First impressions

Apparently, it takes on average about 3.5 seconds for people to form a first impression. Once that impression is formed, if it’s positive it takes about the same amount of time for someone to change that to a negative impression if new evidence comes up. If instead the first impression is negative it takes on average 7 times more evidence to change the impression to a positive one than it did to form the original impression (so I would have to be nice to people for something like 70 years before ultimate players will begin to think I'm a decent person). Some people will never change a negative impression – once you’re in the bad books you stay there forever.

With this in mind, you have to feel sorry for the people who try to market cities. Some poor bugger in the local government of each town will have (among the jillion other jobs they don’t have time or qualifications for) the task of trying to make the city feel welcoming to new guests. For international travellers, this must be a tough gig.

First, the people you’re trying to schmooze have just got off a plane. This isn’t all bad. The fact that they can wave their arms and legs around or the absence of a fat person squeezing them into the plane window will probably cheer them up a lot. On the other hand, they’ve just spent hours sitting down in a noisy plane that they probably had to get up at an ungodly hour to get on. On top of that, international flights have been carefully calibrated to ensure that the flight time and change in time zone always ensure that you ought to do the exact opposite of what your body clock wants. If you get on the plane tired you’ll inevitably spend the flight trying to stay awake so that you don’t end up bouncing around your ho(s)tel bedroom all night. If you’d normally be awake, then you’re probably going to land in your destination just as you would normally fall into bed, but the sun will be rising and the day will await.

Secondly, the people will just have come through customs. I’m going to make one of those statements you later regret and invite certain anal probing by saying that customs is not as bad as people make it out to be. If you’re sensible and careful about your paperwork and you don’t try to bring 80 kilos of your favourite live shellfish with you when you travel it probably won’t be that bad. Despite extensive planning to ensure I was wearing good undies today, I went through LAX without getting interrogated by immigration, cavity searched by customs or having my junk handled by security. In fact, the worst thing was the muzak, which is pretty good when you think about it.

However, people hate queuing, filling in forms, and seeing other travellers who are obviously wealthier than they are, so customs and immigration tend to be something that helps put people into a sour mood.

Finally, our travellers, temporally ransacked and feeling a deep sense of violation that no shower will make clean, spill out of arrivals into an airport terminal that has cleverly been designed so that the signs and directions only make sense if you already know where everything is. They will cheerfully follow the signs to the shuttle buses only to find that these are buses to a nearby space shuttle exhibit, and that the only way into town is via a donkey train on the other side of the complex that has just departed but will conveniently return in 35 minutes.

And so it was that I tumbled out of Vancouver International Airport today. I’ll admit that the city has clearly done a lot to please people like me. The airport was quick and easy to get through, the staff were nice, the train to the city cost a pretty reasonable $7.50. I suspect that my time spent in Australian and New Zealand customs has made me accustomed to pretty rigorous quarantine procedures. The customs people here just took my piece of paper then left me to decide whether I would go through the line where people searched my bag and asked why I needed all the shellfish or the line where I walked straight outside.

Once in the city I was immediately adopted by some dodgy guy who kindly gave me some directions then asked for money. Since he played the game pretty well (certainly much better than I did) I figured he’d earned his due, so hopefully he’s off his face by now. His directions did help me find a backpackers hostel, which like every backpackers in the world is full of Australians and not really my scene. In fact, as I type this, people next to me are playing Cranium. I clearly have some kind of innocent doe eyed look that attracts expensive new "friends", and my sense of fair play means I’m a good target for good natured scams. Perhaps it’s time to ditch the corduroy pants and get another Neo-Nazi haircut, although that might just attract an even more problematic set of new friends.

I’ve softened my attitude to the city and the backpackers now that I’ve worked out the clock on my computer. It’s still on Australian time. At first I thought it said 1:51AM, which would mean I’d been up for 20 hours. That’s not all that long, which means my disgust for all things Vancouver might have been real. However, it turns out that right next to the numbers that say the time there are some letters that say PM, not AM, which would normally be pretty obvious, so I’m clearly pretty spaced out. That means I’ve been up for 32 hours, which is more respectable and means that any angst I feel should fade by the time I wake up tomorrow.

I did get some sleep on the plane, but I’m increasingly finding that sleeping on planes isn’t very restful and just makes my extremities go numb. In LA I had pins and needles in one foot several hours after getting off the plane, and here in Vancouver the ends of two of my fingers are still tingly.