Pacific Northwest

I just got back from a two week trip to Seattle and Vancouver. I was in Seattle on business and couldn't turn down the chance to pop up to Vancouver and catch up with some friends.

I managed to fit in a great deal of sushi, which is ridiculously cheap and good in Vancouver, and phở, which I have yet to find at all in Cape Town. Sarah flew into Vancouver for the weekend, Jocelyn had just returned from Australia, and Tarrin was en route from Alaska back to SA, so it worked out incredibly well.

North America's cellphone networks are a complete joke. Roaming gave me no end of hassles and the people at T-Mobile were less than useless. After poorly faking an American accent just to get past their support voice-prompt system (much to my colleague's amusement), I couldn't get them to understand that I was a foreigner roaming inside their country. "No, I'm from South Africa, not in South Africa" was clearly not in their script, so they just looped back to asking me what my mobile number was and getting confused when it started with +27.

I also discovered why Delta's New York-Dakar-Cape Town flight is so cheap: it's 20 hours of hell in what must be the oldest plane in their fleet.