My trip update eh....

This is where I'm at. The image to the left depicts my exact location on the planet. The time here is ONE hour ahead but the weather is a millions times different than San Jose, CA. First off, its freezing ass cold. BUT ass cold. Whatever you wanna call it. There is also a freezing rain warning in store for us tomorrow that's freaking me out. Woohoo!! What's freezing rain eh? Is that hail?

Anyways, things here have been going great. Edmonton Canada is sooo much better than I expected it to be. First off we are staying at a pretty sweet hotel right downtown by the University of Alberta. The hotel Materra is super modern and has the best amenities ever. Intuit did us good. I have a CD player alarm clock for goodness sake! The Intuit office is also pretty nice too. Especially because I expected some dark creepy office. IT WAS A GAZILLION times better!

Anyways, let me start from the beginning of my trip. There are 8 of us on this trip. We arrived late lastnight and upon our entry into Canada, we hit up customs. Myself and 2 other co-workers were asked to go to the Imigration room for further questioning. Chris and I passed the extra lame questions with no problems but this other guy who I won't name didn't have it so good. He went into this interigation room and was held up for a while. So long that we had to leave him at the airport. We asked him what was going on and all he said was it was something that happened a long time ago and that he didn't know if he'd be allowed back into Canada.. Sure buddy. Anyways, so we left him at customs hoping that he'd be in the hotel lobby ready to go to work the next day. Fortunately he was there and the story still remains untold. I'm going to try to get to the bottom of it but he's keeping pretty tight lipped.

We spent today in meeting discussing online banking and how to come up with the best prototype for our customers. The conversations did get heated since some of the opinions were different amongst the US and Canada teams but in the end, we were all in agreement that we needed to talk more the next day. That's after talking from 9am - 6pm!!! My brain hurt from all that talk! The Canada team also did something really nice for us. They made us all real life Hockey Jerseys with our lastnames and the number 07 (representing 2007 release) on the back and on the front it had our release name with Intuit's logo. Not bad huh? My jersey is pretty cool. I'll for sure post pics of it later.

Tonight was fun too. We visited the WORLD's LARGEST MALL which resides in Edmonton, Canada. Awesome huh? Yes. They have a casino, a waterpark, an iceskating rink plus rollercoasters all INSIDE the park. The mall is built by the people who did the Mall of America so you can scale the size based on that place. The mall, called West Edmonton Mall was pretty cool. They had a bourbon street type area with tons of restaurants so we all had a nice dinner at a steak house.After dinner we split up into 2 groups. 4 of us wanted to go to the casino and the others wanted to get go back to the hotel. We all got our way and Larry, Chris, Chuck and I headed to the Palace Casino. I played Craps and BlackJack and came out a winner. It was a fun 2 hours but the casino was not up to date, it was soo 80's! It was actually sort of depressing. On our way home, we passed the bars nearby the college. It was poppin downtown. Edmonton is seriously a fun city!! I never expected this place to be this cool. Besides the yucky canadian accents, I could come back and visit. I may be coming back here again this summer for work so if you're interested, come on with me. Hope you're all having a great week!!! I gotta go now and hit the sack. It's 12:25am right now and I need to be up at 7am. NOT COOL DUDE!

Laali OUT (say out in the canadian way) eh!