tasty.

I loved that Amsterdam had cobblestone streets and little street-sweeping machines that came out at night to clean them. I loved that it was designed with not just longevity, but beauty in mind, its core shot through with bridges and canals that surprisingly do not smell like sewage. I loved its public transit, which was easy to understand despite being in a different language, that people bicycled everywhere, that it was equal parts familiar and not, that its residents don’t really use curtains, and peering into a residential alley is like being like a little human in the middle of giant dollhouses. Everything is open, if you don’t avert your eyes. I loved that windmills were just half an hour outside of the city.

I miss Amsterdam. I miss it whenever I’m out in the middle of a chilly night, walking through the streets of Toronto, breathing in the cool night air the way I was the other night. Something about that combination, a midnight stroll and a lingering chill takes me back to a night when A and I, ravenous and excited, once traversed the streets of an electric city, holding hands and looking for a FEBO.

Flashbacks, Things I Get Myself Into

The Blair Bitch Project

December 14, 2017by Nikka1 Comment

Sometimes we look back at the passage of months and wonder where time went. I started out wanting to tell a sort of story, and ended up with a mish-mash of moments randomly cut and pasted into what looks like an incoherent toddler’s nursery project. I don’t know about you, but my life sometimes feels that way. But who cares? Also, in the 21st century, if it isn’t captured (and shared, and retweeted), did it really happen?

The year is nearly over, and I’m glad for having gotten the chance to spend it with the people I love, and now for the chance to have a moment for a cheesy-ass retrospective. My shit resembles rejected footage for the Blair Witch Project, but that hasn’t stopped me from trying. Yes, I am that embarrassing friend who’ll whip out a GoPro and just stick it out while walking around in a foreign city. I’m a terrible videographer. Probably best to watch this on a mobile device; Vimeo wouldn’t take the full sized HD version. Ah well.

2017 from Nikkajow on Vimeo.

Things I Get Myself Into

Brexit Through the Gift Shop

November 25, 2017December 20, 2019by Nikka1 Comment

I kind of expected to come back home swathed in the Union Jack from head to toe, but the only things that really caught my fancy were Harry Potter themed. Which is weird, because I’m not that big a Potterhead. Still, I’m pleased.

Platform 9 3/4 is the place to go for anything Potter-themed. There are wands to be had, stuffed owls, sweaters, shirts, scarves, toques, satchels, keyrings, socks and sweets, including Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans. It’d be an absolute delight if it wasn’t swarming with people. Because it really is in King’s Cross Station, it’s a mecca for the fandom, and who hasn’t heard of Platform 9 3/4? There’s even a trolley that’s half disappeared into the wall where excited youngsters can have a photo snapped for a price. The queue is crazy. I don’t know if there are off peak hours, but we were there in the morning and it was already packed. (No, I didn’t pay for a photo, much to your relief.)

I got this one for free. Wait, wrong platform…

Here you go. Sorry, random Indian couple. The crazy queue I was talking about is to the right.

The House of MinaLima on 26 Greek Street in Soho is the place to go if you don’t want to be caught in a swarm of excited youngsters or do the (pricey) WB Studio Tour. It’s a shop run by Miraphora Mina and Eduardo Lima, the graphic artists behind all eight HP movies along with the newest one, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. The windows are currently styled to look like Honeydukes Sweet Shop and there are Hogwarts acceptance letters all over the steps and floor. With four floors in total, the ground floor is the main shop where you can buy the actual goods. The other floors are purely for spectacle and Instagram. The second floor has copies of The Daily Prophet and The Quibbler (complete with giveaway spectrespecs) strewn about willy nilly, while the third floor boasts a huge Marauder’s Map underneath your feet and proclamations from Umbridge are on all the walls. The fourth is inspired by the Fantastic Beasts movie. It’s kitschy and bright and fun. Best of all, Continue reading “Brexit Through the Gift Shop” →

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