25 June 2012 ~ FREE AND CLEAR

Recently I was on a flight to Düsseldorf in Germany.  Last time I landed in Düsseldorf it was in West Germany; such are the changes in our world’s borders.  Yet with changes or not, Europe is still a beautiful place.  Although their currency has changed from the Deutsch Mark to the Euro, they still speak German.  This should not come as a surprise because, in Germany, they have been speaking in German for centuries.

As you know by now, I work in the world of aviation maintenance; primarily in the field of technical training.  As big as the world is, in aviation it is a small world.  You can travel a long way to distant countries and still find out that someone knows someone that you know.  If not a person, then a restaurant or a bar or a pizza joint or even a street vendor called Joe who serves the best hot-dogs in the world.  This is what I love so much about what I do.  Being able to travel the world and train aircraft maintenance engineers (AMEs) is a dream job for me.  Of course, travel is not the glamorous world it used to be in days of yore.  But once you arrive at your destination you get to experience and indulge in the local cultures and customs.

I have had the good fortune to share a glass of cold beer with colleagues in my industry in many different countries of the world, many different provinces here in my home country of Canada and also many different states in the USA; and get paid for doing it to boot.  Of course it isn’t always a cold beer because it could be a hot cup of coffee, but you get my point of local cultures and customs.

Recently, in a place in northern Ontario, I was driving my rental car from my hotel to the airport to conduct training for the week.  This particular Monday was a Statutory Holiday in Canada, so the traffic was virtually non-existent at such an early hour.  I arrived with lots of time to spare, having scoped out the training location the day before, when I arrived on the Sunday evening and picked up my rental car from the airport.  That’s why I knew I wasn’t seeing things that were there the day before; even though it did look like a static display.  A statue of sorts.  As I was driving up the hill towards the edge of the airport, through the early morning mist, I could see, quite clearly, two magnificent looking moose.

I say two magnificent moose because the plural of a single moose just so happens to be moose!  The word "moose" came from the Algonquian Indians and so consequently its plural, instead of being "mooses" or "meese", is the same as the singular.  If you’re interested, that is true of most Indian names where a plural is concerned.  Such is the stress free life of the indigenous population of North America perhaps. 

So, although I wasn’t too happy to leave my family on the Sunday of a long holiday weekend to travel up to the Canadian north by my lonesome, that all changed when I was blessed with such a gift as to watch two majestic creatures of Canada just ‘chilling’ a stone’s throw from the side of the road.  With being early I was able to just sit there, drinking my coffee, and enjoy the view bestowed on me.

A relatively simple, and free, pleasure; but priceless nonetheless.