Courtesy of YVR and Jaeger Mah
Jaeger Mah, who has been living inside the Vancouver, B.C., airport for 80 days, moves out Nov. 4.
By Harriet Baskas, msnbc.com contributor
Jaeger Mah, the 29-year-old man who has been living inside the Vancouver, B.C., airport since mid-August, is finally heading home.? ?
He?s taking his video camera and his Hawaiian shirts with him. But he?s leaving his cavities behind.
Last summer, Mah beat out 95 other entrants in a contest to mark the 80th anniversary of Vancouver International Airport (YVR). First prize was an assignment as a citizen reporter at the airport and a $15,000 fee.
There was once catch: The winner had to agree to really live at the airport for 80 days and 80 nights.
That was no problem for Mah, who vowed in his winning video entry to be ?the Anderson Cooper of YVR.? Mah moved into the airport on Aug. 17 and since then has been spending his nights at the on-site Fairmont Vancouver Airport hotel and his days finding out what goes on behind the scenes at the airport. Along the way, he?s been producing regular video reports and sharing his observations on Facebook?and Twitter.
Mah, who moves out Nov. 4, said he was looking forward to doing his own laundry (the hotel only offers a dry-cleaning service) and being able to buy a bunch of bananas or a bag of apples instead of the single servings of fresh fruit he considered ?price-inflated? in the airport food courts.?
He also shared some of the highlights of his 80-day stay, which include ride-alongs with the airport?s firefighters and emergency crew and a lesson in how to de-ice airplanes?using an 80-foot crane. Mah spent an evening with his dad at the airport?s Flying Beaver Pub playing the Saturday night ?Name that Tune? game and a day with a veteran Air Canada pilot. ?The pilot was leaving for Tokyo and he wanted to show me everything that goes into preparing for a flight. There are all these things you need to check, like the weather and the wind patterns, and you need to plan your flight map.?
During his 80 days at the airport, Mah ate many of his meals at one of the VIP lounges. ?They welcomed me from the start, and I usually went there for breakfast and lunch and a nightcap,? said Mah. That meant he could save most of the ?YVR bucks? allotted to him by the airport for something else. ?I took my girlfriend and my parents out for a really nice dinner at the Fairmont,? said Mah.
Mah also stopped in to visit the airport dentist. ?I figured I?d just go in for a checkup, but I found out I had five cavities. So I went back.?
As his live-in assignment at the airport ends, Mah says he?s going to miss all the people he?s been seeing every day at the airport. ?There?s a woman who?s going in for surgery soon. And there?s a guy who tells me a joke every single day. I?ll miss those friendships.?
The people at the airport will miss Mah, too. ?At the beginning, we thought that 80 days was ample time for Jaeger to tell some amazing stories about YVR,? said Rebecca Catley, YVR?s director of communications. ?But 80 days have flown by, and there are still so many fascinating and interesting stories to be told.?
Mah may be moving his stuff out of the airport, but he?ll be back soon. At the end of November, Mah and his girlfriend are flying from Vancouver to Maui. ?I can?t wait,? said Mah, ?because now I know everything that goes into flying. I know what the flight crews are doing, how the airplanes are prepped, how they push planes back from the gate and what the pilots have done to get ready to fly.?
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Find more by Harriet Baskas on Stuck at The Airport.com and follow her on Twitter.?
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Source: http://overheadbin.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/11/01/8585296-around-the-airport-in-80-days
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