I’m on a month of parental leave as of this week. Part of it I’ll be spending at home and part of it we’re spending abroad because we had unspent money with Air Canada that was about to expire.
In retrospect, it seems no matter where in the world you go this year, it seems like a real gamble in terms of safety. The U.S. and Mexico have hurricanes, floods and earthquakes; Europe has terrorist attacks and forest fires and so forth.
We chose the beautiful destination of Japan where rockets are flying overhead and has been threatened to be “sunken into the sea” by nuclear bombs.
Good as it may be for Black Press to have a reporter on the ground, I’m not sure I need to witness that on the off chance it does happen (personally, I’ve had enough fiery stuff this year).
Consequently, my colleagues have been teasing me for days, going so far as to give me a “Kidz Printz Identification Kit” with the compliments of Crimestoppers.
Being the mature and responsible adults that my wife and I are, with less than two weeks to go and a baby travelling with us, we’ve not booked any hotel rooms. In the past, this hasn’t exactly worked out.
On one occasion, my brother and I were backpacking through Europe. We missed the last train of the evening to Munich, so we took the last train to Brussels.
When we got off, we couldn’t really find anyone who spoke a language we recognized, let alone spoke. Being in Brussels, this was a bit of a surprise, as Flemish (one of the two national languages) is pretty comparable to Dutch, which I speak, nor could we find anyone who spoke English, German or anything else.
The closest thing we recognized was a cab driver trying to speak some sort of eastern European language to us.
After searching for more than an hour, now past midnight, we decided to go to one of the hotels we had passed earlier. The cost was 80 Euros for a room with a bathroom smaller than a porter potty, carpet cut the wrong size for the room, and consequently a foot up the wall. The entrance of the hotel, comfortingly, had bulletproof glass and we were asked not to leave the batteries in the TV remote (which were both bolted) because someone might steal them.
Clearly, given that we haven’t booked any lodgings yet, my judgment hasn’t improved much.
Honestly, I think my wife and I are much more of a danger to ourselves and the baby than the angry North Korean Balloon.