Life

On Monday this week, due to the weather hitting +10°C for the first time this year, I went further afield than I usually wander. Specifically, I took the train past downtown and to Chinatown, an area that has, over the past couple years, gained a reputation (local) of being plagued with homeless encampments and drug-addled people, to the point that businesses have had to lock up even during business hours to keep the transients out.

Still, winter tends to keep those people in other shelters rather than out on the streets, and I wanted to visit the Asian grocery stores there in Chinatown, which I have not ever really been to before, so I took a bus there, walked to two separate ones, and then took a separate bus back, plotting a route that took me past the stores listed in the news article above too. For the moment anyway, it was safe enough and I didn’t run into any druggies, though I did see a woman and a man emptying multiple bottles of.. some suspicious liquid onto the side of the road opposite from us while I was waiting for the bus home with a couple of people.

The first store I visited was called 99 Supermarket, named after the street that it’s on.

This store very much had an imported trading goods sort of vibe, with weird things stuffed onto shelves and overflowing boxes everywhere. I loved it very much. It wasn’t particularly crowded too, and what clientele was there was mostly East Asian in ethnicity.

Excuse the weird angle on this tableware aisle shot:

And look at these cute bowls instead.

Like most Asian grocery stores do, they also had an in-store hot food section, even though the store itself didn’t seem to see enough customers for that sort of thing. There wasn’t a lot of choice at the counter, and there was no price list either, so I almost passed on buying food here as I planned to go to a second Asian supermarket after this anyway, but I talked to one of the two ladies behind the counter who told me that it was a box of $12 for three tray items, and in the end I decided to get a box.

I was actually surprised that one of the “three items” in this case was actually the noodles that I picked, as most stores like this give you the noodles or rice and then 3 more food items on top of that, but whatever. They wrapped it up nice and securely in a plastic bag to prevent spillage, which was a good thing because by the time I got home I noticed that the styrofoam box with the food inside was sitting in a vertical alignment in my shopping bag. There was no external spillage though even though there was some sauce in the box itself.

There was a bit of a kerfuffle over payment too, as apparently that food counter only took cash or debit, and I only found that out after they had already packaged up my food. All I bring on my trip is a phone with Google Wallet’s Tap to Pay set up on it, and my credit card digitally stored in that, so that was a no-go. In the end they just asked that I went to pay at the main cashier up front with all my other items though, and I did so.

This was also a blessing in disguise though, because I had to spend $35 or more in one trip in order to register for the store’s loyalty point card, which provided discounts on many of the items in the store, including some that were already in my basket. I actually only had around $29 worth of items, so the box of food that I couldn’t pay for at the food counter pushed me to $41, qualified me for the card (which turned out to be just a virtual phone number thing, and sadly not a real physical card), and qualified me for $8 off the items in my cart, taking the total price back down to $33.

Anyway, after that little adventure, I took a hike over to the other store that I was planning to visit. This one was called Lucky Supermarket, or Lucky 97, again due to the street number that it’s on.

This one has become a franchise and actually has had a new store open not too far from the T&T Supermarket/H-Mart Asian supermarkets that I frequently visit on the south side, but this specific one was on my route that Monday anyway and I had never been inside any of its stores in recent memory (it’s possible I visited them with my parents two decades ago), so I figured it would be a good time to recce it.

This supermarket actually caters to the Asian, Western, and Muslim/Halal markets all at the same time, which I did not realize — it was a lot more crowded and its clientele reflected this too, with a healthy mix of East Asians, South Asians, Muslims, and Caucasians all. It was also about three times the size of the previous supermarket.

There was a decent selection of Asian foods, though its vegetable section was poor and its instant noodles aisle, while huge, was as generic as I’ve ever seen, with nothing adventurous outside of the “usual” brands at all. It was also quite jarring that at the same time it also carried a ton of Compliments items, the in-house brand of the Safeway/Sobeys grocery chain megacorp. A quick Google search seems to indicate that Lucky is actually independently-owned and not an affiliate of that group, though. Yet. They had a huge halal meat section as well as a huge section of regular meat, and I thought the meat choices and prices there were actually really good. I thought it was a really interesting juxtaposition to 99 Supermarket, which had better vegetable choices and great canned/packaged food and spice options, but not meat.

Both stores also had a section devoted to joss paper and joss sticks, which I actually had not seen at either H-Mart or T&T.

I had a thought while wallking through this place that I was appreciative that I was born in Singapore and had the chance to be able to experience the culture and some of the languages growing up, even the ones I don’t formally know but could recognize some words from (for example Malay). All those experiences made it so that at least half the time I kind of understood what any particular weird item in either supermarket I was looking at was! But just half the time!

Anyway, I did find out that their food counter was completely closed, and I was glad at that point that I had bought some hot food from the other store for lunch once I got home.

Lucky Supermarket also sold the “Golden Happiness” specialty buns that I had recently seen at Safeway and mentioned last week, except these were $1.69 here instead of $1.29 at Safeway. Worse, while tabulating my expenses later that day, I noticed that I actually got charged 5% GST on these buns here, so they were closer to $1.77 per, whereas Safeway does not charge GST for those buns. How weird. And even worse, I bought 3 of them but only 2 of the buns actually made it home, so somehow I either dropped one of the buns on the roadside or bus on the way home, or left it at the supermarket counter. Bah. That’s a sign never to buy those buns from them again.

I took a 701 bus home after that, from a bus stop right next to the Hong Kong Bakery and the defunct Italian Bakery mentioned in the news post near the top of this segment, and that was also where I eyed the woman and man emptying their bottles of mystery liquid onto the road. On the way back, I experienced both the bus having to stop for a train on the Valley LRT line for the first time, which I have not had the pleasure of using yet (but plan to later this spring), as well as the bus passing by a snowplow called Plowy McPlowface. It was parked forlornly along the side of the road around 96 Avenue and 106 Street, since who really needs a snowplow in +10°C weather, but while I was familiar with the existence of the snowplow (local), I didn’t realize that that was Plowy until the bus passed it and I saw the sign affixed to its body that said “Hello, my name is Plowy McPlowface.” By that time, it was much too late to take a photo. At least I had a brush with royalty that day.

On Tuesday, and then again on Friday, I went down to the Hudson Bay store at Southgate, since it had been announced that the entire chain was closing most of its stores and ceasing operations soon, and their current stock would be liquidated. This was very sad — even though I had only been here a little over 10 years, I’ve seen the two big box stores at Southgate, first Sears and now The Bay, shut down. And walking through the stores felt like I was watching a giant whale in its death throes and people carving pieces of it up for themselves to save (and/or profit) however they can.

The sales were “only” 15% to 40% off this week, though it was on top of the already discounted prices in most cases and there was some stuff, but not everything, that was already listed from 25-50% off before that additional hidden discount that you could only find out at the cashier’s. I still did end up buying a couple of items for myself, one being a Hudson Bay Jules Velvet Throw to replace the cotton padding I drape over my computer chair, that was an additional 15% off its 50% discount ($29.72 instead of its $69.99), and the other a random cushion that was an additional 25% off its 75% discount ($7.47 instead of $39.99).

There’s still a lot of stuff in store though, plenty of which hasn’t sold because Hudson’s Bay has tons of overpriced “premium” branded items that haven’t been discounted yet, though there were also so many sections that were pretty much stripped bare by people (or possibly the brand removed its items from the store instead of participating in the liquidation). I will probably go back next week and the week after and walk the stores a bit more since the store is so close to my home, both to watch it slowly empty out as well as to see when the prices will change. The closing announcement was only made this week and liquidation sales, according to the cashier, would probably continue over the next couple months, so right now the discounts weren’t quite at blowout level yet. But it’s a sliding scale, and as prices drop some of the more popular items would also disappear as they hit different people’s comfortable purchase price points.

I’m saving this online article (local) about the shutdown and liquidation, as well as this video, which features the Southgate Mall outlet of The Bay.

It was also by sheer happenstance that I captured this picture three weeks ago when I was in-store, before I knew that they were about to liquidate and shut down:

So I decided to go back to that exact spot and take more pictures of the same location this week, so here’s one from my first trip on Tuesday, Mar 25 2025:

And my second on Friday, Mar 28 2025:

Their escalators were also shut down, and have been shut down for over a month at this point since my post three weeks ago also complained about this, and I guess (like I read someone say online somewhere), the infrastructure is one of the first things that goes when a store is shutting down. The down escalator from the 3rd floor to the 2nd floor was working again by the end of the week though, but the one leading up from the 2nd floor to the 3rd still was not working, so people still had to use those fire escape stairs to even get up to the third level where all my pictures from after this next one are from.

All the following pictures from this next section are from the 3rd floor of The Bay outlet here at Southgate, as I took memory snippets to remember the dying giant by. I will probably keep doing this over the next month or two.

Tuesday Mar 25:

Friday Mar 28:

All those pictures were just from the 3rd floor — that floor calls out to my heart more than the other 2 floors, with the 2nd floor mostly for men’s clothing and the 1st floor mostly for ladies’ clothing and perfumes and shoes. I’ll eventually take pictures of those too, though.

Outside of that sad news, I also went over to Safeway and found more of these weird “This section will be undergoing exciting future changes!” signs that I had first seen two weeks ago:

I haven’t seen those shelves empty since COVID-19! I think I finally found out why though, as I also found this one in another part of the store:

There’s already an Asian foods aisle, albeit not a very good one at all, and European stuff is already fairly decently represented in the rest of the store anyway, so I wonder what exactly this new aisle will cater to. Cool, though.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I wanted to start a more detailed grocery price tracking spreadsheet, and I modelled and started a template this week that looks like this so far:

A lot of those fields are calculated automatically, but is this too much information for me to want to bother to track? Or not enough? There are a few other things I could track but don’t. We’ll see. It’s just a prototype for now. I wonder if there’s a grocery price tracker app that allows me to do that sort of stuff. There are a lot of apps that do a lot of other things that I don’t care for, like building meals and figuring out what ingredients I need from what store and nonsense like that. I just need one where I can input prices and weights of things I find and it tracks it in a large database and shows me price history and dollar-per-unit comparisons and changes. And syncs across mobile and PC.

Next, here are a couple of landscape pictures for the week. The first one was from Monday Mar 24, at 8:04 pm:

Nice, pleasant weather, with the sunset creeping below the horizon, and all that’s left of the snow were little puddles of water. Then, later on in the week on Thursday and Friday, a huge snowstorm came by and dumped a little over 20 cm of snow on our city, although it wasn’t particularly cold, with temperatures somewhere between -5°C and -10°C. But this meant the local Southgate Mall snowplows had to be brought out again, and they beeped and screeched all the way to past midnight on Thursday night, and past 3am on Saturday night, annoying everyone in the nearby apartment blocks in the name of capitalism.

 This was Thursday Mar 27, at 12:58 pm:

And then Friday Mar 28, at 11:36 pm:

Snowbanks!

I didn’t get to go out nearer the end of the week due to this, but my escapades earlier in the week felt like (and were written in the vein of) I was doing some travel blog stuff that I love to do. Visit, experience, chronicle. I actually found out this week that I’m being flagged at work for having over one year of vacation time accrued, which for my current term of employment is 140 hours per year. It rises to 175 hours later this year in November, when I hit 15 years worked here, but my accrual rate also increases at that point (local). Apparently it’s actually a thing in our collective agreement that we’re not supposed to accrue more than a year without using it, a clause that I’ve honestly probably been told before but never manage to properly internalize. And honestly, 20 days a year is a lot of vacation time. It’s one of the few good perks about working where I currently do. I seldom use it all up in a year, and I didn’t even use up last year’s sick time either, so it’s not like I needed vacation time to offset sick days either.

Burning the vacation time as it comes so as to not go over the limit is a thing that we have to consciously do since there’s always so much to do at the office due to being understaffed in terms of project work, even if we’re done and caught up on day-to-day tickets, so it feels like I’m being a traitor to my team sometimes if I take time off. And yet there are these caps on our total vacation time that force us to take time off, or lose it, an issue I’ve run into in the past as well. I get that they’re sort of coming from a good place though, wanting people to take their hard-earned breaks from work, and they don’t really enforce it all that often anyway until things like budget issues make them worry about people secreting away huge banks of vacation time (which makes them a liability if they ever leave or are forced to leave, I suppose).

But anyway, they’re in one of those enforcement stages now, and apparently I am all the way up to 220 hours of banked time that I now have to use. Each workday counts as 7 hours, so I have to lose (220-140)/7 hours, or about 11 days, and I’ll be accruing time between now and that time, plus while I’m on the vacation itself too, so I’d need to take almost three full weeks of vacation time… just to get back to the maximum banked vacation cap itself, which I will probably then immediately creep over again. With that as a catalyst, I started looking at laptops this week, something I briefly wrote about last week in yet another serendipitous moment here on Shiara‘s Yuusha Nikki blog.

But I can’t really afford to take a long vacation somewhere either since I’m trying to save for that house, I’ve been saying. Or is that really true? Looking at my finances, I have about $90k of liquid cash, and the maximum mortgage the bank will give me based on my current salary is around $300k, so putting 20% down on a mortgage would be about $75k Canadian, for a $375k house. Everything beyond that is for moving costs, and saving up an emergency fund or nest egg for things like repair and maintenance. Or trying to save up for a bigger downpayment to reach for a more expensive house. But, life experiences are important too, and something I rank very highly.

Also, I had to re-sign my housing lease this week, and this one now does not have a fancy clause that allows me to break it at any point without a penalty, so I’m kind of tethered to this apartment for another year now — breaking the lease will cost me $1,000, on top of one month’s rent (another $1,329 or so), though finding someone to transfer the lease to will cost me $200 for a lease transfer fee and no penalty instead. But the point is, while I am still slowly looking for a house, I can also (and have mentally readjusted to expect to) just remain here for another year and keep building up my funds anyway, waiting for the next housing market crash to move in and grab one, while casually keeping my eye out for a “perfect house” in the meantime. And I can definitely fit a trip into those plans. So maybe I should travel somewhere instead.

Where should I go? What should I do? Who should I go with? When should I go? Should I go somewhere or do a boring staycation? Try a travel vlog (video blog) or livestream like I’ve always wanted to do? A “normal” travel writing blog? Join some sort of short-term program? Look for a sponsor somehow? How would that intersect with my evening streams?

So many questions, but my excitement levels are building. I could travel around Canada, I could try a hiking trip in the British Isles, or take the train around mainland Europe, or I could go back to Asia again, perhaps this time visiting Thailand or Malaysia, where I believe lodging costs (the main cost of any long trip for me) are cheaper. Or visit a Comiket event in Japan. Or stop by my beloved Singapore again. Or go crash at Kel‘s place in Guangzhou again. Or try to find someone to travel with. Chinese New Year has already passed this year, but there are definitely other events I could try to hit up. We’ll see…