If you read this site, you've probably already figured out that I travel for work from time to time (lately, it seems as though I stay home from time to time). There are many perks to this, and some serious drawbacks. One of the nastiest, as far as I'm concerned, is the dreaded expense claim form. It's a bitch to fill out, it's a bugger to remember to get a receipt for all the stupid things to do, and it's a pain in the ass to fit some very necessary expenses into allowable categories. More often than not, I'll lose money - because I just forgot to get a cab reciept, because there's no way to reclaim the hotel cleaning staff tip, because you want to give a small present to someone who helped a lot. But the biggest drawback of all is the time between incurring expenses and getting money back: I incur the cost when I book the plane ticket, I can't get money back until after I've completed travel.
The booking plane tickets and hotels part is not so hard - that's what the web is for. But last time, I booked a hotel through destina.ca (hey, they claim they'll give you aeroplan points for doing so). The hotel deal (a suite hotel in Ottawa) was great - excellent rate, quick transaction. The destina customer service when an issue was encountered? Not so much.
Destina.ca's hotel bookings are handled by hotels.com (or hotels.ca, in Canada, I guess). Like a plane ticket, you pay at the time you book, and they email you a "confirmation receipt". Nowhere on said confirmation receipt does it say that you have actually paid (ie. paid in full by VISA or whatever). Nope. It looks just like any other reservation, the kind where you pay at the hotel.
1. When I checked out of the hotel, I asked for a receipt - I was snottily informed that I get this from hotels.com.
2. So, I log into my profile as soon as I get home. Well, what do you know... that reservation date has passed, no changes can be made - that's what the interface tells me, there was no option of even looking at it. So, here's what I do:
3. I email destina.ca (as I booked through them), explaining situation, asking for a receipt for a work-related travel claim. Standard response of, that part of destina is handled by hotels.com, here is their number.
4. I call hotels.com, explain the situation. I am assured that a receipt will be emailed right away. No reciept arrives during the next week.
5. I follow up on the phone, and explain the situation. I ask for a fax. I'm told it will be sent in the next five minutes. No fax arrives that day.
6. I follow up on the phone *again*, rather persistent this time - I refuse to get off the phone until my email beeps with a receipt. Eventually I get the *same confirmation receipt* that I had all along. I explain that I need something that shows that I actually stayed there, and that I paid - since other reservations I could cancel for a full refund, and still have my confirmation, and then claim it even though I never spent the money - except, of course, I can't. That's why most employers require a real receipt. They're not stupid.
7. The agent tells me "that's all we can do for you, sorry". Seriously.
So... lacking the time and energy to call back *again* and be even pushier and demand to speak to a supervisor, now I'm still stuck with my stupid confirmation receipt, and playing the game of "here is my parking fee receipt from the same hotel, here is my credit card statement that shows exactly this amount charged by hotels.com, on the date of the confirmation, here is the confirmation, please give me my money back". Meaning, I'm stuck with a more complicated travel claim again, and I've wasted far too much time on this.
Bottom line:
I will never book anything work-related through destina.ca again, and I will caution every colleague who will ever propose to do so. It's not a deal if it means fighting red tape after the fact. Back to calling hotels directly, I guess. Or expedia.ca, so far, all of their stuff has made sense.
Last summer, I fell in love with tundra plants. Right now, I'm loving the brightness of a snowy Arctic. I'm just very glad I brought my sunglasses! I don't remember the last time I saw sun three days in a row!
The unseasonable warmth continues, though there is plenty of evidence of the many blizzards that hit South Baffin over the last several months. It would not be fun to be a car here, and not just because the roads have turned to sheer ice (though sanded in some places).
Of course, it is a good place to be a sled dog. At this time of year, the dog teams are tethered out on the ice (by break-up, they're by a creek on shore).
I can't exactly go far during a lunch break, but the ice has an irresistible pull. Maybe someday I will get to go to the floe edge. I also like the beached boats, patiently waiting for break-up (and maybe someday, I will get to kayak in Nunavut).
Of course, it's not just dogs, tundra and ice - this is a city (Iqaluit has city status). Not only that, it's a territorial capital, with a legislature - and lots of flags outside it.
One more exciting thing (two, actually). I have the best souveniers. Last night, I bought a carving of a polar bear (local craftspeople come around the restaurants, so as you dine you get a crafts display. I also eyed beaver mitts - too big for my hands - jewellery, prints, dolls...). Today, I splurged on a caribou hide (harvested here, tanned in the south).
I should have started taking pictures of every hotel room I stay in - and the views from them - a few months ago. If I put all the pictures (which I didn't take) next to each other, you'd understand why the updates are so infrequent. Tonight, I come to you from a hotel room with this view:
My room at the Frobisher Inn in Iqaluit has a spectacular view indeed. Besides the hills over which the sun sets, I have a splendid view of Frobisher Bay and the mountains beyond. And earlier today I took a really great walk out to Sylvia Grinnell Territorial Park. This is me at the observation platform:
The crust on the snow is thick enough to walk on in most places, if you avoid the spots where the powder that has fallen since the crust formed drifted. It's pretty special, stomping around the tundra on several feet of snow. It's also pretty special to be in a place where you can walk from your hotel to what seems like the edge of human habitation. I know it isn't, I know that Inuit have occupied the land around here for generations, but still: crest the hill, and the only evidence of people you see is snowmobile tracks.
Ah, yes, the snowmobiles. Transportation, entertainment, and - at least so far from my room - soundtrack to the polar evening (that, and the television in the room next to me or below me). All things I can live with.
But back to the tundra and the edge of the world (I didn't walk along the road to nowhere, but it exists here too). Today was particularly special because I revisted the exact spot where I first met the tundra. It was just uphill of the observation platform at Sylvia Grinnell last June, right after the solstice, that I first saw purple saxifrage and lapland rosebay. Today, in the warm afternoon sun, that spot had already started melting.
It is, I'm told, unseasonably warm on Baffin Island right now. This doesn't surprise me: it felt much warmer here today that it did yesterday at home. Not to get all cliched on you here, but - it's a dry cold. There is no open water anywhere (unless you count puddles), and it wasn't particularly windy. Toque, mittens, scarf and extra layer rapidly joined each other in my bag. Me, I think this is the pretty time in Iqaluit. No?
In the twenties, Carl Sauer talked about the "cultural landscape". Simply put, the cultural landscape is the product of the physical landscape and a a culture - physiography influences what people can do with the land, but cultural norms and values transform the landcape too. When I first came across the concept, it made perfect sense to me: on a road trip to the Kitchener-Waterloo area when I was still in elementary (or "public", in the words of the day) school, there was something that made me feel really at home.
To put it into context, I was only nine when we left southern Germany. I was old enough to have had some measure of independence through the combination of a bus pass and a bicycle, and I had my own mental map of our landscape and spatial relationships (everything within about 3 km of the farm, anyway). To say that I missed the landscape fiercely when we moved here would be an understatement. In my mind, I turned it from something that is admittedly lovely (the foothills of the Alps, with farmsteads dating back hundreds of years and towns that have mideaval cores) into an icon. At 14, I was convinced that I would never see it again. My parents were not the sort to frivolously spend money, and thus trips to Germany were never an option. It didn't occur to me until I was 18 that I could make it happen on my own, and through the luck of a scholarship that freed me from having to make as much money as possible every summer and still be able to pay for school, I went back for the first time almost 10 years after we'd left. I was the first of my siblings to do so, though Marlene joined me in a matter of weeks.
I'm not sure, now, what I expected. I was still caught up in the wonder of travelling. I didn't mind that I had a middle seat on a Hapag Lloyd charter plane, that it got to Frankfurt at 6 a.m., or that I had a child's knowledge of the country I was headed to. I walked out through customs, and there was this wonder that I was actually in Europe - you know, like when you dream about something for years and then it happens and you're not quite sure if it's real. The next month was more than I'd hoped for, and it started a whole new story.
See, I had mentally prepared myself for *not* loving it. What you think is wonderful as a child looks different at 19, I was sure. And people would have aged (with very few visits from one or two aunts and uncles, I hadn't seen the Germany part of my family for a decade after all - and that included the grandmother who I spent more time with than my parents while we still lived there). I was wholly unprepared for the impact of the landscape. I didn't expect that being there would hurt so much: it looked so right to me, and I loved the farms and the fields and the woods and the childhood paths I found so easily again so much, it hurt realizing that in a few weeks I wouldn't have it anymore. I started grieving its loss from the moment I saw it again. My German family made fun of all the pictures I took, and sure, I was a total tourist that way - but how do you explain to them that you need to capture it, because, unlike them, you can't have it?
For the next three years, I spent as much time in Germany as in Canada. I did a year of my undergraduate degree there, and I stayed as long as I possibly could. Eight months later, as soon as I wrote my last exam, I hopped on another plane to spend the next four months there again. The scholarship paid for tuition and then some, but I didn't have piles of cash: my parents helped a little, but mostly, I always had jobs - even in Germany. And I flew with carriers such as Air Pakistan, because they were the cheapest and $600 including taxes and fees was about as much as I could afford and still go.
And still, realizing that flying isn't that big a deal (even if it is expensive), it wasn't enough. I spent one summer cycling al the roads within 30 km of Wangen. I got to know the little villages and shortcuts better than those who had lived there their whole lives - at least, on the surface I knew them better. Again, I don't think the German family understood why I needed to spend so much time exploring every path, and I never tried to explain it. That last summer, I had a feeling I wouldn't be coming back for a while (after all, I was due to start grad school), and I thought maybe I could store enough of it, or maybe I thought I'd see it so much that it would be ordinary and I wouldn't miss it.
So I wrote a master's thesis on Old Order Mennonite farming systems, because I wanted to figure out *what* it was that made a culture transform a landcape from a drumlin field to something that felt like home even if I'd never been there before. And, along the way, I figured something else out: that I feel the same way about certain landscapes here. Not so much the fields of southern Ontario, but the northern Ontario bush. It, too, is a part that I feel the need to absorb as much as possible, just in case I ever lose it.
I stayed away from Germany for five years. I went back for a month at Christmas, and it was fun, and it was as beautiful as ever - but for the first time, I also missed Ontario while I was there. I missed the feeling of having a definite place in society - by now, I was an adult, and living the usual life of car, apartment, job, social life. Hanging out with aging family (and now grown-up cousins) and university friends was fun, but I didn't feel like I fit as well as I had in 1993.
And over the years, the Shield and its landscapes took on the same iconic meaning as southern Germany had once. I love the Shield in a way I can't explain to anyone who doesn't have that relationship to it. It doesn't hurt yet, to look at it, but I worry about not having it anymore. I worry about my parents selling the camp (an inevitability, I know) and not having a "home" in that landscape anymore. Every time I go, it gets a little harder, to realize that it may not be something I can take granted forever. That's where the whole backcountry obsession started: I put activities and skills in place which will still keep me connected to the Shield even if I no longer have a base in it.
So, I'm a little screwed, loving two places that can't be part of the same lifestyle - not in a belonging sense. My solution to that has been to stay away from southern Germany. For six years, I didn't go - by now, I could have afforded it, and there are vacations - I spend as much on a kayaking vacation as a trip to Germany would cost, after all. But it just made life easier, not having to be torn all the time. I made the decision that here is where I belong, and it would be enough.
So why did I do it? Why did I let myself slip into a quick weekend in the foothills again? Because for the past couple of months, I've been mentally totaling how many aeroplan points I would have by the end of the year, and would they be enough for a flight to Stuttgart, and... I'm exactly where I didn't want to be. Except, not quite: this time around, it's not as hard. I'm not saying it's not difficult, missing a place - interpret place broadly, place in a large family, place in space, place in the belonging sense - but it's not *as* difficult. And that's pretty good.
Bottom line? This - here, Canada - is home, in a way that no other place likely will ever be. It shouldn't come as a surprise - my life is here. But still, I've been doing a bit of reading on second-generation immigrants, and I fit the pattern pretty well (though it's a weird call - technically, I'm not second generation. Yet I don't really consider myself first generation either, because my parents are here). But that's the beauty of Canada. So many of us are first and second generation immigrants, that this, too, creates a place of belonging - a shared lack of shared traditions? Not just a cultural, but a psychological landscape. I don't know. I just know that it's easier to live here without having been born here or have six generations of ancestors here than any other place I can imagine.
(And I need another 26,000 aeroplan points. Fewer after next week.)
Under cartoons that require no caption in German newspapers, you will usually find the notation "ohne Worte", translated to "without words" (or, I guess, sans mots).
Today, in Ottawa, we stopped at Starbucks on the way back from lunch. During my afternoon meeting, I actually read the back of my coffee cup. Caption it Ohne Worte.
