But how will you get it if you don't want it badly enough to do anything to get it. Firstly, there might be many others who want the same thing and if they want it more than you do, chances are, you are going to be the one quoting "If you love something, let it free. If it comes back, its yours, if it doesn't, it never was". Victory does not come to those standing on the sidelines hoping for the ''right'' thing to happen. There is nothing wrong with hoping for the best, but if you are not going to do anything, you need to be prepared for the worst.
That being said, there is no way I can relate this to my trip to Vancouver and Whistler.
The Vancouver trip was actually mostly a trip between Hyatt Regency and Le Soleil, barring some mis-adventures out into downtown Vancouver looking for food. The first night was interesting because I managed to pull my friend up to the bar and club district to go to a club where a band was playing live reggae. But other than the music and the noticeably better ratio (of boy is to girl or men is to women) in the club, there was nothing exceptionally good in that club compared to any club in Atlanta. So the music ended at 2 in the night, putting an end to my night, which lasted for another 5 hours, after which I had to get up for the conference.
Now lets not talk about the conference, except that it was a lot of information and by the time my night ended at 12 in the night, I was so exhausted that I again slept at 2 in the night. Tuesday lunch was interesting because we went to this sushi place and I enjoyed the sushi (not that I have ever hated it). But my opinion might be biased by the fact that everybody who knew that I was going to Vancouver told me to try the sushi there.
Lest I forget, I should mention that for my flight from Toronto to Vancouver (which was around 4-5 hours), I was sitting next to this girl (name forgotten) who was very enthusiastic about telling me everything there is to know about the country of Canada. And since I am an awesome listener, I entertained her, and by the end of our conversation, even she confessed that she was exhausted. And everything I learned about Canada from her seemed strikingly different from the Canada I know from the very educational series South Park. Surprised?? Even I was! But in the end, I had learned everything from how the global warming was affecting the permafrost in arctic Canada to the First Nations citizens of Canada (the US equivalent of Native Americans) to the reason why Quebec was trying to secede from Canada and how that crisis was averted by a brilliant Prime Minister of Canada (whose name I conveniently forgot). I also learned so much about Vancouver that I surprised my friends in Vancouver when I was telling them about Vancouver and they knew that I have never been there before. I tried to convince them that I had not read the Wikipedia page on Vancouver but to no avail.
Back to the conference and sushi. Nothing exciting happened on Tuesday and Wednesday except that I went for a pizza at 12 in the night with some locals from the University of British Columbia. Well nothing exciting happened there either, except that the pizza was really tasty (or I was really hungry, or both). So having spent 3 days in Vancouver and done nothing touristy, I decided to skip all conference sessions on Thursday to go to this well-recommended Stanley Park. It was a pretty place, albeit too small for what it was trying to be (which I am not sure of either). But that is where I experienced the high point of the Vancouver trip, where we came across this frozen lake. Being boys, we got down to breaking the ice by throwing huge rocks on it, but the ice was way stronger than we expected, and eventually we gave up and went on.
That evening we headed to Whistler on a bus and after 2 hours, reached our destination. The next 2 days there was really awesome for me because that is when I learned to love the snow and hate the ice. For some reason, I decided to skip all workshop sessions to just go snowboarding. First day I decided to take a lesson, and that was a really smart decision because I managed to learn some of the basics to finally be able to enjoy snow boarding. Our group was really diverse. The instructor was Japanese. The rest of the composition was a Swiss dude and his South African girlfriend, a British Couple, and Australian bloke and me. Pretty diverse, and I found it really happy how so many different people come together for a common purpose. Not that any of them were different in any way other than their way of speaking in English.
But both days of snowboarding involved a lot of falling. I could not sit without discomfort until 2 days ago because falling hard on your bum on hard ice is not fun. I even had some pretty bad falls on my knees and shoulders, but luckily I am still up and running without any serious injury (touch wood!!). Lets just say that I was lucky and the instructor taught me well enough for me to make sure not to get hurt too bad. As an achievement, I managed to ride all the way from the top of the mountain down to the village, albeit on a beginner trail, but all the way through the mountain nonetheless. And this is something I am going to tell anybody and everybody I meet, because I am proud of it!
But the maximum action happened when I was trying to get back from Vancouver to Atlanta. Some flight delays, delayed luggage and all that usual stuff. Nothing I feel like talking about unless I was writing this blog while I was on some airport waiting for my flight.
Lets just say, I went to the conference to learn about Machine Learning, and ended up learning only about snow boarding (I hope my advisor is not reading this post!)
Back to the lesson of this post. I can see so many ways I can spin this trip to fit what I said in the beginning, but I shall not waste either of ours' time and stop here.
