Despite going to bed late last night, I woke up about an hour and a half ahead of my alarm clock, and lounged around working on my previous blog post for a little bit until just before 10:50 am, at which point I left in advance of my checkout time of 11 am. I had booked a Flixbus back to Calgary for 12:55 pm, and I killed the intermediate time by walking around Canmore’s Main Street and popping my way in and out of the non-food shops there.

This post isn’t going to be very long, especially after yesterday’s train wreck, so allow me to pontificate a bit:

It was really interesting to look at the difference between Canmore and Banff. Canmore is great for staying at instead of the ever-popular Banff due to hotel prices, and even if one was visiting Banff, the regional bus between the two negates most of the pain of living in Canmore instead, unless there was an absolute need to be at a hike or attraction first thing in the morning. Which there is, sometimes. I would say that Canmore has the better hikes too, and in theory it will continue to keep growing over time, whereas as Pablo, our tour guide yesterday, pointed out, Banff has already reached maximum size and is not legally allowed to grow any further in size due to protected areas. How big it is now will be how big it will be a decade from now assuming normal circumstances.

Canmore also feels a lot more “authentic”, in that it feels sprawled out and arranged in a very small town sort of way. Even though there are hotels in Canmore, a lot of them are kind of banished onto the east side of Canmore, across the train tracks. And while Canmore Main Street is fairly bustling and has some tourist souvenir shops and a couple of booths selling raft tours and such, there aren’t a lot of them, a lot of the shops there are Canmore/Alberta focused and walking down that main street kind of gave me European City vibes in places. Not that I really have first-hand experience of what walking through this imagined European City would actually feel like these days.

But that’s both good and bad. It does feel rural outside of that one central street, to the point that even though I had left most of those shops for the very last day to visit, I was very quickly out of actual interesting shops to visit. Canmore has no notable indoor shopping malls, no food courts, the fast food places are also largely banished to the edge of town on the other side of the tracks, etc.

Banff on the other hand is the complete reverse of that. The center of town is saturated with shops, especially touristy ones catering to outside visitors rather than to locals. They are spread across several streets, and there’s a lot of different looks — long rows of shops, both REIT and strata/indie indoor shopping malls, outdoor shopping streets, etc. While the main bulk of Canmore’s shops can be easily done in two hours, depending on one’s taste in shops, Banff can easily take more than one day to do, as there’s so much to look at. It’s almost like the difference between REIT malls (Banff) and independent malls (Canmore). And it’s really interesting to compare. Now, I haven’t seen Banff at 2am to see how the nightlife is there, but I was so surprised by how dead Canmore was at that time when I saw that yesterday, and to me I think that underscores the difference between the two towns.

That doesn’t make one of them universally better or worse than the other though, as long as one is aware of the differences. I still would probably stay in Canmore over Banff on future visits due to the price, but I would not look to Canmore for shopping or people-watching or even for places to try to dig around and find interesting items in. There are a few, but nowhere near Banff in scale.

Anyway, rant over. What I was trying to say with all that was that I walked around Canmore’s Main Street between about 10:50 am to 12:30 pm or so and felt like I had run out of interesting shops to see by the end of it. I even visited no less than four art galleries — and there was one called the Ken Hoehn gallery that I really liked the art of and even got to briefly meet the nice artist who was hanging around there. Specifically, I liked his giant pictures featuring night scenes and the Northern Lights. He also explained to me the layout of a painting that I was looking at and pointing out how things in the landscape formed the letters L, O, V, and E. Nice guy. If I ever get rich someday I’ll buy a big painting from him.

I also finally found a store selling some music CDs — specifically, there was a small section in a second hand bookstore secreted away in the back of a small building behind a book cafe that sold new books. That second hand bookstore had a small collection of CDs from local artists and I picked up a couple CDs from a group called The Wardens (who apparently are park wardens who formed a small band) as souvenirs, that’s the kind of odd, local CD I like having!

Here are a few final pictures I took of Canmore before I left. Some little kids crossing a road!

A friendly dog staring at me!

A barechested man in front of a very scenic Safeway!

The last picture I took in Canmore, it’s a normal path!

And yet normal is so beautiful there.

The bus ride to Calgary was very uneventful. The most standout thing about that trip was that two of the people waiting for the same bus were two Japanese girls who were dressed like delinquents and puffing on cigarettes as they chatted in Japanese. It was very uncharacteristic in that I don’t ever really see Asian females doing that, especially here in the west. So some of my stereotypes were shattered. Regardless, in lieu of any interesting story from the actual bus ride itself, here’s a burnt out recycle bin that I saw in Calgary downtown.

I had lunch in Chinatown again, at a restaurant named Calgary Court. I had Malaysian Chicken Fried Hor Fun, and it was great, though not really authentic to Southeast Asian Hor Fun as I know it, since that’s usually a wet dish. But I like the western version quite a bit too, and this one did hit that spot.

While leaving the restaurant and heading back to the downtown core, I also saw and took pictures of this electrical box:

Nin Jiom Pei Pa Koa! The magical Chinese peppermint medicine. I’ve definitely sung its praises before. That picture of the Posumon medicated oil on the back side was awfully familiar too though, like it was something that either Ah Ma/Ah Kong used to use, or Yi Yi/Yi Tiew maybe. Or maybe it was us? I don’t remember the name, but I do recognize the bottle! I must try it sometime once I get home.

I also walked around a small, neglected mall named Opulence Centre, with tons of empty shopfronts or closed shops.

This mall is getting a mention in the blog for one main reason, which is that there was a shop inside of it called Swank Hair Design that I initially ignored based on its name alone. While passing by it on the way out though, I noticed people thronging around in a way that wasn’t befitting of a hair salon, and upon a closer look, I realized that it was a music shop! It largely sold just vinyls and a few cassettes though.

According to a sign outside the mall, they were probably actually named Neon Taste Records, and according to Google reviews, they have been here for about 7 months. What’s up with the shop sign then???

Anyhow, I had dinner scheduled with WingBenny that night, and was planning to meet him at a restaurant on the north side of the city, near where my Airbnb house for the evening was. Due to the timing I wasn’t actually going to check in until after the dinner, so I had about four hours to kill until then. I initially planned to visit the University of Calgary, as I had only been there once or twice a long time ago and don’t remember a thing about it, and was hoping to check it out as an enemy scout, I mean as a community member of a fellow Albertan University. I was hoping to find a library there and sit down and work on my blog a bit. I even considered walking there, but it was blazing hot in the afternoon and I had not only just finished a long hike the previous two days, but was also carrying my full load of luggage this time, so I decided to not do anything like that and take the train there instead.

Calgary’s CTrain (public transit train system) has a “free fare zone” where people can take the red line or blue line train along 7th Avenue in the downtown area without paying. I hopped onto one of those trains, taking the Red Line west and north toward Tuscany Station. I also need to add here that everytime I see the name Tuscany I instead think of the Japanese term tashika ni (確かに) which means “surely” or “certainly”. They sound similar and I can’t help it.

Anyway, I took that train, but the driver abruptly stopped the train on the westmost station of the free fare zone and ordered everyone out. Or rather, he said over the intercom that there were technical problems with the line and the train couldn’t go any further and would be turning back east/south instead. But that a different train would be coming soon to bring us along.

Well, the second train several minutes later came by, and same thing, the driver ordered everyone out and the train just turned around as well. Four trains later, the station was immensely crowded and I noted that even if I managed to get to the University at this point and find a place to sit, I probably would not have much time at all before I had to leave to meet Benny for dinner.

So I gave up on trying to breach the University of Calgary’s defences, and instead decided to stay in the downtown core. I walked through a couple of malls, and saw a branch of The Bay equipped with 70%-80% off and 5 days left signs.

Then I headed to a place that I had actually already scouted out before, the Devonian Gardens located on the fourth floor of a mall. I came here back in 2021 during my Calgary Stampede trip. I remembered that there were some tables there, even though they had no power sockets next to them (the third level of the same mall did have tables with power sockets though, but they were occupied). But that was good enough for me anyway, so I sat down there for about an hour and change to rest and work on the blog. I even saw an indoors bird and wondered if that bird was trapped in there. And I saw someone dancing while his companion took several videos of him.

Everyone got kicked out of the gardens by the security staff at 6 pm as it apparently had opening hours that were now coming to an end, but that was when I needed to leave for my meeting with WingBenny anyway so that worked out.

I took the bus up to meet him at a Chinese restaurant called Cafe 100%. This one also apparently had some Singapore-ish fare, and I ordered the Hainanese Chicken Rice. It was okay, though the yellow rice did not really match the meal for me (I associate the Hainanese Chicken Rice dish with white rice only), and it was missing the crucial ginger sauce for this dish, but.. well, it was okay. It did not wow me, but other than the rice it was passable.

WingBenny is great, but I think our meeting and conversation went rather awkwardly this evening, and although it was cordial and a fairly fun time overall, the stat sheet reads rather badly because he declined a picture with Tigey, declined a gift of tea that I tried to give him, paid for the meal again while I wanted to split the bill normally and after he didn’t finish his meal to begin with, and also gave me advice on maybe not staying at the airport overnight and maybe treating myself better and picking safer hotels and things to stay at instead of potentially sketchy Airbnbs (he said that the neighbourhood my Airbnb was in might not be the best one, although I think he might have been talking about the age of the neighbourhood’s buildings rather than high crime rate in the area or something.)

But, all that sounded worse than it was, the conversation was perfectly fine and I would also inversely argue that the ability to have these sorts of candid conversations (that come from a good, caring place) is *because* we have attained a certain level of friendship. We just are almost totally opposites when it comes to travelling I think, which means I get to see and consider cool opinions from him that I wouldn’t think of otherwise. And also means that we probably can never travel together because we would drive each other nuts, hah.

He was super nice though, and not only paid for the meal but also drove me directly to my Airbnb. After we parted ways, I checked in and the wife of the owner that I was talking to over Airbnb came to meet me and showed me around the place. Doing laundry there was an additional $10, but I had known this already and handed them the fee once I arrived. I never caught the name of the wife, but she showed me how to use the old-style washing machine and dryer — no digital controls at all, just a bunch of knobs you turn back and forth. Cool! She spoke broken English but after a while I dropped a few Chinese words and we used my broken Chinese instead, and then kind of switched back and forth depending on the situation. This language practice is one of my favourite parts of renting random Airbnbs though.

I took a couple of pictures of my room, which was on the ground level. There were also a couple of basement suites and I briefly met a couple of the occupants staying down there. The room upstairs that I was in was probably much nicer though. And had an ensuite toilet and shower!

There was no heater or air-conditioning in the room, but the windows had insect screens behind them and the host’s wife said to just leave the windows temselves open if I wanted the cool night air, or to close them if I wanted it to be warmer. My room’s windows were pointed right at the road, but the neighbourhood was quiet, so that wasn’t an issue. It was slightly creepy knowing that it was technically possible for some stranger to creep up to the house and stand outside the window behind my bed, watching me type away on my blog, but if there was anyone there I hope he stops by to check out my entire blog series and maybe some of my earlier weekly entries as well. Welcome!

The other issue with this house is that there was a large brown spider on the ceiling, and although it didn’t move at all while the light was on, it had moved on sometime after I turned off the light to go to bed and then turned it back on again in the middle of the night. I was worried about it falling down onto the bed so I made sure nothing was beneath it and made sure that I slept under the sheets for most of the night (it would have fallen onto the foot of the bed). Um.. I hope you subscribe to my blog as well, spider.

Besides all that, the night was pleasant. The new moon had turned into a thin crescent moon and I could see the moon through the window for most of the evening.