Life

As mentioned in the opening blurb for this page, enjoy the life section of this week’s blog post as a series of daily posts, travel blog style!

Sunday, Apr 06

After submitting my weekly blog post on Sunday, I had itchy feet and decided to go out and explore, as excellent weather had finally arrived. It was on somewhat short notice, so I decided to go across town to a place called Queen Mary’s Market.

Here’s a close up of some of those window signs.

This used to be called Super Flea Market, but apparently got renamed some time ago. Not that long though, I had a local screenshot of their website in this blog post. Or have my blog posts just been going on that long now. Anyway there used to be two (I think) Super Flea Markets in Edmonton, the one at 12011 111 Ave NW that I went to today and one at 5017 127 Ave NW that seems to be gone now, but which I think I had visited by myself about seven or so years ago shortly after I first transitioned.

But anyway Super Flea Market was a place that Dad used to drive the family to when we lived together in the 2000’s, and it holds some nostalgia due to that. I remember eating hot dogs and looking at second hand book counters and card stores and picking up some L5R cards at a corner store in one of these two flea markets. I also have some memories of a flea market that don’t fit in this one, so it was probably at the other location that is gone now, but I think I also had some memories of this place too, and I wanted updated memories of the place anyway, so off I went.

I took a bunch of pictures inside, and will share some of them here.

I am not brave enough to wear something like that out in public.

There were two food courts in that area, one with four or so stalls with a bunch of tables and what I judged to be extremely overpriced food, and the other one with a single store modeled after a food truck that was selling interesting-sounding sandwiches. I picked the latter, of course, as their prices, while still sort of high for a flea market, were at least approaching sanity.

This “food truck” stall was called Rival Burger, and my food was apparently being prepared by this guy:

I ordered the Oklahoma Burger, after getting that as a recommendation from the cashier as to what to try. I was leaning toward that anyway though. The burger was great… however,

It came in that assumedly grease-resistant paper, but a lot of the filling spilled out of the buns onto the paper and eventually soaked right through and onto the table itself. Or well, the napkin I placed between the grease paper and the table. My hands were super greasy and messy by the time I finished what I could of the burger, and slurped up all the Oklahoma that had leaked out onto the napkin. Thankfully I had refilled the tissue paper packet in my bag earlier this morning.

Outside of food, I had given myself a $20 limit for purchases at this flea market, but I actually ended up not spending any of it at all. I did almost buy a CD at that Dinosaur Records store in the second picture above, and I kind of still regret not getting it, but eh, the CD case was a bit tattered, and I can likely get a better quality one online for about a similar price if I wanted to. I was hoping to find some Asian CDs at that store too but there was only a tiny K-Pop section in one of the boxes, and the only Japanese music CD in the store was stuffed with the eight or ten Korean CDs there. I don’t remember seeing a single Chinese CD.

I wandered around a bit more and peered at a lot of stores and then took a bus and then the train home. A couple of peace officers boarded said train at Churchill Station and confronted someone who was seated two or three rows further down the train from me, before pulling him off the train. Not sure who reported him, but the train didn’t move so the driver was evidently expecting the officers to arrive there, and according to the peace officers talking to him, he had been “passed out for awhile”. He didn’t seem homeless so perhaps he was just under the influence of something, and he didn’t resist as he was escorted out.

I also stopped by that one spot at The Bay in Southgate and took another picture of what it looks like today:

That was Sunday! Now on to Monday.

Monday, Apr 07

Compared to Sunday, Monday was a much quieter day. I only really went down to the mall to get lunch and walk around a bit. I did almost spend a bunch of money on a DJI Pocket 3, the upgraded camera to the DJI Pocket 2 that I use, which has been out since late 2023. It’s supposedly not only a better camera but also better with connecting to streaming services and such, which the 2 was poor at, though I’m not completely sure as there aren’t a whole ton of reviews of that aspect of the DJI Pocket 3 online yet.

I wanted it as a tool that I could potentially use for my goal of live-streaming as I travel around the world (and city), since I’m already fairly comfortable with using the Pocket 2 to record videos as I walk around, but that’s still a pretty scary commitment to make. I did visit the McBain Camera store in Southgate and try to buy the DJI Pocket 3 Creator Bundle for $929 (which is its price in CAD almost everywhere online too) though, and they said it was backordered and would be a couple weeks, and that if I wanted to join the five current backorders they had for it, it would be 20% of the cost plus tax, which apparently was $195.30. I could still cancel if I wanted to after, they said. Supposedly. I actually did TRY to join the queue, but when I tried to pay, they said that they didn’t accept Tap to Pay from my phone and I needed to use my actual credit card, which I no longer even bring along with me.

I said I lived nearby and would come back another day with the card. As of the end of this week though, I hadn’t done so yet, even though I’ve since been back to the mall several times. I think I will eventually get this, I have $1,500 from my PSA at work and I can use that to cover most of this plus a laptop, but I haven’t decided what laptop I wanted yet so maybe I’ll do that first and then see if the remainder covers the Pocket 3.

Anyway on the way back home I also picked up a cute cushion from the QE Home store, the same store I got Carrotblade from. This one was $10, 50% off its normal price, and I had been eyeing it for a week or so now after walking past it a few times on the way home from this or that grocery run, so I finally bit on the bait this time. Here’s the cushion sitting next to (on top of) Carrotblade at home.

I also saw this at the Thai Express store in Southgate:

I can get free forkchops to eat porkchops with on Friday huh. If I’m one of the first 100 visitors there. I’ll try for it, though I’m not sure I can with my daily team meeting.

Tuesday, Apr 08

I went down to the University today, because Sandy, who had been taking classes this semester while also working, had mentioned the day before that he had a final project that was being featured in a semi-public showcase this afternoon. So I declared yesterday that I would go down today, and I did so! With fanfare even, since the fire alarms were blaring with a 10th floor alarm malfunction when I left my apartment building. I brought Tigey along today, just in case.

I had actually thought that his project was something human/cultural anthropology related, because I knew that he was taking those classes in a previous semester, but it turned out that his final presentation was for a Media Studies class, and it was a video/podcast and was one of eleven chosen from the class that he was in to be featured on a rotating video being beamed from a class projector in a meeting room. It was nonetheless quite cool though, even though the room was so hidden away that it was difficult for me to find even knowing exactly what the room number was.

The meeting room was hidden away on the second level of the Cameron Library, which is the second largest library on campus, but the way that that library is laid out, it’s very easy to miss that the library even has more than one floor to it. The stairs leading up are not really obvious and there’s little signage indicating that there’s anything more other than the ground floor. This was the first time on the second level of the Cameron Library even though I’ve been at the University in some capacity or other for nearly 25 years now, and I was surprised to see that they even had 3D printing machines and consoles with Xbox Game Pass subscriptions that students could use. And even on that level, the specific meeting room where the showcase was being held was tucked away in a corner that I walked right past the first time, before doubling back again and seeing it.

Anyway, the presentations were being showcased in two different meeting rooms, although I’m not clear if they were two different sections of the same class or if it was playing the same video but unsynced with each other on purpose, since they were playing different things when I was there. One of the meeting rooms looked like this:

And the other one like this:

I stayed to watch a couple of the presentations, including Sandy‘s, and then went out to lunch with him as we hadn’t met each other for quite a while. I asked him if he would mind sharing the presentation for the blog, and he agreed in principle, but hasn’t passed over the file yet. I don’t want to force him to either so we’ll see if that ever comes to fruition! I’d definitely like to preserve his voice and memories though, as he spoke about growing up with different forms of media and what they meant to him.

I took a couple of chronicle photos while I was there at the University — both the main libraries on campus had a question board out by their front entrances, and I’ve always liked to catalogue these (there are several of them scattered across my blog!) so here are two more. This is the one by Rutherford Library:

And this one was by Cameron Library:

I also went to take a picture of the menu at Ho Ho’s, my former favourite restaurant that has since fallen from favour.

It seems that the menu is mostly the same, though a few more items have vanished, a couple new ones have wandered in, and some of the prices have gone up slightly while some have gone down slightly and many others yet remained the same from the menu in December 2022. I did not take a prior picture of the price of the food trays so I don’t know if that one changed. I’ve never eaten from it.

While Ho Ho’s menu was nearly the same, the store that I’ve eaten the second most of at Hub Mall, Chosun Korean Restaurant, had changed slightly:

They actually used to have a Kimchi Stew under the Soup section that would come with a nice bowl of steamed white rice, but that one is gone now. That was sad, that one was my favourite dish too. But I didn’t remember them having stir-fried noodles before, and that was what I went for, specifically the spicy pork noodle. Mmm.

I hung out with Sandy for a bit longer after we had finished eating, and we talked a bunch before parting ways at the bus station. The only other thing of interest I have to chronicle from the day is this picture from 8:27 pm later that evening:

What picturesque hues.

Wednesday, Apr 09

Today, I took a walk down to South Park and visited the T&T Asian supermarket there. Just a normal grocery run to a store that I don’t get to visit a lot in winter due to how cold it is and how terrible the Edmonton bus service is. Just throw in a few detours here and there and it would make a good story, surely.

My first detour was in Southgate Centre itself, where I visited The Bay again to check on a theory that Satinel had given me — that most likely the price shifts in the liquidation sale going on there would happen on Thursdays because Thursday is generally new flyer day for stores. To verify this, I needed to check the prices on Wednesday, and I indeed noted that the signs still said 20-40% off, with most items at 20% off, which was the same sale point that the store had been pushing since at least last Friday, like I mentioned on last week’s blog.

I did note, however, that they had removed the prominent Zellers sign from the location on the 3rd floor of The Bay where I usually took my comparison pictures! So now the poor, forlorn top of the wall is just empty.

Oh well. I walked down from Southgate to South Park, which is about a half an hour’s walk. Along the way, I saw clear signs of spring sprouting from the grass:

I’m glad there was a fence separating me from those alpha predators.

I stopped by the Goodwill store at South Park, but didn’t find anything particularly interesting there, though the store sections had been shuffled around a bit. Not far from there though, there was a large furniture store called JYSK that was advertising a closing down sale, so I went inside to peek:

It all looked like good stuff and I nearly bought some pillows and cushions, however I went to ask a store employee when exactly they were closing down, and he said that they would still be open at least through the end of 2025. That made me super suspicious as to how “legit” the closing down sale prices actually were. Either way I might shop here if or when I finally get a house, if the store is still around at that point, and I’m thinking of getting a new pillow nonetheless, but I didn’t actually end up buying anything this trip. I took a few pictures of things I liked and will slowly do my research when I have time.

I also saw another interesting-looking company, a liquidation store called Fire Dealz, that apparently opened about five months ago. A liquidation store! With random stuff for sale inside!

I came on a Wednesday though, and according to a chart I saw on the wall, the prices of things in the liquidation store varied depending on what day of the week it was, and Wednesdays were the “$1” day.

They also said that the store was closing early today, at 2 pm, even though the “normal” closing time for the business was 6pm. This was so that the employees had time to restock the place for tomorrow. Which meant that the way the place worked was that they brought in new stock every Thursday, with each item priced at $25, and then the prices of the remaining items each day were dropped to $15, then to $10, and so on. And by Wednesday all the remaining items were going for $1 each.

I wonder when the best day to visit this sort of store is. Thursdays would be interesting to see, of course, but since the price steps down each day, something that was a bad deal on Thursday could be a decent deal on Sunday and a great deal on Tuesday or Wednesday. And if you knew the exact retail price of an item, and had the time to visit the store every day, it would be a form of gambling to see if you could leave an item for an extra day and hope that no one else decides to purchase it on that day (since not everyone will know the retail price of an item) or beats you to it the next day so that you could get that item a little cheaper. Hmm.

Theories aside, this also meant that most of the items left in the store by the time closing time on Wednesday afternoon rolled around, which was when I was there, was most likely trash, passed over by colloquial vultures who had already picked the rest of the store clean. This was what the store looked like on Wednesday afternoon:

The awful world of consumerism. I did ponder picking up an item or two, in particular a lab notebook that would have gone into my stationery box, but I wasn’t sure if I was fighting (by preventing something from being wastefully thrown away) or encouraging (by having the product move, thus encouraging the business model) overconsumerism by buying here, and in the end I decided even that $1 would have been a waste of money, and I didn’t pick up anything. I resolved to come back here some Thursday though.

Anyway, two full hours after I left the house, I finally reached T&T and did some shopping there. Although I did not buy any of the following products, there were some photos I captured for posterity anyway, including this one of the famous (to me) Shiroi Koibito cookies, a Hokkaido specialty that they forbid selling anywhere else in Japan except on the port side of airports. I tried looking for them when I was in Kyoto for the RSJP a few years ago, but to no avail. The ones in Narita Airport were just 1,760 yen though, which was under $20 CAD at the time, whereas the one I saw today was $40 a pack, and while I like them quite a bit, I don’t like them quite THAT much.

This was the third time that I’ve seen them at the local T&T supermarket over the years though, and I suppose it’s nice that they’re there at all. There must still be a market for them outside of obstinate and frugal spenders like me. Also, there are always lots of weird items and packages at the Asian supermarket. Like this one:

Florida Water? Apparently this Florida Water is a herbal scented liquid and bug spray and body coolant and male cologne and other things. I’ve never heard of it, but after doing research about it at home, there are various testimonials of it online (local) at least. I wonder if this meant to say “Floral” but got bastardized into “Florida” for giggles at some point. I don’t think it’s an accidental typo here… also, I kind of want to try this. Maybe I’ll buy some the next time I return to T&T.

Next, this thing.

Fish Slice of Asian Seabass & Snakehead Fish. Awkward name, but I boggled at the “100% processed from live fish” line. As opposed to what? I guess fish paste? I suppose it’s a sign of how counterfeit or watered down some food will be that a fish product has to state that it’s made of 100% fish. Or do they mean that every bit of fish in there was harvested from a still-wriggling fish, and once the fish dies they can’t harvest any more from it?

And lastly, what is this.

Uno, but Younuo, which is more or less a cross-language pun with the word “Uno” and the pinyin of the Chinese word 友诺, which more or less means friends’/friendly promise. But the way “You nuo” is pronounced in Chinese doesn’t actually rhyme with the way “Uno” the game is pronounced in the Western world in the least. 友诺 is also apparently the first two syllables of the Chinese name for Eunos MRT Station in Singapore, and THAT word *is* actually pronounced as a rhyme to Uno the card game — Eunos is basically “You-nose” (the third syllable of the Chinese name causes the -s part) and I pronounce Uno as “Ooh no”.

Since I already wrote the Memory Snippet segment below this week before I got to this part of the Life segment, my followup thought here was: why am I talking about language so much this week?

Besides groceries, I bought this cute little block thing for $9, which was half off its base price and a lot cheaper overall than I thought it would be:

I’m not sure how that thing has 787 pieces, and I haven’t opened it, but I do like dioramas of Asian food scenes and will eventually perch that on a shelf in my house somewhere.

I also learnt today that Dad will have his eye surgery on May 01, so if that goes well and he feels up to it, we’ll start to talk about going to Singapore about two months after that, though I’m not sure if we’re going in August or if we’re going later in the year, closer to December. We’ll see.

Lastly (for today), here’s a couple of nice sky pictures. This is one that I snapped on the way home at 3:25 pm:

Look at how low-hanging and.. well-defined? all those little clouds are. Or is it because they’re all dark clouds encased in a white outer shell. The sky looked very weird to me. And this other one was from 8:07 pm at night.

What a mix of swirly, wispy, dark, and light clouds and different colours. Onwards to Thursday!

Thursday, Apr 10

Ooh boy. I actually took the day off work today because I had a headache in the morning, but then it cleared up, so I decided to spend my day off walking. Yesterday I visited that Fire Dealz store and found out that I had arrived at the very end of the last day of last week’s stock, with a bunch of junk on sale for $1, so today I decided to go back again, in the morning, and check out what the very start of the stock cycle looks like. It looked like this:

Just look at that queue lined up along the far wall, snaking toward the cashiers that are offscreen to the right. The shop opened at 10 am and that shot was taken at 10:04 am! 4 minutes after it opened! What was happening here? I wasn’t quite sure, though I spent about 45 minutes there and the queue was still as long when I left, and I’m not sure it really moved at all. I did notice that some people had a tag team thing going where someone would bring a box up to another person that was already lined up in the queue, so they basically had one person chopping a place in the queue and one person hunting for treasure I guess. I don’t think everyone was doing that though, and I probably should have watched the people moving around a little closer, but I was too busy rifling through the boxes instead.

I didn’t end up buying anything here, but it was very interesting seeing what was on sale at the very start of the cycle, on Thursday morning, and compare it to the end of the cycle, on Wednesday afternoon. A lot of the things here were still boxed up, and there were a lot of ornaments, clothing, kitchenware like pots and plates and stuff, several small tables and chairs, toys, books, pet food, and lots of other stuff. I’m sure there was stuff there that cost a lot more than $25 too, that the very first people would have immediately found and grabbed and lined up to buy, though there were also some “expensive” items up front behind the cashiers like computer monitors. And sofa and kitchen furniture sets on the other wall across from the cashier queue that were heavily discounted but were still hundreds to thousands of dollars.

It turns out a lot of the stuff right after opening time on Thursday were still in boxes, and a good handful of the boxes were still unopened even when I got my grubby hands on them. I got to open several boxes to peek inside of them (many were labelled on the outside, but not all), and that was a nice visceral feeling too, to be able to open packages without having to pay anything, heh. Also, a lot of the packages that I remember seeing were Amazon packages addressed to people in Vancouver, BC. Odd that they ended up here!

Here are my other pictures from this part of my Thursday:

Anyway, I only had limited carry space and didn’t find anything out of this world so I didn’t buy anything. I had an urge to keep on walking too, so I didn’t want to burden myself down with something heavy this early on in the day.

After leaving the store, I wandered south and east, first stopping by a clothing store called Dots where I picked up a cardigan and a t-shirt that was on a very deep sale, something like a total of $18 for two items that were allegedly worth $120.

Then I stopped by a hair salon called Great Clips. The former name of this company was Super Clips, and back in the 2000s Dad used to drive us to these salons to get our haircuts because they were cheap. They were also always in the middle of nowhere, so that, plus the fact that at that time I was struggling with gender dysphoria and associated getting a haircut at Super Clips with bad memories, meant that I had not been to one for forever. It’s funny how that has changed since now I prefer short to medium length hair by far.

Anyway, although I was not planning to get a haircut right this day, I was planning to get a haircut soon because I had not had one for some time and my hair was annoying me. So when I saw that I was walking past one of these, I decided to pop inside and get an impromptu haircut.

This was probably the first time I’ve ever gotten an impromptu haircut. It was cheap and quick too, coming in at only $28 instead of the usual $50 at the small haircut salon in Southgate Mall, or $100+ at the fancy salon there, and taking only around half an hour or so. The lady who did my haircut was from South Korea, she said, and had been here in Canada for 8 years. She also mentioned feeling lonely and feeling like her life was just working and paying bills like a slave. I tipped her $10 and she was very happy about that.

Next door to the Great Clips store was a Japanese restaurant called Midori Ramen, and was one of those stores where the cook yells out Irasshimase! as people entered. Cool. I went there for lunch and settled down at this lovely seat by the window:

I ordered an appetizer called takowasabi, for $6.99. I had never heard of this before, but it was very good (and apparently even better with sake, but I don’t drink alcohol).

I basically took each slice of dried seaweed, put some of the octopus and wasabi mix on top of it, wrapped it up, and nommed it. Yum. My main meal was their Signature Tori Paitan ramen:

I think it was very so slightly overpriced at 18.99, as there wasn’t a ton of it, but what was there was very good. Yummy. The onion taste was a little strong but I actually like it that way. It stayed with me for quite a while after.

After lunch, I decided to continue on east and south and basically walk all the way to Mill Woods Town Centre, which was the nearest mall to our old family home, Edmonton 4012. I was more or less familiar with that mall and the surrounding area but not familiar with anything on the path between where I was and that mall.

This was a 1 hour 15 minute walk at a brisk pace if I ignored everything, through a mix of light commercial areas as well as some residential areas, but since I wandered into several stores along the way as well, it took two hours for me to complete this walking leg of my trip. Some pictures of the trip and some of the stores I entered follow.

Value Village, by Parsons Road and 34th Avenue. It had a poor selection of CDs.

A giant gorilla, by 93rd St and 34th Ave:

H&W Produce, by an outdoor shopping strip mall at 92nd/93rd St and 34th Ave. Their goods felt rather overpriced.

In that strip mall was also an Indian grocery store called VR Grocery.

And a little ways further, this Domo gas station that only had a tiny booth for the attendant — they had a few drinks and snacks but the shelves and coolers were.. outside? I wonder how well this works in the winter. And the hot parts of summer. Weird.

There was also a Korean grocery store called A-Mart, that I had heard of before but had never actually had the chance to visit one of their outlets. I’m not really sure how the prices here compare to something like H-Mart, the other major Korean supermarket chain. I signed up for their membership “card” while I’m here though. They asked me where I moved here from, I said I came from Singapore, and they welcomed me to Canada. Ummmm.

Across the road, on the north side of 34th Avenue, there was a strip mall with some buildings that looked like they were being dismantled. I didn’t cross to it but I took a picture anyway:

But this turned out to be a very scholastically interesting picture, because I found out later that night, while glancing at local news, that this was the site of a fire that an arsonist had set (local) two nights ago, around 12:30 am on Tuesday morning. I had wandered by two days later, completely oblivious, took a picture of it because it looked interesting, and wandered onwards.

My next stop was a Cash Canada pawnbroker, on the far eastern end of the same strip mall at 34th Ave and 92 St. I’d not been in one before, but I didn’t expect it to be so full of hardware and not much else.

Even the computer game section was largely full of old sports games. I guess that tells you what sort of clientele (i.e. rednecks) comes here to pawn off their stuff when broke.

After this was a huge stretch of residential neighbourhoods for me to walk through. I passed this guy holding up a sign while stoically facing the traffic at a traffic light, but he didn’t see me and I didn’t look to see what sign he was actually holding up.

And here are a couple of shots while walking under the beautifully endless blue sky:

Halfway between that earlier strip mall, whose name I am not sure about but might have been called Strathcona Square, and my final destination which was Mill Woods Town Centre, was another small strip mall called Kameyosek Shopping Centre. It looked like this:

I wandered into an Indian grocery store called The Spice Rack here too.

It felt like.. you know how sometimes you can tell a drawing or website design is badly done because it doesn’t make use of all of the space that it has and leaves a lot of white space around each element or around the borders? That’s how this store felt like. Like the shelves were placed too far apart.

Anyway, another 15 minutes later and I was approaching Mill Woods Town Centre. An old haunt of mine, though things have changed a lot. For starters, there was now an LRT station there with trains going by now and then.

And the bus station had been overhauled since we last lived near here, though I had been here a couple times since then and so it wasn’t exactly new to me:

And this nice, shiny public library which I still haven’t had time or much of a reason to visit:

Both me and my phone’s battery were a little tired out at this point so I didn’t stay too long at Mill Woods Town Centre, especially since thanks to the wisdom of the ETS planners and/or our city council, there was no direct bus or train linking Mill Woods and Southgate any longer. Both bus route 6 or bus route 73 used to directly link the two transit centers, which aren’t that far apart, and it would be about a 30 minute ride back then, but now I had to take a bus and train, or bus and bus, to reach Southgate (and thus home) from here using public transit, and this generally took about 50 minutes to an hour depending on connections and timing.

The Mill Woods mall itself was okay, the inside wings of the mall were kind of quiet but the central area at least was busy.

There was a store in the food court of the mall, on the right of that third picture, that looked interesting enough that I decided to buy dinner home from there, never mind that it was only 2:50 pm at the time. It was called Bernardo Diner Filipino Cuisine, and honestly its prices weren’t that great, $14 for rice and two sides:

But the tray food looked interesting:

And the two sides I picked ended up being mixed vegetables in tripe sauce, which is the tray that the lady in the picture is reaching for, and pork in soy sauce, the second one from the left in the furthest tray from my point of view. They put the vegetables right into the rice but actually put the pork belly in another plastic container, which was nice because well, I wasn’t planning to eat it for another seven hours still, and even though I didn’t ask for it, this way the sauce wouldn’t just get absorbed into the rice and dry up in the ensuing seven hours, so it was appreciated minus the little bit of extra wasted plastic. The whole meal was pretty great in the end, seven hours later!

For the moment though I took the bus back from Mill Woods transit centre to Century Park’s one, where I took the LRT back to Southgate. The bus from Mill Woods to Century Park was bus route 56, which apparently goes all the way to West Edmonton Mall, but even the part of the route between Mill Woods and Century Park was paaaacked full, standing room only and even then it was a tight squeeze. Maybe due to kids that recently got off school, I’m not sure, though there aren’t any schools right by the town centre itself. It was an experience I haven’t had pretty much since my last trip to Japan. Transit in Edmonton (at least in the routes that I take) are just not crowded to the point that there’s not even really any space to stand. Except that bus, I suppose.

To round off Thursday’s entry, I have two more pictures. One is this shot of The Bay and its new 25-50% off signs, proving Satinel correct — The Bay seems to change (deepen) its liquidation sale prices on Thursdays.

And this other one is a sunset picture from 8:22 pm. I love the way the orange light of the setting sun glimmers off of the underside of the clouds.

And lastly, I received my Elections Canada voting card in the mail today. Advance voting is on April 18-21, with the final vote on April 28. I’ll definitely be trying to catch an advance voting date to get it over with.

Friday, Apr 11

Friday was a little bit of a rest day, partly because I was rather tired after Thursday, partly because being tired the last few days meant that I had fallen behind on my blogging too (which is also very reminiscent of the start of every trip that I’ve ever gone on and done a travel blog for), and partly because I needed to do laundry. I did go out at lunch and get a few pictures of The Bay though, including my usual spot:

It’s interesting to see what new item they bring to the forefront of the shelves there now and then, that then get immortalized in my pictures of that one little random spot in The Bay. Today it was tableware!

I also got one of the “forkchops” that the local Thai Express store was giving out for their birthday, that the sign that I had seen back on Monday this week had talked about. It looked like this:

Weird. But cool. The other picture from the day was the post-sunset sky at 9:03 pm. Nothing as glorious as the day before, but still. It kind of looked like a large dragon flying south to north across the western skies:

The actual excitement on Friday came when I went to do laundry though. I saw a bug on top of the washing machine itself, on one of the arms, and peered at it using my phone to magnify it. I was fairly sure it was a bedbug. I took a picture of the bug and sent it to the Midwest Rental housing management, who agreed and thanked me for letting me know. They asked if it was still alive and moving and I said that I hadn’t seen it move at all, and then I went back to check and compared it to the picture that I had taken of it (which I won’t share on the blog since the less media exposure given to those devils, the better) it was still in the exact same spot so I told them that. They said that they’d call contractors in to treat the place.

I did my laundry upstairs, then came back down with my clean clothes after. At that point, nothing else had happened yet, and in particular I was worried that other people would use the laundry room, since it was Friday afternoon and we were heading into the weekend, and by far the busiest laundry time of the week. So I wrote a note on a piece of paper telling others not to use this laundry room. I even told the management that. They replied with “We have removed” (it).

I inquired why they would not inform the other residents on the floor, and I was incensed enough that I actually drafted up a second, more forceful message, including a threat to personally hand a copy of the message to all the residents door-to-door if management took it down again, as at this point it was 4:30 pm in the afternoon and the management would be going home and several people would be doing their laundry before they would be back in the office on Saturday. And they didn’t reply to me at first so it seemed like they were just trying to hide the evidence, especially with how long they took to spray my unit when I had bedbugs from the neighbour in the last place.

But I decided to first go off to play AMQ with Satinel, Heg, and Lightcaller to let the situation simmer a bit. And about 40 minutes later, they replied saying that they had come by to do a visual and remove the one bug but didn’t see any other bugs, so perhaps it was just carried in by somebody. The contractors were also coming in first thing Monday to spray the room. So whatever, I accepted their answer and let things be. This is jumping ahead a little, but on Saturday afternoon while I was out, they also posted a notice on the door of every unit on the floor with a note that they were coming by sometime next Tuesday, between 8 am to 8 pm, to do an inspection for preventative pest control. They had better arrive before 6 pm when my stream starts or they aren’t getting in.

There’s no sign of bedbugs in my unit yet and it better stay that way. I don’t want that sort of itchy feet.

Saturday, Apr 12

I had tried working on this Life section of my blog post daily throughout the week so that I could have time on Saturday to go visit an event or two as well, but it actually did not work out so well at first, largely because I forgot how tiring it was going out when my body was not very used to it. On Wednesday night, for example, I conked out early and lost all that writing time. And on Friday night there was a community game event night on Nomakk‘s stream that stretched on all night as well, so I lost that night too. Still, by Friday afternoon I had managed to catch up to about the end of Wednesday’s part of this week’s Life section, and I had planned out Thursday and Friday plus squared away content for all the other sections of this week’s blog too, so I allowed myself to venture out on Saturday like I had originally planned, though I only went to one of the two events that I was going to go to in the end.

This event that I picked was directly on the LRT line itself, so travelling to and from that place was only about half an hour each way plus a bit of walking. This was an event called the Comics, Zines, and Books Market (local), and was in the main foyer of the Art Gallery of Alberta, next to Churchill Station.

The event, well, wasn’t very big. Though it was somewhat interesting, there ended up being nothing that pulled my interest, at least not within a price point that I could stomach.

I walked around for about ten minutes before leaving. There was a gift shop attached to the main foyer too, and I walked around that as well but didn’t buy anything. I contemplated going into the art gallery itself, but did not in the end either — I felt like I wouldn’t be able to appreciate it enough to even be worth the $14 admission fee. At least for today. I might still come back here another day though.

But for today, I went outside, and took some pictures of a gathering or perhaps demonstration that was taking place outside. There were what seemed to be a group of people of African descent gathered around someone who was standing on a bench and talking, but I could not understand the language and did not venture close enough to even manage to identify it. A couple of people in that crowd were holding signs, but the signs weren’t facing me or even being held up when I walked by, so I couldn’t see what they wrote either.

There were also a few people standing on another side of the square, feeling decidedly dwarfed by that gathering. One of them had a sign that I could see, and this was what seemed to be a Slavic language of some kind, but Google Translate didn’t give me anything intelligible when I tried to translate it.

At any rate, they were just chilling out and talking and I didn’t go near them either. I cut right between the two groups and went to a store called the Edmonton Arts Council Shop & Services.

I had been to this store before, but it was many, many years ago, and apparently now the store is locked up and requires the staff letting you in, I guess once they verify that you aren’t a homeless person trying to cause a ruckus. Makes sense, though I didn’t see any visibly homeless people around today regardless. While this store was pricey too, I liked quite a few of the books here, they were just a bit too pricey for my taste as always. Particularly these books (local), which fall pretty close to cultural anthropology and (in the case of one of the books) food culture, fields that I am very interested in. I almost bought them. In the end though, I just bought a handful of postcards to give away to random people the next time I go abroad. Or keep, perhaps.

I actually recognized the style of the bottom postcards, the smaller ones with “Edmonton, Canada” written on them, I’ve bought some of them from the convenience store in the University before and even sent one to a preschool class in the USA a few years ago. I guess they’re still around!

Next I took a walk to the Edmonton City Centre Mall, which itself is a chain of two main mall buildings joined together by pedways to buildings with their own tiny shops. While not completely dead, this place was definitely sad to see when compared to something like Southgate Mall or West Edmonton Mall, especially on a Saturday. There were a good number of shops that were either shuttered or for rent, though I’m not sure if some of those shuttered shops were open on weekdays. Some of the ones in the adjoining buildings like Manulife Place, which probably served office workers, were explicitly closed on weekends, but even there there were also shops that were vacant.

I went up to the food court at the top of one of the malls, Elevate Food Court, to eat there. This was a very sad food court, compared to where it was before — back in the heyday of the malls, the food court used to be in the basement and it was larger and always bustling. Maybe again this was just a weekend thing though. I also remembered coming here with Ran back in 2020, and I even still remember the exact conversation I had with her here, that she wasn’t very fond of her home University (and neither was I)!

The store I wanted to try, the Siam Thai Kitchen in the far corner, was closed for whatever reason, though I accidentally found an Easter Scavenger Hunt thing next to its counter.

How cute. Anyway I had lunch at the Chinese store there instead. It was called Shanghai 360, and was one of the worst Chinese fast food places I’ve ever eaten at, relative to the price of the food. It only had one vegetable selection, the price was so high for 2 and 3 items (although I ended up taking a combination that triggered the Special Combo instead so I got a discount of over a dollar), the noodles were cold, the meat was not tasty, and they only gave me a chopstick without a spoon so it was annoying to eat the final bits. If only I had the forkchops with me.

I wandered through some liminal dead mall spaces after that and went back through a building I used to work at, Enterprise Square, to the Bay/Enterprise Square LRT station where I then took a train home from. The original name of this station was Bay Station, named after Hudson’s Bay/The Bay, which is now in the midst of closing down. I wonder if that will affect the name of the station. I wonder if that’s something they paid naming rights for. Anyway, this is what a good, bustling mall (Southgate) looks like on a Saturday in comparison.

Southgate Mall was apparently holding an event where one or one’s pets could partake in a picture session with the Easter Bunny, but the prices were a bit too pricey for me to want to bring Tigey to this.

Oh well.

Summary

Well, this was a week. I had forgotten how difficult it was sometimes to keep up with my daily blog when I was on vacation. It’s hard to find time for it when afflicted with wanderlust in the day and then exhaustion at night, heh. I might try something like this again, though it probably won’t be a case where I go out every single day to do something and then write about it. But then again, Monday and Friday this week were only runs down to the mall as well, so it’s not like I was gallivanting around the city every day. Will I try this again next week? Maybe.

I do have plenty of things I want to do in the city and even outside the city still. I want to visit the Royal Alberta Museum, some libraries, festivals, farmers’ markets, craft and antique fairs, second-hand bookstores, restaurants, and more. I also want to go to Drumheller for the dinosaur museum there, and maybe Banff or Jasper, or even both, for the mountains. And maybe visit some other nearby provinces? Or go to the Maritimes? Take the train across Canada? Find a way to head north into the territories? So many dreams, so little time. And so tired.