Si in Denver, Colorado, May 2007
Simon Lockington

I’ve never been to Denver before, all I ever knew about Denver was that it was high up in the mountains and would probably be full of snow. Denver is in Colorado where the television program South Park is set. That’s about as much as I knew about Denver.

The Large American Company I work for has an office in Denver and another one in a town called Colorado Springs which is about an hour south of Denver. I would be here for a week.

Denver airport is pretty large actually. You get off at one of three terminals then you hop on an underground train and go to another terminal where you collect your bags.

I popped out the side of the airport and found a taxi to take me into Denver City. The taxi driver was a bloke from Somalia who wanted to know everything about anything. How far is it to New Zealand? He has a cousin there. Hong Kong is expensive isn’t it? How much for a Playstation? Then he proceeded to tell me how his brother was getting divorced from his French wife who was only using him to get his green card etc. Great.

YOU MUST BE FROM NASA?
When the taxi driver finally dropped me off at the hotel I went to get checked in. I was staying at the Mariott City Center which is a very nice hotel but it has a room tariff that makes your eyes water compared with what you actually get. Even though the Large American Company is paying, you still feel violated somewhat when you see the bill.

“You must be from NASA?” asked the girl at the check in desk.

I had one of those moments where you wonder if you should just go along for the ride, or fess up and say you’re just another computer programmer. I thought for a little bit, but then decided that if the bloke checking in just next to me was from NASA, I would look like a dick.

“Um, no, I work for Large American Company”.

“Oh…”

It turns out there was a large conference being run by NASA at the hotel, so she had probably been saying that to people all night.

The night I attempted a last ditch effort to find my suit jacket with Qantas who were their typical useless selves. It really sounded like it was the first time that anyone had ever left something on a plane! You would think that there would be procedures in place for this kind of thing but there didn’t seem to be.

OMELETTES, GRITS AND BISCUITS WITH GRAVY
The next morning I wandered off into the street to find somewhere to have breakfast. I make a point of trying to avoid having breakfast at the hotel I stay at because the absolute shafting they give you on price can be unbearable.

I wandered around for about four blocks and found a ‘diner’ (there doesn’t seem to be a concept of cafes in the US, it’s Diners). It was one just like you see on TV, with booths, waitresses cruising around with coffee jugs in their hands etc. I got sat down and started reading the menu.

Americans are real big on omelettes, they just love them. Just about 80% of the breakfast options available were either centered around an omelette of some type, or had an omelette as a side order. The remaining 20% of options will be pancakes.

Grits were also available, I’m not sure what they are, someone later explained that it was a corn type product.

Then I came across an option called Biscuits with Gravy. In America a biscuit is a bread type product, not a Tim Tam or a Shrewsberry. They’re cookies.

No, a biscuit is a breadroll type thing, and it comes with gravy you can dip your biscuit in. Popular opinion is that you should really only have biscuits with fried chicken (often termed here as Chicken Fried Chicken).

Being that I was in Denver and wanted to do the full Denver experience, I went for the Denver omelette. I didn’t know what it was, but given the other options, it looked like it was something that would be relatively safe and my stomach would probably be able to process it within a week which was a HIGH PRIORITY.

I read the paper whilst waiting. Big news of the day was that Chrysler had just been sold to a group of investors who were worried because of the medical benefits liability they had just taken on. Over here, the motor industry is creaking under the load of employee entitlements such as medical care for life and superannuation etc. What they need is John Howard’s WorkChoices employment reform. That’d sort them out.

Breakfast arrived. On three plates! One plate had the Denver Omelette on it (which looks like an Australian omelette which bears striking similarity to a New Zealand omelette), another had French Toast and yet another had what I later worked out to be hashbrowns. I asked if there had been a mistake, surely I wasn’t expected to eat all of this. This is the breakfast special sir, all for $4.37.

I didn’t eat for the rest of the day.

DON’T YOU HAVE A SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE?
On my way back to the hotel I walked past the Denver visitors center so I stopped in to see what I could see.

The old ladies looking after the place were delighted to see me and carefully explained all about Denver.

I asked what were some sights to see that Denver was well known for. The old ladies looked at each other somewhat puzzled.

“You know, if you were in Auckland, you would go to the Sky Tower”, but I’m not sure that they even knew what Auckland was.

“Ok, well in Sydney you might go see the Sydney opera house, or climb the Harbour Bridge – what’s the Denver equivalent?”.

It appears there isn’t one which is a shame. Infact there didn’t seem to be much at all in Denver itself, it seemed that you had to go out of town to see anything of interest.

I went back to the hotel and did some work.

Later on, Joe, another bloke who also works for the Large American Company in Australia, turned up and we decided to go for dinner.

WHATS A LONG BLACK?
It was a crap night, thunderstorms, rain etc, but off we went down the street in search of a restaurant that Joe had been told was really good.

The hotel staff who had given us directions had obviously overestimated our skills at both navigating and walking pace and after 10-15 minutes we stopped to consider if we were lost or not. We decided we probably were and got some renewed directions from a bloke in a basketball store.

With renewed enthusiasm we boarded one of the natural gas powered, right hand drive buses that go up and down 16 th St Mall and eventually made it to the very up-market restaurant.

We stood around for a bit waiting for someone to come and seat us, and I was starting to wonder if perhaps we had been judged not suitable. However along comes the head waiter who gives us a quick look up and down and appears to judge us as suitable. Joe blames our wait on the fact that I was not wearing a suit jacket and he was, which was somewhat of a sore point with me.

The menu looked very flash but I was a bit self conscious of the fact that I couldn’t understand much of it. Which one is the steak? Which one is the chicken? I did however recognize the Crème Brulee and so tailored my requests so that there would be sufficient room to accommodate one of those after.

If you ask an American for a long black they’ll stare at you blankly and expect you’re asking for something from the ‘adult range’.

I did my best to explain how you go about making a long black coffee the waiter showed some signs of understanding, but I wasn’t overly hopeful. As it turns out he did really well and came back with something like what you’d expect to get at any café in Australia which was great.

SUBWAY – TRANCE STYLE
The next morning I was determined to find a breakfast that didn’t come on three separate plates. A ham and cheese croissant would have been nice but I was pushed for time and settled for Subway instead. The workers here obviously couldn’t give a crap about anything as they had their dance party music playing hard on the store music system. I had to raise my voice to announce that I wanted cheddar and there was a distinct lack of interest in doing anything at all.

I was flung my Subway and off I went to read the paper with The Prodigy pounding in my ears.

Not much going on today, they’re still talking about Chrysler, but last night a few people got swept away by the river and people are not sure where they’ve gone. Some whales have turned up in a harbour somewhere and you can get round-the-clock updates on one of the TV channels.

After Subway it was off to work for the day.

COMMUNICATING WITH AMERICANS
I could understand people in Manila and Hong Kong having trouble understanding me sometimes. Often my frequent use of ‘eh’ at the end of a sentence had them puzzled (“Damn this is a big car eh?” and “This traffic is ridiculous eh?”) and so I had to substitute “eh” for “isn’t it?”

 I’ve been a little bit surprised with how often Americans have not been able to understand me. You would be talking away at them and then notice them ‘hang’ like a dead computer when you said a word they hadn’t heard. Then you back track, try and explain the word giving examples from American TV shows and also synonyms for that word.

I had to do that a lot which I thought was interesting.

One of the blokes who I was meeting with was British, but he’d been in America for many years, but he quickly caught on, he was delighted that someone spoke similarly to him and was often telling me “They (the Americans) won’t get that”. He said that a lot.

HARD ROCK CAFE
One night I strolled around one of the more popular areas near my hotel and came across the Hard Rock Café. This is an international franchise that has lots of Rock and Roll memorabilia from famous artists and groups. The Denver one was no exception.

At the Hard Rock I was served by a bloke called Matt who really went out of his way to provide good service. That’s one thing I’m not keen on about America is that you have to tip regardless of whether you got good service or average. Matt was the only guy I’ve had serve me in North America who I genuinely felt deserved a good tip.

He showed me to the table then sat down with me and explained everything, then went and got my order very quickly. He would then check if I was doing ok every time he walked past.

Matt was a pretty ‘out there’ kind of bloke and he wasn’t alone. One of the waitresses found out that someone at one of her tables was having a birthday so screamed at the top of her voice for everyone else to sing happy birthday. At first I thought someone was being mugged until I worked out what the story was.

Naturally a place like the Hard Rock Café has a merchandise section and in Denver’s case, to get in and out of the restaurant you had to walk through the merchandise, so ofcourse I had to buy something.

On the way back to the hotel I saw my first real live American Police chase. I’m not sure what they were chasing, if anything at all, but five police cruisers flew past along California Ave just like in the movies!

COLORADO SPRINGS
On my last day I had to go out to Colorado Springs which is about an hour south of Denver.

The scenery on the way there reminded me a lot of New Zealand, large green fields framed by large mountain ranges in the distance.

Apparently more people come to Colorado in the summer to hike through the mountains than they do to ski during winter.

CHEAP GAS IS A GOD GIVEN RIGHT
I took a shuttle out to the airport but after it picked me up it spent an eternity driving around the other hotels in the downtown Denver area. Here is where the bell hops and concierges and make or break you if you’re a shuttle driver. Each time we stopped the shuttle driver would try and ‘encourage’ the hotel guys working the entrance to send customers his way. It was fascinating to watch, some people obviously had deals going with other shuttle operators and were not interested in having this guy around. Mr Shuttle driver was having to work his game pretty hard and it was interesting to watch!

I’d been commenting to an old bloke sitting next to me on how there must be a large industry run by the bell hops and the concierges of each of the hotels. The old bloke was from South Carolina and we got to talking. He had been to Australia and New Zealand before.

We got to talking about the so called ‘excruciating high cost of gas’. People here are screaming because gas is up around US$3.20 per US Gallon (ie US$0.85/litre which makes it a little bit over AU$1/litre). Apparently that’s savagely expensive! I told Mr South Carolina that it’s not unheard of to pay AU$1.45/litre in Australia and much more in New Zealand to which he laughed and said “But cheap gas is our God given right!”.

The car industry over here doesn’t seem to be very progressive, they’re still manufacturing huge behemoth SUV’s that make SUV’s here look small. In Australia, the Ford Explorer is about as big as it gets. In the US it’s a ‘mid-size’ in the US, it’s bigger brother, the Expedition, comes with tug boats to help it park.

DENVER
Denver is a nice place. On the flight home I wondered what I would say about it to anyone who asked. Aspen is apparently the place you want to go to in Colorado, or even Boulder.

In places like Toronto when you ask what there is to do, you get “Go up the CN Tower” or “Go to Niagara Falls”, in Amsterdam, well, you don’t even have to ask anyone what there is to see there. Whenever I asked anyone what there was to do in Denver that was unique to it, there was always a puzzled look and lots of soul searching.

Denver is kind of like vanilla icecream. Everyone likes vanilla cause it’s plain and inoffensive, but after your done with your bowl, you think “hmm, that was nice, but it would have been better with a bit of caramel”.

Whereas if Manila was an icecream, you’d be saying “Damn that had a lot of nuts in it”.

Si