Travel Talkers Toastmasters

We travelled to Canada for our March 16 meeting. Our Destination Master, Natasha Trunquest provided these clues for the mystery destination:

• This destination is a major city in Western Canada.
• It has a natural harbor facing the sea and mountains.
• There are sizeable numbers of Vietnamese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, and Iranian residents, along with a great number of South Asians, primarily from India. It is the most ethnically and linguistically diverse city in Canada.
• It is one of Canada’s warmest cities in the winter. August is the hottest month. The wettest month is November.
• This city is home to the third largest film and television production industry in North America.
• It has the largest port in Canada and the third largest port in the Americas, by tonnage.
• Of notable mention is the fact one of the city’s neighborhoods shares a name in common with the capital of Grand Bahama Island, West End.

If you guessed Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, you are correct!

Our Travel Topics Master, Raji Bandanapudi, continued the theme of the meeting by asking us questions related to Canada. She asked if we would ever consider traveling to Canada during the winter, what winter sport is our favorite and if we had ever visited Niagara Falls from the Canadian side. She also asked us about Canadian food, if we had ever visited the Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta Canada and which of our favorite movie or TV actors is from Canada.

Meghan Burns’ speech, “The Languages of Scrabble,” introduced us to the game of Scrabble and the world champion of Scrabble tournaments, Nigel Richards from New Zealand. Mr. Richards has won many Scrabble tournaments. Megan included in her speech the details of Nigel Richards winning the 2015 French World Scrabble Championship in Belgium even though he does not speak French. He studied the French lexicon for two months prior to the tournament. We learned that Scrabble is played in 30 different languages and for each language the letter distribution and score for each letter differs because the frequency of each letter of the alphabet is different in each language.

Join us for our next meeting on March 23 from 6:30pm to 7:30pm Pacific (-7 UTC). The meeting theme is “Trekking.” Raji Bandanapudi will give a speech about her adventures. Join the meeting to participate in our Travel Topics session and guess the mystery Destination.

Register for the meeting: https://tinyurl.com/TravelTalkersZoomLink

Looking forward to hearing your Travel Stories!

Helen Josephine,

Travel Talkers Toastmasters