So Laura and I have spent the last week on vacation in Costa Rica. A volcanic black sand beach on the Pacific coast with a couple of days in Arenal.

There is a lot of restructuring going on at work and it has been difficult to take my mind off of it. It hasn't really felt like a vacation to me. It's the first time in Centro America for Laura and as we might have to move here full time, I have been worried about her enjoying the place too much to appreciate it myself. After a couple of days in the office and a weekend at home in Santa Ana we hit off out for the coast with no real aim in mind. We arrived in Puntarenas and realised it was a postindustrial dump that had fallen on it's knees since the railroad was torn up. Looking in the guide book we arrived in Playa Hermosa just south of Jaco. We stayed at an extortionate hotel for three nights and were bitten mercilessly by the fleas of an itinerant cat that begs food from the guests at the beachfront restaurant.

The place is mostly occupied by surfers escaping the commercialisation of Jaco. They speak a completely different language from normal humans... well dude it was toally gnarly and the super-mutant back wave ride ...... We didn't understand a word. There were a few trips away to coconut plantations, other beaches and some jungle trail off-roading in the rented 4x4.

After three nights we drove to Arenal and stayed in a spa. It was cloudy with a lot of rain, so we didn't get to see the lava red glow of the top of the volcano, which is normal for this time of year, but still dissappointing. Whilst driving we encountered some strange long nose cute creatures, some monkeys and some alligators under a bridge. It rained sticks most of the time in Arenal and we decided to head out for home for a couple of days rest before work.



We are flying back on Wednesday, unless something big has happened at work that I don't know about yet.

I wore a new pair of briefs yesterday, I got up last night to have a wee and there was a sticker on my thing that read "Large".

So.... Montreal was fantastic. Well Old Montreal was fantastic. It seems to be experiencing a renaissance with many of the old buildings being renovated, the last of the old street names and hotels have been converted from English to French by prefixing them with "Le" or "La" such as the excellent Hotel Le Saint James in a desperate attempt to eradicate the obviously Britannic roots of this marvelous city by Quebecois pomposity. Laura and I had a marvelous time and continued to fall ever more in love with each other, much as we do on a daily basis but with more eating out.
Montreal was the most populous city in North America in 1860 and the richest city in Canada until the Quebecois started demanding independence. The declaration of French as the only official language of Quebec together with the linguistic and cultural ethnic cleansing of English by the Quebecois stripped Montreal of its economic powerhouses as the both the successful companies and individuals left for Toronto (including the Bank of Montreal).
What was once a thriving and wealthy city has really been turned into a quaint has-been of a metropolis that makes money from tourists coming to visit Canada's second pretty French place. I am however willing to forgive the Quebecois a little bit as they cook better bread than anyone else in Canada.

Toronto is a city segmented by the nationality of it's immigrants; there is a Chinatown, a Little India, a little Greece, two Little Italys ( the original one around College Street and the newer more affluent one around Woodbridge); a huge Korean population around Yonge and Finch and a centre for just about everyone else except the French, English, Irish and Scottish who have dispersed into and formed the first white populations in the Toronto area. The land was purchased in 1787 from the local Missisaugas (Native American Indians) for 1700 pounds sterling and some goods by the British Commander Lord Dorchester in Montreal. John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada arrived in the Toronto area in 1793. There was no city or street plan at the time, it was just some land by a lake, the area called Toronto by local Iroquois is actually about 2 hours North by what is now lake Simcoe. Lieutenant Govenor Simcoe spent three years here and during this time had a ten block town layed out with modest buildings for parliament, court and religious services and called it York after the Duke of York. York changed it's name to Toronto in 1834.

The first phase of my project went live but a change in the financial certainty of the product I was replacing has undermined the budget for the subsequent phases and I lost three embers of my team so the last few weeks have been somewhat fraught at the office and I feel geographically uncertain about the next few months.

Laura and I more or less live together now and this has given me the opportunity to flex my cooking muscles; she can't eat disaccharides or polisaccharides. So I am cooking to rules laid down here which is quite a stretch, but fun as I love juggling pots and pans.

We are back to Costa Rica for two weeks on Wednesday with a week on vacation in the middle... can't wait!

So a quick update as I've been a little slack recently. I went back to Costa Rica about three weeks ago to launch the first phase of my new project. It was rough, but we got there and succeeded where a few attempts by our competitors have recently failed. I had planned on spending a month in Centro America and checking out Guatemala, but as the more observant among you will have detected from my previous post I have met someone very special, Laura. So I hightailed it back here to be with her on Monday.

Laura had picked up the keys to my new Toronto apartment while I was gone and met me in the arrivals lounge at the airport. She looked so very beautiful. On Tuesday I rented a GMC Envoy 4x4 from Budget to haul my stuff from the office to my new apartment. It is roughly the size of Brazil and had no problem swallowing the boxes and cases. I tried to swap it for my standard pimp-mobile 300C yesterday, but I think George has been letting someone else use it. The only thing they had was a Ford Crown Victoria and as I am neither an off duty cop nor over 60 years old, I am unable to be seen in one. So I'll drop the GMC off tomorrow and get something more sensible on Monday or Tuesday.

On Tuesday night I met Laura's parents for dinner. It was a fine night out and in a recent opinion poll among almost six friends are relatives of Laura, 97% thought I was the most likely candidate to carry her across the threshold (margin of error +/- 3%). After dinner we got a cab back to my part of town and Laura suggested we nip into a pub called the Jersey Giant. Outsider it was nothing special, inside it's all whitewash and black oak beams supporting a vaulted ceiling. But there in a corner of the bar was a vision of ecstasy. I rubbed my eyes, I was obviously hallucinating, maybe it was some sort of mirage. So I asked the barman... "Does that hand pump really have London Pride coming out of it?" About a nanosecond after he had finished pronouncing the word "does" I announced "This is an emergency! I need a pint of London Pride and don't spare the horses!" I ordered a port for Laura, who was at that moment was elevated in my estimation from her previous status, "most divine creature ever to have walked the earth" to her new status of Goddess. Paying for the drinks I walked out to the terrace with the best girl in the world in one hand and the best beer in the world in the other. Bliss! We spent an hour outside chatting and watching the constant stream of loonies that seem to oscillate from one end of King Street East to the other before going home.

Tomorrow we are off to Montreal for a long weekend.

I'll add some pictures when I get a mo...

Positives and Negatives
As many of you already know I am back in Costa Rica. This was going to be for a little over a month which under normal circumstances I would absolutely love. However, a short time ago I met someone that changed my perspective and now I am looking forward to getting back to Toronto. So much so, that I am willing to ride the undercarriage on the way back if there are no seats available. The Ticos I occasionally fly up there to work for me don't like the place due to suffering the cold there in the winter months. They don't believe me about the weather changing, so I have started referring to it as Hawaii Del Norte so they'll agree to more work in Canada.



So my project has had some setbacks which is annoying but other than that, life is good. My apartment is wonderful as ever and I have joined the gym under the office here so as not to let things go. I am going there every day and have decided to remove the dietary staple alcohol, from my regime for a week or so to help cut back the calories.

I left my credit card in an ATM machine one evening last week, which would normally have been a massively disturbing, given that the new one needs to be sent from the UK to Canada and I'm on the other side of the Americas. The following morning I went in to the bank with the ATM outside and told them about it and they returned me the card on seeing my Driving License. Disaster averted! Banks will not do this for you in the UK.

Yesterday I took a taxi home from the office, the taxis at the side of the building tend to be driven by sedate, somewhat confused old men, that drive you to random destinations they remember visiting as a child before the dementia set in. The taxis at the front seem to be driven by wannabe Ayrton Sennas. They cut the seatbelts out of the back of their cars, lower the suspension so that bumps larger than an ant dropping become impassable and mount disturbingly large fire extinguishers on the passenger side A pillar so as to guarantee facial disfiguration and death for the copilot when combined with the non-functioning inertia belt in the event of an accident.
I elected to use the clean and undented vehicle at the side. There were seatbelts in the back and the driver seemed quite a pleasant old chap. After a small nap, he took off in the direction of Santa Ana. He asked for directions which he ignored and took the wrong turn off of the autopista. After a detour through a small town in the countryside we ended up back on the right road. Apologising profusely, he stopped the meter at 5000 Colones and told me that I would not have to pay any more than that as he had made a mistake. If I hadn't been sat down, I would have fallen over. This is not the behavior of a regular taxi driver. He got me home and I paid him the 5000 he asked for and another 2000, because I didn't want him losing out for being decent. Besides there are far worse things than a taxi ride through Costa Rican countryside at night.

I discovered a flattened scorpion about 3 inches long just inside my front door the other day and wondered whether I had trodden on it on the way in the previous evening before banishing it from my thoughts and presumably into the dustpan of the maid a little later that day. Yesterday I decided to have a night in. While I was cooking this "Shadowy Thing" started darting about the kitchen. On closer inspection the thing revealed itself to be some amphetamine fueled grasshopper too fast to catch under a glass. A couple of squirts with the first household spray that came to hand, slowed and confused him enough to allow transportation out to the terrace. I had just resolved that Centro America has entirely too many creatures turned away from my cooking to watch a very un-flat scorpion trundling across my kitchen floor. This guy spent the night under an inverted glass before being carried to the terrace for his portrait and thence to the garden that he may continue to pursue whatever mischief he wants. If I found myself bitten by him, his next trip to the garden will be as a martyred warning to the rest of his phylum.

Contrasts

Three million people in Darfur depend on food aid from the UN. Due to lack of sufficient funding the UN announced last week that it will be halving food rations from May to 1050 calories per day. A normal person needs between 1300 and 1500 calories per day to survive. So this amounts to a diet plan for the starving and undernourished.

The International Federation of Competitive Eating has four events listed for May, people from all over the US will gather to gorge themselves on sickening volumes of tamales, bologna (current record 2.5 pounds in 5 minutes), Shoo-fly pie and hot dogs (current record 53&1/2 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes).

Sometimes I feel a little confused.

The desk calendar of the receptionist at the office announced that Wednesday was 'Administrative Professionals Day'.

It was also the twentieth anniversary of the day Chernobyl self destructed. On April 26th 1986 at 6:30am Unit 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear power station exploded spraying 120 tons of Uranium and 900 tons of highly radioactive graphite into the atmosphere to rain down over Ukraine and the rest of Europe. Lieutenant Vladimir Pravik and his firemen climbed ladders to the broken roof of the reactor to train their hoses on the fire in an attempt to control it. Without protective equipment they were subject to a lethal radiation dose every 48 seconds. After an hour, dizzy and vomiting they were rushed to hospital, Pravik's eyes had turned from brown to blue. Suffering from such massive internal radiation burns that their hearts blistered, they died and their radioactive bodies were welded into lead coffins for burial.

Twenty years on, a thirty kilometer radius around Chernobyl is sealed off and will remain so for as close to forever as makes no odds.



There are no reliable figures on the number of people that have died and will die as a direct result of this disaster. If you are interested, you can read more here, here or here.

So the other day I take the morning off work to sort out a driving license.

I don't want a Canadian driving license at all really, I don't need one for the car, I get off the plane, take a taxi to my apartment and the next day I pick up my Chrysler 300 from Budget which is a brisk five minute stroll from where I live. Three of four weeks later I take it back, get a cab to the airport the following morning and spend a week at home in Costa Rica. I'm happy because I like my vanilla white pimp mobile, although I am worried they may be letting other people drive it when I'm not in Canada. George the manager of the little branch of Budget in North York is happy, because I have rented a car from him for three weeks per month for the last seven months, although he is a little worried that I might figure out I could just buy one for less money. My boss is happy because Budget give me a full size car for sub-compact rates, although he is a little worried that rent-a-wreck might be able to do me one cheaper.

In fact I actively do not want a Canadian car driving license. All it would give me is the opportunity to receive speeding tickets, which on the whole I'd prefer not to get.

All would be simply marvellous if summer wasn't approaching and I wasn't suffering from the trauma of motorcycle withdrawal symptoms. It is different this time, On previous occasions, I have wanted a motorcycle but not owned one. Now I own two and can't ride either of them as they are both at Dave's in England after their tortuous shipping nightmare from Spain.

My Harley is a 1996 XL1200S on which I have spent a much time and effort making it fast; unlike most Harleys, it is not a chromosexual hairdresser's idealized vision of a one percenter's ride. Cosmetic changes have been limited to having shiny bits powdercoated black and the practical, a fork brace, a rack and a flatter saddle than the standard bucket. Motorwise there are many changes: Buell Lightning heads with XR750 spring kit, Branch Flowmetrics manifold, performance carb, cams, mufflers, ignition module, air cleaner, Dynojet etc. Needless to say, it is fast and surprises a lot of sports bikes. To quicken up the steering the forks have been lowered in the yokes and it has received a fork brace. I also replaced all the brake lines with braided steel items to improve feel. It still handles and brakes like a Harley though, which is to say much like an oil tanker. I have had a love-hate relationship with it for ten years now.

My other bike is a 2000 Suzuki GSXR600 SRAD. Which is a beast. I picked it up for a song in Andalucia off of a broke English guy. It handles and brakes by the power of thought alone, which is to say, if you have thought it, the bike has already completed the maneauvre. It is fast enough too and gets to the very bad side of 200kph in no time, much after that my adrenal gland runs out of power and I have to ease off on the right wrist. I'm not the boy I used to be.

Anyway, I can't import either of them to Canada. The rule is that they have to be either: over 15 years old or originally made for the US or Canadian markets. I tried to explain that there are only two types of Harley, California bikes and the rest but they weren't interested.

Renting motorcycles is extraordinarily expensive compared to cars and I just can't see my boss paying out the extra $2000 per month to cover my transport mode preferences. I could air freight my Harley over and insure it for six months via a US motorcycle tour company, but financially this is the equivalent of being anally raped by Genghis Kahn and at least sixty of his closest Mongol horde.

I could buy one, but to get license plates in Canada you need to get insurance, to get insurance you need to have an Ontario driving license. This leads me on to part two of my missive, which will henceforth be referred to as the 'pissed off bit about licenses'.

You can swap a British License for a Canadian one, but they do not recognise a Gibraltar license as British, which it is. I am only prepared to part with my Gibraltar license. My proper issued in England one, I want to keep. After all, it's not like I live here! Worse still the only category that you can swap the is the bit that lets you drive cars. The Ontario Government Driving License department or 'bastards' as they are referred to colloquially will only accept US motorcycle licenses for swaps and Swiss ones. Most US states will give you a motorcycle license if you know which way around you are supposed to sit on a bike. "Well done Mr Johnson you made the front from the back, here have a motorcycle permit". I took my California motorcycle test about 18 years ago, obviously the license expired a long time ago. I may have to get them to try to look it up. The Swiss license is apparently very difficult to obtain, the Swiss government seeing motorcycles as far too rebelious and motorcyclists as people that should really be legislated out of existance. I now believe that the Ontario government is trying to do the same to bikes. It is illegal for a bike to filter between lanes of cars here! Wankers! What is the point of having a bike if you have to queue up with cars. Sorry, I have to say it again. Wankers! Well as soon as my bike in Canada dilemna is resolved I know someone who will certainly not be complying with this asinine nonsense.

I may have to take a motorcycle test again, which will not only involve learning Canadian road law, but I'll also have to ride within it for the duration of the test! Ontario has three levels of motorcycle license. M1 - no passengers, no freeways, no alcohol, daytime only; M2 - no alcohol; M - you can have a beer(Yay!). I think I will be able to go straight into the full M license once I have taken a test, rather than have to wait two and a half years due to having had a motorcycle license in the UK for so long, they give credit for the experience but not a license.

So, now I have bored you with this rubbish, I shall go shower and hit the gym! For my next post I may ponder as to why first generation immigrants to a country gravitate towards employment in the Immigration departments of the host country of their parents.

The Panama Canal
Panama earns a great deal of money through the canal which can save as much as twenty days on a journey from the west coast of the Americas to the east which equates to 18,000 miles from a journey between San Francisco and New York.



It is a phenominal work of engineering and a great tribute to American ingenuity of the last century. It was finally completed in 1914 and after ten years by 56,307 people led by the US Army Corp of Engineers, records from the French period of construction are uncertain.
From the time it was started on January 10th 1880 until the day the first traversed it on January 7th 1914 as many as 27,000 men died in it's making.



Over 18 years the French moved 30 million cubic yards of earth but their efforts finally succumbed to tropical disease and financial ruin. The US Army waged a war on malaria and yellow fever; removed another 238 million cubic yards of earth and finally completed a work first dreamt of in 1524 when King Carlos V of Spain ordered the first survey of the canal route.



It is a marvel to watch the train guided cargo ships being raised and lowered in the locks. If you ever have the opportunity, go to Miraflores locks and see it for yourself. If you are interested in the history, have a look here.

Firstly, apologies to you guys that have been looking for a new post from me and not seen one in a while. Secondly, here is the excuse:

As you may have read in my post before last I joined a gym. It is now one month since I joined. Since I started I have gone from seeing a personal trainer once per week to twice per week and other than my week back home in Costa Rica and Panama, I have been every night except two.

I have lost an inch from my capacious waste, 5lbs in weight and more importantly gone from 27.4% body fat to 20% fat. This equates to a lard change from 55lb to 40lb. After work I saw my nutritionist who gave me the second interesting piece of information in the space of two weeks; the first being that you should only eat carbs early in the day as the body cant do anything with them late in the day, as the day's work or workout has already been done and so all any fat you eat can be instantly laid down to expand the waistline while you burn the small number of carbs between the last meal and bedtime; the second is that for health reasons, one should eat about a gram of protein for every kilogram of bodyweight.

For every 30 grams of chicken, beef or fish you eat, you only get about 8 grams of protein, a cup of peanuts will give you 37 grams of protein. All this stuff is available online so I won't continue to bore you with it. If you have a heavy workout schedule, you need to up the protein by another 40%. So at the advice of my nutritionist, I have started using protein and calcium supplements.

After a month of getting me used to the right movements and technique, my trainer Simon switched me for the first time on to serious weights. This time last month I had difficulty managing three sets of 20 repetitions on a leg press machine with no weights on it. Today he loaded 6 weights the size of truck wheels on to it. I managed the same number of repetitions. It hurt though. He pulled the same trick on a bunch of other machines and started me on a punishing bench press regime.

After an hour of tortuous training with weights and resistance machines I died and was reincarnated on an exercise bicycle. Forty minutes later I was wondering how my whole body had been turned to jelly in one hundred precious minutes.

After hobbling back to the locker room I had a cleansing sweat in the steam room for 15 minutes, went home, ate a salad and then met Kevin and Nora down the pub to undo some of the good work.

I fear my fondness for six packs may prevent me from developing one.

I have much more to tell you about Panama and a recent visit to a dark, old German mansion house in downtown Toronto that is now a restaurant called Carman's where the waiters point a flashlight at your steak so that you can ensure it is cooked to your liking when you cut into it. But I will save all this for another time.

I would however like to take this opportunity to wish you a happy Easter. For those of you unfamiliar with the history of Easter, it is named after the Saxon mother goddess of spring and fertility Eostre. Easter is the time of the spring equinox, when the first flowers appear in Northern Europe and the time of the rebirth of the world after the darkness and cold of winter, which is why it is associated with eggs and that most procreative of creatures, the rabbit. I think the Christians reappropriated it for something, but I can't remember for what.

Blessed be!