Happy Birthday Father!

It would have been Arnis's 83rd Birthday this July 23.

Oh, how I often forget his birthday when he was alive!

AKIC's Canada Trip Notes: June 2015 in Vancouver, Winnipeg and Brandon

[Some pre-trip thoughts.]
• To think that humans are bad because they go to war is to miss the point entirely about war.  War is a good thing because humans are so bad.
• It seems that we are going to have the indignity of having no one come to meet us at the Winnipeg Airport.
• The family and relatives I had are disintegrating into nothing. The older ones are dying off and I never had much dealings with the younger ones who live out of Winnipeg.
• Great argument against abortion because of rape.  "I'm sorry innocent one but your father is a rapist and so we are going to have to kill you!"
  [The following was typed inVancouver]
• Nightmare at Pudong:  Paperwork problems cost us 16,000 RMB.  So, I fly to Canada by myself. Jenny & Tony take a flight the next day.
• Just before we encountered the problem, we were waiting in line to check in.  Behind us, young twenty-something foreigners who sounded Canadian kept using "like" and "fuck" in their conversation.  No consideration for the people around them.
• Angela, a ex-student, in Wuxi now living in Vancouver, picks me up at the airport. I had to use a payphone to contact her. She lives near the airport in a house that has four bathrooms and a huge yard. We will be staying with her before we fly out to Winnipeg.
• I am going to have to get a Chinese driving license.  Because I don't work in BC anymore, I can't renew my driver's license there. This I was told at an ICBC licensing office in Richmond.  However, I learned that I could drive with a valid Chinese driver's license in Canada and that if I moved back to Canada, I could change it to Canadian.
• But this leaves me with the problem of having a valid photo ID so I could renew my passport.  For that, it looks like I will have to get a proof of Canadian citizenship certificate.  But does it solve the problem of my having a valid photo ID other than my passport? [Perhaps, my Chinese driving license can be my photo ID.]
• Are humans to conform to the system or should the system serve the needs of humans?  Needing pieces of paper just so you can do something that isn't criminal is galling.  I made a mistake and have to suffer more that someone who performs an act with criminal intentions.
• Richmond, a suburb of Van, seems a lot smaller than Wuxi.  The buildings are not as tall, the roads are not as wide and the subway train is only four cars long (compared to the twenty car long Wuxi Metro.)
• Still the sky is so blue!
• I watched the ninth episode of Game of Thrones.  I knew the dragons would save the Queen or as I think of her:  blonde girl with the dragons.  I also foresaw that the Queen mother, or as I call her the mother of Jodfrey, was going to be thrown in the clink by the religious sect.
• Angela and I meet Tony & Jenny at the airport.
• We will try to get a Chinese visa for Tony although it won't be necessary for Tony to get back to China. He was given a exit and entry permit so he could leave China. [We went to the Visa offices but they couldn't give us same day service, it turned out.]
• Damn! I had a great thought but I forgot what it was.
• One way in which China exceeds Canada is that Chinese can buy liquor in their grocery stores while in Canada, you have to go to specially designated beer stores or government liquor stores.
• You can buy pineapple beer in Vancouver though!
• I saw many typical British Columbians in the shopping mall where I tried to renew my BC driver's license.
• How has jet lag affected me? I didn't fall asleep till after 2:00 AM.
• It is only right and proper that we feel guilt about the things we did and may have done wrong.
  [The following was typed while on the plane the plane from Vancouver to Winnipeg]
• The Vancouver Back Door of the Bus Thank You! Riding the bus in Van, I first saw one guy get off the bus at the back door and say “Thank You!” to the driver as he did so. I thought it was strange. Then the next passenger getting off the bus at the back door thanked the driver. I thought it was just two oddballs doing it. I was in BC after all. But then everyone getting off the bus by the back door did it. Woh! I thought so polite. Jenny & Tony noticed this, and when we got off the bus, at the back door, Tony loudly said thank you!
• Bus baby troller procedure: when mothers and strollers get on the bus, special accommodations are made for them and seats are folded away.
• Politeness has me on edge. I feel the need to modify all my thank you's with an intensifying adverb.
• Anxiety about weight of bags. One airline service person from Westjet asked me how much my bags weighed andI said I didn't know but that we had gotten them all the way from China. The limit was 50 pounds (why no metric? Not that I am complaining.) Two of our bags were just under 50 pounds. One came in at 38.
• Security before domestic flight in Vancouver was more intense than when going through security at Shanghai. Jenny has metal in her shoe that caused her to spend extra time with the metal detector people.
• So many laowai in Vancouver. They looked Canadian and spoke with Canadian accents but seemed so foreign to me.
• Rode the skytrain. I have ridden subways in Mexico City, Chicago, Vancouver, Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and Wuxi.
• Tony would rather play Minecraft then look out at the window at the gorgeous scenery. He was even that way on the Skytrain.
• My Macbook Pro is a little big for the plane. It doesn't fit on the fold out tray.
• Tony likes his bacon and hash browns. I have given him all of mine from my meals.
• Weather was gorgeous in Van. Too bad, we were only there for three days.
• Watched a video with Father from 2010. He said he hated mountains because they blocked the view of the sky. [He said he also hated Winnipeg because it was a big city.]
  [The following was typed while I was in Winnipeg]
• Someone – My brother Ron – met us at the airport after all.
• I drove a car for the first time since May and June of 2012. Funny, how nerve wracking it is to get into the driver's seat only to then to have it seem like riding a bicycle.
• The first evening in Winnipeg we went to a cousin's place for dinner.
• We are staying at my brother Ron's house.
• Tony has fallen in love with his uncle Ron's Xbox 360 and the GTA game which I have him playing with the mute button turned on.
• The first full day in Winnipeg, the three of us all got up at 11:15 AM. As soon as we had breakfast and got ready, we went to a Walmart Super-Center on Taylor Avenue. There was so much I wanted that I had to tell myself to want nothing. The food section was mouth watering. I restricted myself to buying a 500 ml tub of cottage cheese. (I asked Jenny to try that and she didn't care for it.)
• Coming back then to my brother Ron's house, I got stuck for the first time in over ten years as a driver in a traffic jam. I wanted to get back on Pembina Highway from Harrow Avenue but I was in behind ten other cars trying to do the same thing. It took a while for me to get to the stop sign and then the traffic kept coming and coming so that I didn't think I would ever be able to make a right turn. What was really annoying was that there was a parking lot just up the road where cars would take advantage of the break in traffic to make their right turns and thus take a chance away from you. One of these cars did let me turn but it was Jenny who noticed this. The road from Harrow to the turnoff near Royce Avenue, where my brother's house was, was filled with bumper to bumper traffic. [This makes me reconsider the Chinese habit of turning right without looking. How I wish this could be done in Canada.]
• I have a few people I want to pay a visit to in Winnipeg. On the Friday night, I was able to get a hold of Ed Chalmers, my reservist buddy who is now a policeman in Winnipeg.
• Cousin Pat, actually husband of my cousin Edie (pronounced E D: that is you pronounce them as letters), is a fiscal reactionary.  He has been retired for over twenty years and doesn't go out much, out of choice.  He says the world is going to shit.  Case in point, he says, America's huge debt.
• And after riding around Winnipeg and spending time at the Polo Park shopping centre, I am very inclined to agree with Pat, although not for fiscal reasons.  At the food court there, I saw so many fat and badly-dressed people.  And the ones who were in shape looked to have spent too much time in the gym, which only showed how decadent the civilization was becoming either due to overeating or being overly concerned with body image.

• Not one really knockout local woman had I seen.
• On Saturday, we went to the Forks and Polo Park where we did too much shopping.
• Saturday, we also drove past the new Winnipeg Blue Bombers stadium and I saw as the reports had indicated that there was no parking. Pat also told me that 30 million dollars was going to be needed to repair the thing after one year of operation.
• I drove past the recently constructed Museum of Human Rights.  Pat had said it was ugly.  Under his influence, I thought it looked like a Wuxi white elephant.
• Saturday for supper, we went to an Italian restaurant on Corydon avenue.  We didn't have a reservation so we had from 5:00 to 630 to eat our meal.  The place seemed undermanned.  Our waitress dealt with us brusquely. Jenny enjoyed her salmon. My lasagna was too much.
• In Polo Park, they had a shop that sold music CDs and movie DVDs. I thought everyone got that stuff off the Internet now.
• There was a shop at Polo Park for white trash culture called Spencer's.
• Tony was very irritable. The whole time in Polo Park. He was always wanting to go to a computer or toy store.
• We went to Assiniboine Park on Sunday. There was a lack of signs, we thought, as we drove around looking for the zoo and the mini railway. And it just so happened that it was complained about by the owner of this mini railway that we wanted to go to for Tony. Just as we walked to its ticket office, the owner said business at his railway was slow because a lot of tourists didn't know of it. I told the owner I only knew of the mini railway because I had ridden in years gone by. And as I mentioned that I was living in China, the owner talked and talked to me and he had me thinking I was becoming a slow talker after all my years in Wuxi.
• At the Assiniboine Park Zoo, a lot of animals were hiding because of the hot weather. Tony did see a polar bear swimming at least.
• Mosquitoes! Worse than Wuxi!
• Two pretty girls – Asian – entered the Tim Hortons as I was having coffee with the ex King of Wuxi.
• No more pennies in Canada.  When paying cash, prices are rounded to the nearest nickel.  Inflation continues.
• Mobile phones are more expensive in Manitoba than Wuxi.  The former King of Wuxi said that in Wuxi, he and his wife both had mobile phones but that in Winnipeg, only his wife had a mobile because of the price and the restrictions of contracts.
  [The following was typed in Brandon]
• It was a two hour drive to get Brandon on Monday. Dull, dull, dull, dull, dull. I was in pain when I arrived with my butt sore and my leg all so stiff.
• Before leaving for Brandon, I had coffee at a Stella's with Trevor Kraft who I knew at DHL-slash-Loomis in British Columbia.
• I wanted to buy a burner phone to use for two weeks in Brandon but it was just too expensive. When it comes to mobile, they do it better in China. You can buy a sim card and phone cheap in China.
• I visited my father's grave side after supper on my first day in Brandon. My first time to see the grave stone in person. I will try to visit it every day while I am here in Brandon.
• Second day in Brandon, we – that being the Kaulins family – went shopping. First the family went to Mark's Work Warehouse where I bought two pants for work and a pair of jeans. Then, we went to a nearby Walmart where Jenny and my Mom bought stuff, and Tony whined about being hungry so I took him to the in-store McDonalds. He had chicken nuggets and I, for the first time in years, had a quarter pounder. The fries that came with it were too much. Later, just Jenny & I went to a Dollarama. Jenny bought some things she thought she needed and I bought four brands of chocolate bars that I couldn't get in China: Smarties, Glosette Raisins, Skor, and Wunderbar (Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!)
• I had to accompany Tony to the bathroom at Walmart because he had to go poo. In the men's room, there were two urinals and a toilet which was occupied. Tony was noisy and impatient, and even looked under the door to see if anyone was in the toilet. When the person came out, it turned out that he was an old man, and he said something to me about his being old and slow to which I could only say that someone had to learn to be patient. Tony then took his time in the toilet and so there were two men waiting. But then the cleaner came in and told us that there were more toilets and urinals in the back of the store. I told him I was just waiting for my son to finish, but he repeated himself. “There are three urinals and two more toilets in the back of the store!”
• Lots and lots of obese and old people at the Walmart.
• Also at Walmart, I made an appointment to see an eye doctor because I wanted to see someone I could talk to in English and so get proper glasses. The only catch was that it could have taken a week or more for me to have had the eyeglasses made and I may have had to get my brother to mail them to me in China. [It turned out that I got my glasses on the day before I was to leave Brandon.]
• I have seen people of all races in Manitoba: Africans, Latinos, Asians and Aboriginals.
• I have brought Ron's X-box to Brandon because Tony likes it so much. He especially likes the GTA game. He also plays Minecraft on it using a disc which I have purchased in Winnipeg. [It was either that or buy him a much more expensive Minecraft Lego set.]
• I got myself eyeglasses at Walmart. They were bloody expensive because I needed progressive lenses. The doctor said that one of my eyes was higher on my face than the other, and so he asked me if I had ever suffered head trauma. I told I'm didn't and thinking about it afterwards, I was sure I told the truth. All this was useful to know because I wouldn't have learned it in China. The last glasses I had made in Wuxi were shite.
• Storm rolling in while we were at the Real Canadian Superstore was cool to see. What a contrast between the black cloud of the incoming storm and the bright, blue, clean sky.
• Soccer in Brandon: at a field near my Mom's, a game was played by Africans and Middle Easterners. Maybe one fellow was white.
• Almost bought a pair of Duracell ear buds, but changed my mind at the last minute. I have to resist and resist...
• Went to a second hand store that was near the Superstore. It depressed me.
• Tony called the Superstore the Stupid Store
• Went to see Mad Max Fury Road at a nearby multiplex cinema which had an arcade but no human ticket sellers. I bought a large popcorn and two large drinks; and Jenny was impressed by the pail like size of the drink containers.
• As soon as I got to my seats in the cinema, I had a let down feeling. The experience was too expensive. The popcorn wasn't fresh. The atmosphere was impersonal. I vowed to never see a movie in a Canadian cinema ever again.
• The movie itself approached Fast and Furious levels of implausibility. The movie makers wanted as much chase in the desert as possible.
• Tony went to the bathroom three times during the movie.
• I watched the Chicago Black Hawks defeat the Tampa Bay team to win the Stanley Cup. It was during the Stanley Cup Final in 2012 that father died.
• We went for one afternoon to Minnedosa, a small town about 45 km North of Brandon. The drive there through green flat fields was pleasant enough except for a ten minute stop caused by construction.
• Summer means road construction in Manitoba. The winters and the wide range of temperatures destroys them.
• The drive to Minnedosa was also ruined by an unexpected school zone speed warning on a provincial highway. The radar sign indicated the car's speed and made me wonder if we had gotten a ticket.
• Minnedosa was a nice little town.
• We would stop at three places there.
• We first went to a park downtown, climbed on an old train car and caboose, and posed for photos by an old Sherman tank.
• I saw a bald headed man with tattoos and sunglasses strutting on the Minnedosa Main Street as I was trying to get to Minnedosa Lake.
• We finally found the lake and I saw the bald headed man walking nearby it. Near a beach, there was a playground to which Tony happily ran to to be among a bunch of what I learned were pre-schoolers who were celebrating the end of the school year. I talked to an older women there who had first talked to Jenny. She told me that she was there with a two year old niece of hers. She also told me of twin boys in her family who were graduating from high school that day and who were six foot three. One of them had suffered a stroke when he was 14 months old. I gave the woman a yuan coin to give to someone.
• From the playground we went to another playground where we picnicked. I saw some high school students nearby who were dressed in suits and gowns for their graduation photos. A little later, there was a motor boat towing a water skier in the lake.
• I then saw two sights as well that sickened and annoyed me. First, there was this greasy long haired man with tattoos and no shirt riding his mountain bike. Then, there was a group of five young men who hung out at beach and boat launch and seemed up to no good. I was happy when they pulled away. Manitobans can be friendly and yet there is that white trashy element to them. When I drove Jenny and Tony to our third stop, a nearby dam, I saw a beer can that must have been tossed from the vehicle of the five rowdies.
• We saw the bald man walking again as we pulled into a park by a dam. We walked on the dam which made for some nice photos, past some babbling brooks and then into marsh land.
• We returned to Brandon and weren't stopped by construction. As I drove, Jenny took some great video of the sky. That damn school zone where there were no kids caught me speeding again .
• Trying to make a left turn in Minnedosa was annoying because these big pickup trucks would pull beside me to make a right turn and obscure my vision, thus preventing me from making a left turn.
• Back in Brandon, we went to a Value Village. I was tempted to buy books by Sarah Palin and Rex Murphy. [Value Village is a thrift store chain. We had gone to one in Winnipeg as well.]
• After dinner, we went to father's grave to place some new flower pots. Mom said that ones she had laid previously had been stolen.
• Then we went to Canadian Tire: an hardware chain that is as much an institution in Canada as Tim Horton's. It is in fact older than Tim Horton's. No Canadian tire caps for sale alas....
• Three types of garbage cans provided by the city at my mom's house. I wonder how types of garbage cans, they have in the swankier parts of Brandon. Five? Seven?
• As a reactionary, it is my duty to mock these things and remain ignorant of what the different colored lidded cans are for.
• The world has become less humane. Humans have to adapt to the system, not the system to people is the governing ethos these days.
• I watched some television news and was appalled by the left-wing orientation. Listening to the results of the SCOTUScare decision, all that was said was that the decision was about whether millions of Americans would be able to afford health insurance.
• I had coffee with Raymond Pero who I have known since 1982. How to describe Ray? First off, Raymond is a nice guy, of low status, with a ghoulish laugh. I couldn't help every time I met him to make off-color jokes to get him to giggle.
• Surprisingly to me anyway, Raymond is a father. He got some native girl pregnant and now his twenty year old son is working at a McDonald's in Winnipeg. Ray and the girl are separated.
• Ray's parents have both passed away and they are both buried in the same cemetery as my father.
• Ray is still a reservist private after all these years. I gave up the ghost as far as a military career when I realized I could never be an officer and would never get beyond corporal in the ranks.
• Ray gave me some updates from people I remember from my days in the reserves. Some have died like then Lieutenant Thompson who later became the CO of my regiment. Another young lieutenant from my time is now retired and is a curator at the Shilo museum. A third, this sinister fellow who was only good to share a complaint with was now in a mental home.
• Opened up a Smarties box and thought it strange that it had three compartments inside.
• I hate driving and I hate flying, I can tell you on account of this trip.
• Saturday morning in Brandon, I took Jenny to some garage sales where she bought a few things to take back to China. I saw a set of books about the Simpsons that I would have liked to have purchased but didn't because of worries of weight restrictions for our return flight to China. At one of the sales, we saw a family of Chinese who were from the Northeast as I suspected and as Jenny confirmed when I asked her. Another home had about 50,000 hockey and other sports cards for sale. They were from the 1990s and the time of the great sports cards memorabilia bubble.
• Brother Ron came from Winnipeg for our Brandon weekend and told me that we (that being Jenny, Tony & I) didn't like doing interesting things. Tony only liked playing computer games, I only liked reading and Jenny only liked shopping. True enough and yet what we going to do? Go Fishing? Biking? Driving? That one trip to Minnedosa I did take tired me out.
• I regret that I won't be able to see all my cherished acquaintances in Winnipeg. We came at the wrong time. Weekdays, everyone has to work and weekends, everyone already has plans. The logistics of meeting them wearies me as well.
• I didn't visit my sister in BC this trip. I learned from my Mom that Benita is not too pleased but someone was going to have to be disappointed this trip.
• I have told my mother that she should sell the house in Brandon. I can't see myself coming back here except to visit my father's grave site. It may well be that I may never see it again after this trip...
• My memories of Brandon are ultimately bitter. I have some good memories of my last year of high school, which was my first year in Brandon, but even then I can recall there were bouts of loneliness and not feeling that I belonged that would haunt the rest of my days in Brandon and in Winnipeg and still to this day in China. I wandered the halls of Brandon University, for four years, lonely and lost. I went to the University of Winnipeg to try to correct those times instead of giving up on the educational establishment as I should have... My times in the Militia with all the assholes and the drinking unsheltered me from any youthful idealism I had.
• My telling my Mom to sell the house in Brandon seems selfish in a way because it ultimately repudiates my father who was obstinately happy to live the rest of his days in Brandon.
• Ron, Tony & I went to Shilo's Royal Canadian Artillery museum. Shilo, which is about 15 km from Brandon and where I lived on two separate occasions, was not as I remembered it. It seemed smaller and some new roads, which disoriented me, had been built.
• After the museum, we drove to Quebec Crescent where the PMQ we had lived in 1976-77 was no longer standing. The area behind the PMQ where we would wander didn't look the same at all. In my memory, it was more open.
• I ran in Bruce Tripp, an unforgettable figure from my reservist days, at a Beer Store. Go figure.
• Our third drive out of Brandon was to Souris which was 47 km south, more or less from Brandon. [Our first small town, Minnedosa, was about 45 km north.]
• Souris is famous, to those who know of it, for its swinging bridge. I, if I recall correctly, went to the Bridge on a school trip in 1979 or 1980. I have a distinct memory of the kids getting rowdy and swinging the bridge very violently.
• In Souris, we stopped first at a little rail museum in front of which was a old rail service car where Tony posed for some photos There was also a Moose statue nearby for us to pose by as well. [It dawned on me that were old rail cars and engines on display everywhere in Manitoba.]
• We then drove to Souris's Victoria Park. The website I had visited earlier in the day said it was a place to go. The park had a bit of a hill to climb, on top of which was a lookout tower made of wood that was wobbly enough to make me a little nervous to climb its stairs. From the lookout, I could see the actual swinging bridge which we couldn't find right away. [It turned out we had passed by it earlier.] Tony got upset because there was a pool that he wanted to swim in but he hadn't brought any swim clothes.
• We then crossed the swinging bridge and posed for photos thereon, of course. While on the bridge, a Christian couple gave Jenny some pamphlets. They were an older couple who I had seen earlier in Victoria Park. They stood out then because they were dressed in the Mennonite fashion and they walked rather vigorously with beatific smiles on their faces. Jenny was happy to get the pamphlets and didn't know what they were about till later. I was nonetheless glad to see Christians.
• When a man's mother and a man's wife fight, what is the man to do? What he should want is for his wife and his mother to stop fighting. How he can bring about this goal is another question altogether. The only thing I can think to do is pray for strength.
• The problem is that I am weak.
• Amid this squabble, I had beers with Ed Chalmers, an old friend from my 26 Field days and that Ray Pero character. Ed is working in the child sex crime unit of the City of Winnipeg. One story was enough to further sicken me about the world.
• Tomb desecration of my father's grave? Not quite, but the flower pot that my mother had placed at my father's grave, and that you can see in photos at AKIC wordpress, was missing three days after we had placed it. [It turned out that the workers removed it. Fucking regulations.]
• For me, the clouds in Brandon are what are worth seeing here. White Cumulo Nimbus clouds soaring against a clean blue sky are quite breathtaking if you have spent as many years in a smoggy Chinese city as I have.
• The Brandon Shopper's Mall was a strange place in June 2015. Imagine a shopping mall with no anchor stores. The big retail spaces for a grocery store and a big retail department store were empty. The Safeway and the Target having moved out in the year previous. I went there anyway and was impressed with the food court which had a Tim Horton's and A&W. I took Tony to a shop called EB Games that sells games for video game consoles like X-Box and so on. While there, I saw a father bring his boy, who was younger than Tony, into the store. The man had a big gut and was wearing a Kiss rock band t-shirt. Disgusting I thought. Men use to wear suits at one time. [I admit that I dress as badly as that father but I am readily ashamed of myself.]
• I went to the Manitoba Liquor Commission store. I would have loved to have told those guys to find real jobs. The government liquor monopoly is nonsense! It is another thing for politicians and bureaucrats to screw up. And of course you have to drive to get to it.
• Brandon's population is about 45,000. I had told my students that it was around 30,000. So in my lifetime, Brandon has grown by a sizable percentage. When it had less people though, it had its own television station, its own local newspaper published in the city and it probably had train service. Now, you need a car to get about and the city might as well be a obscure suburb in Winnipeg, what with all its parking lots and strip malls.

[The following was typed in Wuxi.]

• I took Tony to a public outdoor swimming pool in Brandon. He waded for an hour and told me he wanted to go home. His timing was impeccable because as soon as he was dressed, it began to rain.
• On Thursday, a rain storm was heavy enough to cause my Mom's basement to flood. This hadn't happened in the years that I and my brother Ron had lived in the house, but a great flood in Brandon in about 2009 started the problem which has resulted in insurance companies suspending the sale of flood insurance in Brandon.
• Friday about lunchtime, we left Brandon. I said good bye to Mom and then good bye to Father (Dad's gravestone was our last stop in Brandon). Tony had to ruin the moment by insisting on playing the IPad instead of paying proper attention to his grandmother and grandfather.
• From Brandon, it was a two hour drive on the Number One Highway to Winnipeg. The drive was marred slightly by my being boxed in by other cars. At least five times, I found myself the situation where I was doing 110 kmh with cruise control approaching a car ahead of me doing 108 kmh while in my rear a car doing 111 kmh was overtaking me. The car passing me wasn't going fast enough and so I found myself closing in on the car ahead of me and thus having to get out of cruise control.
• It was also annoying to listen to the radio as I drove to Winnipeg. On a country station where I kind of hoped they knew better, they praised the gay marriage court decision in the U.S. “Love is love!” said one of the radio talkers. What the hell does that mean? I thought to myself.
• Switching the station, I heard an interview with an artiste who was talking about conversation circles. Apparently, a group of people sit in a circle and talk, one at a time, as a way of expressing their feelings. The artiste was hoping to get a grant to continue on with her art work. [Driving to Brandon on the #1 Highway, I listened to the CBC and heard an activist advocate the banning of tobacco sales altogether in Canada.]
• In Winnipeg, it was a rush against the clock for me to see as many old friends as I could. I would succeed in seeing two and not seeing one.
• Friday night, I meet Arielle (formerly Eric) at a Stella's restaurant in Winnipeg's Osborne Village. It was an experience in many ways. I first had to find a free parking spot and was frustrated by signs that were full of rules and regulations. A parking lot that said parking was a six dollar flat rate during off business hours was empty. I found I had to find Arielle first to show me where to park. Arielle was the midst of a radical change in identity which I didn't know how to deal with, being torn as I was between being of a reactionary mind and being in practice a nice softie afraid of confrontation. Arielle was a troubled soul is about all I can say. First hearing her voice on the phone was startling because it had gone down two octaves. It wasn't before I had a conversation with her on the phone that I could detect traces of Eric's voice.
• Arielle's appearance was more feminine than I was expecting.
• Saturday breakfast at the Pancake house with Jenny, Tony & Ron.
• Saturday afternoon, I went to see another friend from my U of W days: Nicole Firlotte. I told her about Arielle. She told me she had dated Eric back in the day. Now, she was married to a gentleman named Cain (or Kane or Cane or Caine) who had done some interesting things with their house in the Wolseley area of Winnipeg. He had built a pond in front of the house with gold fish in it and a deck that went all around the house.
• Jenny bought a lot of stuff in China to give to her friends. So I spent my last evening in Canada worrying about luggage weight. I weighed the luggage using my brother Ron's bathroom scale. The procedure involved weighing myself and then weighing myself holding one of our three pieces of luggage. We had to distribute the luggage evenly and then have a lot of carry on bags. We in fact brought five onto the plane.
• My last meal in Canada was a Mozza Burger at the A&W at the YVR.
• I buy two big bottles of Crown Royal at the Duty Free.
• I didn't buy any shoes or books on this trip.
• How was the trip in three words? Emotional, harrowing and unleisurely. I didn't do everything I hoped I could have done.