Hung Far Low in Ottawa? Why, Yes!
I flew across the length of a country and into another country to staff a one-day event called the EDA Tech Forum. This one day event brings together an elite group of sophisticated nerds who take their work very seriously. The goal of this event is to bring to light new technological advances in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) field. My role for the event was to shepherd the herd of nerds to demo Mentor Graphic’s software. I would set up whichever software they were interested in and let them attack self-paced tutorials. What began as a Lunch n’ Learn ended being a Drink n’ Demo session, not excluding the Shepherd.
Like every business trip, I got the opportunity to explore the city and I enjoyed my time in Ottawa very much. Ottawa is not the most scenic city I’ve seen but it has its bright spots. The parliment buildings were extrordinary.
English is still the dominant tongue in Ottawa but every sign on the street had a French translation. In comparison, the cab driver told me Montreal (which is two hours away) is 80% French speaking while Ottawa is 80% English speaking. With that tidbit, I was able to enjoy my time without being intimidated by a new language.
I am learning to live free when I travel. The hotel I stayed at was nice. It’s called the Brookstreet Hotel. The one drawback was that the cab ride to downtown was $50. So my coworker and I rented a two-door Toyota Yaris. Electric Blue. It was a nice car! I won’t knock on it ever again.
After dinner on the second night, my coworker said that was the most expensive meal he’s eaten while on company travel; it came out to be $40 CDN. We recollected our story to a sales manager and he scoffed. He said he once hosted a $2000 dinner for a party of four. We now know better.
A few lessons I can take from this trip are:
1) Order more food when on duty
2) Single Malt Whiskey goes well with Jazz music
3) I need to have a GQ/Nike hybrid pair of shoes on my subsequent trips
Next trip is San Diego, June 3-7, 2007. Right around the corner….
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