New Aeroplan Program Highlights | What You Need to Know

Everything You Need to Know About Air Canada’s Refreshed Aeroplan

Air Canada Aeroplan starts a new airline loyalty flight on November 8, 2020 with a redesign of their Aeroplan program. Today, I will give you a brief summary of what’s important.

For detailed information, visit the Aeroplan Website. Also, you can watch my video on Aeroplan here:

New Aeroplan (Air Canada) | What You Must Know Now

Aeroplan New Earn Structures and Longer Expiration

The earning structures are changing from being based on miles flown to amounts spent. Points expiration will stretch from 12 months to 18 months. Also, there will be options to recover your points without a hefty penalty.

Those Hated Fuel/Carrier Surcharges Are Gone

The new Aeroplan will have no more fuel surcharges. Those ridiculous, pesky surcharges or fuel fees or carrier fees/surcharges will be eliminated. Instead, there will be a flat $39 Cad fee to book partner flights.

Every Seat Is A Reward Seat

A major complaint with the Aeroplan program was that there were no reward seats available. This will change. No more seat restrictions or blackouts. If you can buy a ticket, you will be able to book it with Aeroplan points under their new program. Canada seats will be available based on market value. There will be options to pay using points + cash or points only. Partners' seats will be based on fixed points.

There will be 4 travel zones: North America, South America, Atlantic, and Pacific.

There will be a variety of ways to use points such as to upgrade to business class, purchase Wi-Fi, pay baggage fees, enter elite lounges, etc.

Points Sharing

You will have the ability to pool points together to earn or redeem. Up to 8 members allowed. This is a good feature for families.

Stopovers + Open-Jaws

You will be able to add 5000 points to get a 2nd destination on a one-way trip. You can add Open-Jaws for free on a round-trip. I explained what an Open-Jaw is in the video.

Alexandria Day Trip – Part 9 | Egypt Travel Blog: Day 1 (Part 14)

Egypt Travel Blog: 10 DAYS Egypt Explorer - Felucca Cruise & Red Sea

Koshari (Kushari) Street Food | Alexandria Street Food

After finishing our Alexandria tour, we were heading down to our hotel in Giza. We were all hungry and the tour guide gave us options to go to a restaurant, which would kill another 45 minutes, or grab some street food on our way and keep driving.

Everyone chose to try street food without wasting time and there were a few Egyptian foods to choose from. Our tour guide recommended Koshari, also known as Egypt’s national food, and everyone seemed to agree.

This is a very popular food in Egypt. Wherever Egyptians go, they will eat Koshari. Guests are visiting? They will be offered Koshari. Every week Egyptians will eat Koshari at least 3-4 times.

Koshari is made of rice, macaroni or spaghetti or paste, lentils, chickpeas, spicy tomato sauce, beans, and vinegar sauce. Depending on where in Egypt you buy it from, there can be variations in ingredients, but it’s always got the same great taste.

I liked Koshari right away, but it was spicy. It’s a vegetarian dish, but so delicious that you won’t miss the meat. The one I ate had pasta in it. It felt like I was eating pasta, or chickpeas, or something else.

Koshari is savory, has satisfying depth and texture, and is out-of-this-world tasty. The taste was incredible and the memory of eating it while we were driving through rural Egypt was unforgettable.

Next day I will start the actual Egypt tour, starting with the Pyramids.

Lights Off for Earth Hour

Earth Hour 2009

Published Date: March 28, 2009

This Saturday (28th March) marks an effort to raise awareness of the need to take action on climate change. For a global problem, the initiative needs to be global, and so it is proving with Earth Hour – a worldwide initiative which recommends that every business and household switch off its lights and non-essential electrical appliances between the hours of 8:30 and 9:30 pm. By doing this, it is hoped that the amount of energy wasted will come down not only on Saturday night but, given the awareness raised by Earth Hour, people will take the decision to keep all non-essential appliances off when they are not in use. Earth Hour 2009 is the second annual worldwide celebration, but the movement has been in place since 2005.

Originally celebrated in Thailand in 2005, Earth Hour arose again in Australia in 2007, with lights going out across Sydney at 7:30pm. Last year was the first time that it officially became an international movement however, with thirty-five countries getting involved on a governmental level, and in all 400 cities taking part. Monuments such as the Empire State Building, Sydney Opera House, Bangkok’s Wat Arun Temple and the CN Tower all switched off non-essential lighting for the day. This year, the number of countries and cities participating has gone up by a huge amount, with 82 countries involved and more than 2100 cities. With the United Nations Climate Change Conference due to take place in December, organizers are hoping that the event has as great a level of success as possible.

Although it has had its critics, Earth Hour is viewed by and large as a major method of raising awareness. The amount of energy saved on the evening will, it is true, be dwarfed by the amount used during the rest of the day, and there are many who view the event of tokenism. The environmentalist response to this must be to point out that if one must consider it to be symbolism, it will at the very least be symbolic of differences we can all make in our own energy consumption, and in the use of energy in general. With so man y countries and cities already taking part in the campaign, the importance of as high a level of compliance as possible to demonstrate to national governments the public desire for action on climate change is essential.

100+ cities in Canada are signed up to the event – a sign of national feeling on the issue – and when you realize that the idea at the outset of this year for the organizers was to get 1000 in total worldwide, the fact that this has been more than doubled is something quite astonishing to behold. For the first time, there will be participation from Africa, with Kenya and South Africa both signed up. India and China – each of which has a population of over one billion people, have also agreed to participate. This is a real measure of what people power can achieve.

To streamline and minimize blog maintenance, I will be discontinuing maintaining the Thegreenlivingblog.com website (however, I will still hold the domain). I will gradually move all articles from this site to A Dawn Journal. This article originally published on the above website on March 28, 2009.

The World’s Top Richest People

World’s Top Ten Billionaires 2014

First Published: March 2014 ADawnJournal.com

Forbes magazine recently published its annual ranking of global billionaires. Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates is on the top spot, pushing down Carlos Slim, who was on the top last year. Here are the top ten global billionaires for 2014:

The Top 10 billionaires

Bill Gates ($76B)

Carlos Slim Helú ($72B)

Amancio Ortega ($64)

Warren Buffett ($58.2B)

Larry Ellison ($48B)

Charles/David Koch ($40B each)

Sheldon Adelson ($38B)

Christy Walton ($36.7B)

Jim Walton ($34.7B)

Liliane Bettencourt ($34.5)

Source: Forbes.com

Here are some highlights from the ranking:

– There were a record number of 1,645 total billionaires.

– Bill Gates ranked #1 in 15 of the last 20 years.

– Due to Facebook’s recent $19B accension of WhatsApp, its founders Brian Acton and Jan Koum became 551th and 202th on the list.

– The US continues to dominate the list (492 billionaires), then Europe (468) and Asia (444). Country-wise, China (152) and Russia (111) have the most billionaires after USA.

– Some new countries were added for the first time: Algeria, Lithuania, Tanzania, and Uganda.

– More than 30 Canadians made it to the list.

– About 1000 people dropped off the list and 16 passed away.

– 1080 billionaires were self-made, 207 were inherited, and 352 were partly inherited.

– A record number of 172 women billionaires (up 25 percent from last year) made it to the list. Total new 268 billionaires were added to the list.

Earth Hour A Reasonable Success

Earth Hour Was A Global Success

Published Date: April 6, 2009

This year’s Earth Hour seems to have gone off pretty well, if the early figures are to be taken at face value. An increase in the energy saved as part of the global initiative has been reported, with some individual cities reporting results which represent a doubling of the decrease in energy use. Along with this, some cities which joined in for the first time have reported large savings of electricity which have exceeded expectations. The big headlines appear to be the Philippines, where 647 cities and towns (and an estimated 15 million people) joined in with the initiative to deliver results way beyond what was expected.

Although there has been controversy over the event, with many people and news outlets, among them FOX News, weighing in on the skeptical side of things, a cautious welcome has been given to the results that Earth Hour 2009 has managed to bring about. In The Philippines, while some data is still being ratified, more towns and cities joined in than anywhere else, with Greece coming in second. However, there are other results with importance too – not least in Delhi, India, a first time participant, where the power demand dropped by 1000 MW.

In Canada, Ontario as a province managed a saving of 6% on electricity with Toronto on its own displaying a decrease of 15.1% having posted 8.7% for Earth Hour 2008. Figures like these certainly seem to suggest that Earth Hour is getting a message through to people, and encouraging a more stable use of electricity. The skepticism which continues to ride high centres around the fact that savings on the financial side of the matter have been more or less symbolic, but this misses the point. By showing that it is possible to make large-scale energy savings, Earth Hour may yet be able to drive home the point that our dependency on non-renewable forms of energy is something that can be broken.

A message is getting through to people that if they want to cut their dependency on these forms of energy, such a thing is possible. If people can see that it is not too difficult to live without the constant use of electric lights and non-essential power-driven appliances, then it is something that can be harnessed to allow us to live a cleaner, greener future as a planet. For one thing that has come out of Earth Hour 2009 is the sheer spread of the message.

Canada has always been among the most prominent areas in the vanguard of the green movement, but the continuing advances made by this year’s most compliant countries are telling as well. Countries as distant geographically and as divergent culturally as Canada, Greece and the Philippines, along with the likes of Sweden, Ireland and Vietnam are showing an ability to take the message and run with it, something that gives us all hope for the future. With the positive news still being digested, it is now important that no-one thinks the work is done, as there is a lot still to do to ensure that the non-essential energy usage stays low, and that Earth Hour 2010 is one of the last ones we need.

To streamline and minimize blog maintenance, I will be discontinuing maintaining the Thegreenlivingblog.com website (however, I will still hold the domain). I will gradually move all articles from this site to A Dawn Journal. This article originally published on the above website on April 6, 2009.