When I lived in Scotland, I lived for my first 4 days in the country in a hostel called St. Christopher’s Inn, which is down on Market Street, just down from the Waverley Bridge in the Old Town section of Edinburgh. When I arrived from the airport, it was here that I dragged my bags and checked into the hostel, which was situated above a bar called Belushi’s. This place was really exciting for about an hour, and then I hated it. I was alone in a room with an absolutely terrifying eastern-European guy who refused to speak or smile. I slept in a small, primary-colored bed in the corner, and by ‘slept’, I mean laid in bed all night until 7am when it became 2am back in America, and I could finally fall asleep. Here was the view from my bed there:
After two days of sitting in this room listening to couples fighting in Spanish outside, watching the scary guy come back with giant bags of food for no reason, and smelling the reek of fish and chips which emptied out of the exhaust vent from the bar kitchen downstairs and straight into our window, I was getting tired of the place.On my second to last morning there, I had finally started adjusting to the time change and awoke finally during mid-morning to find a completely new guy unpacking his stuff on the bed across the room. I was thrilled to find someone new who I might actually be able to talk to, and I hoped he spoke English. He did, and with a familiar North American accent, which I remember being a really welcome comfort, after being so lost in a foreign country for so long. His name was Jay and he was from Canada. He’d been staying in the hostel for a few days in a different room (apparently with a flock of fit Swiss girls) and left to fly to Amsterdam to find that his flight was cancelled, and had to return to the hostel for an extra day where he was placed in my room. I remember spending a lengthy amount of time talking about tons of North American things. I don’t even know what that means, but that’s what happened. I ended up hanging out with Jay for the entire day, it was nice to chill with someone who was from closer to home.
We attended karaoke night in the bar downstairs, where a miserable looking, heavily made-up, obese Scottish woman hosted and sang obnoxiously in between every performance. After a horrific dinner, several pints of the city’s local ale, and a few trips outside to converse with the cigarette-smoking Polish guys, Jay treated the bar to an epic Elvis Presley number, and then I don’t remember anything besides falling asleep, if you can ever really remember that at all. When I woke up the next afternoon, he was gone, but had left a piece of paper saying to have fun and with his email address and the town he lived in in western Canada, which was really a formality, because I’d never end up visiting there.
After that a girl from North Carolina whose name I can’t remember, ended up moving in, and I hung out with her for the next few days until I moved to my friend Jamie’s house in Galashiels for a week. That note somehow stayed crumpled up in one pocket or another for the entire 6 months in which I lived, worked and traveled in Scotland, and made it back home to America in the back pocket of some pair of pants, utterly forgotten until almost a year later when this trip began to take shape...
We awoke in Jasper National Park from the freezing, freezing, literally freezing air and snow around us. This was the morning after we had to stop driving because of the weather. We packed up the car amid the gorgeous snowy mountains and took off for route 16, which would lead us northeast through Alberta, from Jasper to Edmonton, the capital. It was about a 3 and a half hour drive, which went by quickly because of the nutty scenery around us. Jay lives in a town called Spruce Grove, just west of Edmonton, and the directions there were easy enough. I gave him a call when we entered the town center, which was a highway flanked by strip malls and fast food chains. The directions he gave me were actually in terms of the fast food places. “Did you pass KFC yet?” “Is there a Timmy Ho’s on your left?” Timmy Ho’s being Tim Hortons, the a Dunkin Donuts-esque place that is almost literally everywhere in Canada. Everywhere. You can’t trip and fall without banging your head on a Timmy Ho’s.
After navigating our way out of this labyrinth of 2-minute hamburgers and coffee-to-go, we found our way into the bright sunny suburbs of Spruce Grove. We found the house, outside of which Jay was standing, and I accidentally drove by, then tried to turn around and parked facing the wrong direction on the wrong side of the street, then drove back again and did an awkward, lengthy 3-point turn, and pulled onto the right side of the road, but about 4 feet from the curb, and then I spent the next five minutes awkwardly trying to correct this, back and forth, while Jay waited on the lawn. Finally we were allowed out of the car, introductions were implemented and we dragged our sleeping stuff into his crazy basement suite house, which was one of the very coolest places we stayed on the trip.
We dropped our stuff in the couch/tv/computer room, I don’t know what to call it, and commenced taking turns occupying the shower. As Halloween was approaching, AMC (which Canada apparently has) was showing horror movie after horror movie. We sat through a majority of Halloween (the movie, not the holiday) while the showers took place. It took like 2 hours for Michael Myers to kill somebody, and I spent that whole time waiting before I got in the shower. Jamie Lee Curtis also exhibited a surprising amount of ‘not freaking out’ after spending the day being stalked by a guy in a bleached, eyebrowless William Shatner mask. During the movie we poked around the room and asked Jay about the random weird stuff we found. Actually that was just me, I think everyone else was more polite. I found a deed to a ‘moon acre’ on his shelf, and needed to know what that was. Jay said he got that at the mall, and it’s a somehow legitimately legal way to own an acre on the moon, as sold by some smart, tricky guy. I got out the moon map and found Jay’s acre by the longitude and latitude. It’s a pretty all right acre, nice crater and everything. Jay said the guy was also selling acres on Saturn. I said Saturn is made of gas. Jay said he didn’t know anything about that. I feel like this guy selling acres on other planets might be instituting some sort of a scam, I’m not sure though.
After we all showered, Jay took us into town, in his crazy car with a remote starter, to the West Edmonton Mall, which is the largest mall on Earth. (Maybe there’s a bigger one on Saturn, who knows, I foolishly missed the boat on that real estate). This mall, is, well, yeah, it’s gigantic. It’s pretty ridiculous. We ate at a nice place there (we’d been having pasta and canned stuff for the week before that) and watched the world series, which was in game 2 at that point, and talked a bit about Judd Apatow movies. Jay was kind of offended that we weren’t fans of Superbad, but I decided to let that argument lie at the moment.After dinner, he took us on a tour of the world’s largest mall. There’s a hotel, a water park, an amusement park, a scale model of the Santa Maria (Why? I don’t know.) and tons of other ridiculous stuff. We also walked past a huge glass case containing live flamingos! What??
We saw the water park, which also had a place to bungee jump from, and visited the sadly closed amusement park, entitled “Galaxyland”. Now I had a little trouble with this. No one else cared, but I got pretty mad, as I’m often wont to do in trivial matters…”Galaxyland”? What the hell does that mean? GALAXY-LAND? What does that mean? Is the park themed like a galaxy? What does THAT mean? How do you theme something like a galaxy? There’s no such thing as ‘land’ outside of a galaxy! How can something be ‘themed’ by the fundamental structure in which it inherently exists? How do you theme a park like a galaxy? What’s it like inside a galaxy? We’re IN A GALAXY! This is one! My grandma’s basement is ‘Galaxyland’! Seriously what is supposed to be inside that park? Stars? Planets? That stuff is already everywhere. Oh hey, you guys want to come to my new theme park? It’s called Existence-Land. The fuck do you put in a park like that?? Whatever you want? Or maybe I’ll call it “The World-Land”. Hey kids, there’s stuff in here, that’s in the world. Isn’t that exciting? WHAT?? Get away from me, West Edmonton Mall…GALAXYLAND???
We continued on the tour, with me a few meters behind everyone else, ranting and raving in my own head. We saw the endless stores, the big pirate ship and submarine ride that was in the middle of one part, and we found a nice photo op there as well.
After leaving the mall, me still raging in my head about the stupidity of the ‘theme’ park, we took off for the main street, which I think was called ‘Whyte’ but I might be spelling it wrong. It was a nice big street lit with tons of embellishing lights. It was a pretty cold, icy night, and the moon was shining brightly, almost full. We could clearly see Jay’s acre on it. We were walking down the road looking for a nice bar with music. As we walked by some random beggar-looking guy on the side of the road, who yelled, “Hey do you guys like hockey?” None of us said anything and Jay hesitated waay too long, and then said, “Ummmm….No,” in his Canadian accent, which made it even more blatant that he was lying about hockey. The guy then replied with an outrageously loud, obnoxious, “Ummmmm….YES.” but we walked on rapidly and left him behind a few seconds later, never finding out what he was going to say next.We went to a sports bar to watch the end of the World Series game. Haha that sentence actually looks really funny. “ to watch THE END OF THE WORLD series game”. Anyway, we got a round of Molson Canadian and watched the Red Sox win 2-1 (Which I couldn’t care less about), and it switched over to the Edmonton Oilers hockey game. That was actually a pretty white-knuckle game, with it going into overtime and the Oilers winning in a shoot-out (or ‘shootoot’ as some Canadians say). The bar went fucking mental, they actually had a red hockey goal light thing that went off along with a deafening siren and everyone was cheering. We finished up and moved on.
We were looking for a place with music, and tried 2 different places, but they were completely dead. One place had absolutely no patrons in it, and the ‘musical guest’ was two guys on a stage doing acoustic covers of the Killers. Despite the efforts of a cute waitress, we left.
We ended up at a place called “Blues on Whyte” which was a dark little place with a pushy waitstaff and a blues quartet doing T-Bone Walker covers.
We ordered ourselves some drinks, I think Jay had some sort of Canadian Lager, and we, inexplicably ended up with a pitcher of Guinness. A PITCHER of Guinness. If any of you have ever worked in a bar, or drank a Guinness, you know that that never happens. There are very exact specifications for how to pour and present a pint of Guinness. My roommate and I in college when I was living in New York City, were new to the whole bar thing, and tried to order a pitcher of Guinness at an Irish pub across the street from our place, called Fitzgeralds. Or maybe that was the one south down the street, whatever it was Mc or Fitz something, and the barman was proper Irish and when we asked for that drink, he had to look away and mutter his reply “I ain’t never served a pitcher of Guinness in me life, and I never…” in a shaky angry voice. I thought he was gonna beat the shit out of us, and we were torn for a minute between ordering pints or running out of that place. So back in Canada, after some confused orders over the din of the T-bone Walker music, the waitress came back with a goddamn pitcher of the black stuff and demanded our money immediately. The stuff was pretty messed up from the pitcher, I tried to pour the pints, but there was no head on it anymore, that all stuck inside the pitcher. We took a photo so that I could prove to Jon, my roommate from New York, that these pitchers were actually served in the world, despite our near-death Irish experience. Here’s that picture.
After that, we were good and happy, and we spent the rest of our time at that bar discussing American and Canadian music/pop culture. Jay gave us a sincere apology for Celine Dion and Avril Lavigne. We thanked him in turn and offered our apologies for Britney Spears and Richard Simmons. There might have been more speak of Judd Apatow movies, but I don’t remember. After about half an hour, that was it for us and Blues on Whyte. We made off from Edmonton to return to Spruce Grove and a local place that Jay frequented. It was apparent that he frequented it when we walked in the door and a screaming, drunk-out-loud girl on a bar stool turned sloppily toward the door and started shouting in a joking tone: “Jay! No! Get the f, no, Pic! Get the fuck out of here, Jason!” He went to say hi to her and we all kind of grimaced and weird-smiled. Yeah that’s a word. I think it turned out that she was someone that he worked with or had worked with or something, and it was her birthday if I remember correctly, which explained her rare form and enthusiasm. We got more Molson Canadian I think, and at that point the Judd Apatow film argument peaked. Jay argued that Superbad was heart-filled and honest, and I argued that it was tired and overdone, which I stand by. We cut the argument off and had some sort of ridiculous delicious shot-drink-thing that the barmaid brought over and went home.
The movie channels were still going nuts with horror movies, so we treated ourselves to Ginger Snaps 2, a Canadian cult film about werewolves until we were too tired to look at things anymore, and I fell asleep.
No comments:
Post a Comment