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.

December 2014 AKIC Notes

December 2014, I did the least amount of writing for this blog since I started it in 2005 (2006?). Why? I had been occupied with other things like my son Tony and whatever my wife Jenny wanted me to do, so there wasn't time to sit down and type my attempts at observations and thoughts. When I had spare time – actually a lot despite what I just typed – I was studying Chinese and reading books. I finished reading my 60^th book of the year just after Christmas because I had decided in late December 2013 to keep track of the books I was reading and was as a result, wanting to achieve a milestone number of books read. The 60^th book was the novel True Grit that had been the basis of two movies of the same name including the one starring John Wayne. The novel was amazing. It was a simple enough story but was so well written: a good way to end a list of books read. I also read the blog of my favorite living writer David Warren who became amazingly prolific in December, publishing a gem of an essay every day. Warren is a traditionalist Catholic, who despises Liberalism, Capitalism, and other Materialist philosophies. Instead of trying to find a middle way between the competing materialist ideologies of Socialism and Capitalism, Warren tells of how Catholicism properly practiced, transcends these false choices and did so before the Enlightenment. Warren writes so well that I have practically given up any desires I had to be a writer. Good writing is re-writing I have learned from another favorite writer of mine and Warren is always tellings his readers how he is junking entries or always rewriting them. I find the time that I have for rewriting for even one monthly entry is not enough.

So the following is a series of recollections of things that happened near me or to me in December 2014. Some of them were made close to the event in question, but I didn't write anything from the middle of December till after Christmas. The writing about these times may not be in chronological order. I am typing them as they come to me.

• I was born in December 1964. Do the math.
• The first thing I witnessed of interest in December was the public safety bully boys of the Hui Shan District surrounding the driver of a three wheeled pedicab taxi. They had used two pick-up trucks to corral the pedicab so that it was against curb on the side of the road. Five of the black uniformed men stood around the pedicab driver as he stood, his head lowered, beside his vehicle. I have heard that the pedicabs are illegal but I have used them on numerous occasions. They are cheaper than a car taxi on a rainy day.
• Within a period of twenty hours, I had two men come up to talk because they had seen me appearing in those short commercials for our school on the Wuxi Metro television screens. One of the guys was gushing and said that I was handsome. He also said that he saw from the commercials that I was teaching pretty girls English. What he meant was that I was appearing in these commercials with the redoubtable Edith who is a very attractive girl. Anyway, this kind of celebrity recognition seems strange to me because I find I am in the midst of a spiritual crisis and mostly feel isolated in my life. Really, this “fame” I have does nothing for my soul or even my earthly self-esteem.
• It is early December and I am befuddled as to what I should buy Tony for Christmas. It had been an easy and enjoyable task to do this previous Christmases, but in 2014, I find it very problematic. I can't think of a toy that excites me, and now Tony has suddenly changed his mind about what excites him. He had been on a Ultraman kick but it suddenly ended when Jenny bought him a yo-yo in late November. He now doesn't want more Ultraman toys for Christmas and wants a yo-yo, even though he can play with the thing properly (I can't either I must confess). He doesn't care for Matchbox toys anymore. I would buy him Plarail accessories or even more engines, but the toy stores that I frequent don't sell them anymore. (Has Takara TOMY Plarail given up on China?) I would buy him some Lego but Jenny opposes the idea because Tony's habit is to play with toys and not put them back when they bore him. What Tony really wants is an Ipad but that would be like buying a drug addict cocaine for Christmas – not done.
• A lot of our students have the Iphone 6.
• With so many Chinese having cars, there will of course be fighting about parking spots. At my apartment building, the people living above us bought a Suzuki Swift and seem to be zealously trying to keep the parking spot in front of the building. On many occasions, they have parked their old e-bike in the spot as a way of trying to hold it. But for a few days, a white Toyota has taken up the spot and I can certainly detect the look of consternation of the face of the owner of the Suzuki Swift. One Saturday morning, I could hear screaming in front of our building and I looked to see a woman pointing in the direction of the parking spot. Jenny tells me that the owners of the Suzuki Swift have not paid for the parking spot... Which explains why they bought a Suzuki Swift.
• I was with Jenny & Tony riding the subway when I noticed that these young women, who were sitting down from us, were looking at Tony. I could have sworn that one of them got on her phone and called some other friends, who must have been sitting in another car on the train, about Tony. Tony sensed that the girls were staring at him and looked away. The girls, eight of them, as a group, then came over and asked Tony & me if they could take a photo with Tony but he ran away into the corner of the car and looked away. I had never seen him so shy and scared. [I took video which can be seen on the Internet.]
• David Warren's description of Saint Nicholas was inspiring. The son of a rich person, Nicholas was not a rich spoiled brat (like some of our students). He lived simply and gave his inheritance away, anonymously tossing bags of gold coins into people's houses. Sometimes, he even sneaked down chimneys to deposit the inheritance. He was also so orthodox that he decked the leader of the Arian heresy, who was really an enlightenment (we can figure it out all on our own) type. A very un-bishoplike thing to do but it was something he did for the love of Jesus.
• Do you have a form showing you changed your passport? I was asked this question by a bank worker. I suppose she meant, or maybe my recollection was wrong, to ask if I had proof that I had updated or renewed my passport. My thought at being asked that question was incredulousness. Could there be such a form? My next impulse was then to say sarcastically, that here was my current passport: all the proof I needed to show I had changed my passport.
• I had to go into the bank and be served by human beings and deal with the bureaucracy because our school had told us that the bank was updating their plastic cards, making them more high tech and all that. If it would improve our service, I had in theory no objection to going to the bank and getting the card updated. I did worry about the time it would take – especially if I had to wait in line longer than it would take to have the card all changed and updated. I was told it wouldn't take that long, just bring the old card and the passport, and all would be looked after.
• But of course, I had to deal with the bureaucratic curse. To get my new card I had to make two trips and spend nearly two hours in the bank.
• On the first trip, the process seemed to be going along smoothly enough. (I did forget my password, having transposed two digits of it in my memory, but a phone call to Jenny set me right.) The clerk – or I should say one of the clerks – noticed that the passport number they had on their records did not match the number on my current passport. This, I told them, was because I had gotten the account over ten years and – as I would later discover – two passports ago. It was then that I was asked if I had any other identification I could show them or proof that I had changed my passport. That ended my first trip to the bank. I was to go home and find my old passport.
• I phoned Jenny about this and she told me that I should have just gotten a new bank account. I felt dumb at first after she said this and wondered why I hadn't thought of doing this myself. And so for a short time I was committed to getting a new account at the bank. But then I wondered why the bank workers hadn't suggested this either.
• One of the reasons to not get a new bank account was that it was a stupid and bureaucratic and onerous process that was best avoided. So, in the evening after my first trip to the bank, I got Jenny to retrieve my old passports. She in fact realized that I had to bring two old passports – not one – to the bank because I had in fact renewed my passport twice while in China.
• So the next morning, having no classes at school, I went to the bank with my old bank card and three of my passports: two expired and one current. (I have another old passport at home but that had expired in the 1980s.) It took them one hour to change the passport number in their computer system. The clerk who was processing this change didn't want to make any mistakes and evidently, had never seen a Canadian passport before. She continually asked questions of other clerks and supervisors (there was one supervisor whose job it was to stick her finger into an electronic fingerprint reader in order to authorize whatever it was the clerk was doing. I saw the supervisor stuck her finger in the machine four times.) The clerk was confused with how to enter my name (Andis Edmunds Kaulins) because she was wasn't sure which name was my family name and which name was my given name, and she didn't know what to make of my middle name Edmunds. (This confusion is a result of a differing practice of placement of family names in the West and in China. In the West, the family name is the last name; in China, the family name is the first name.) When asked to print my name, I caused further confusion by printing “Andis Kaulins” and they made me change it to “Andis Edmunds Kaulins.” A further delay was caused by my not knowing my address. They had to ask around to get the address for my school. Yet another delay occurred and I was then asked it there was an address on my passport. Having gotten annoyed at this point by the clerk's constant questioning of her co-workers and her evident confusion at looking at my passport, and her further studying line-by-line some kind of page-long directive she was consulting which must have dealt with how to change passport numbers in the system, I told them there wasn't. The clerk who spoke English – not the clerk who was processing the passport number change – told me that they needed a Canadian address in their system because five letters, not three were require in the system's computer data base. I told them that I had been in China for ten years and would have to make address up. I then swore at them, saying that I had been told that this card change that I was told that I had to do would take no longer then ten minutes. I can't recollect whether it was before or after the swearing bout that I noticed a back log of people were waiting to be served. So, I decided to make a show of it for them and got up and started pacing, my hands on my hips. This caused one of the people who had been waiting a long time because of me to approach the window I was being served at and to ask what the delay was. Mercifully for them and for the clerks and for me, I finally got my new card and was able to go on my way. With a sense of relief that the process was finally finished, I thanked the clerk and sheepishly apologized to her for my swearing.
• I had hoped to get my Christmas shopping done the day I had my bank card changed. I wanted to buy Tony a Tomica Parking Garage. There was one at the Sunning Grocery Store but it was 599 RMB. So, I thought I would ask Jenny to see if she can buy it on the Internet. I also looked at Lego toys. Tony would love them but Jenny had expressed strong opposition to buying them – Tony would be leaving the pieces in every possible nook and cranny of our apartment. [Jenny vetoed my wanting to buy the Garage on taobao saying it was a stupid idea.]
• When I go to 85 degrees to buy coffee, I always have to tell the clerk to not put my take out coffee in a bag. When I go to McDonalds to buy a meal, the drink gets put in a bag because I can't be bothered to tell them to not bother. I mention this little detail because it is a cultural difference between China and the land I had lived over a decade ago.
• What is the point of me following news or politics? Having a view on it does necessarily make me a superior human being. Having the proper view of President Obama or even Prime Minister Harper is easy to do and requires little effort on my part. And really they don't matter a fig to Jenny or Tony or anyone else I come into contact with.
• In a Speaker's Corner I did about the topic of blindness, a student said that the United States had been discovered to have tortured some people. Later, this same student then understood what I meant when I when I talked about how blindness was not only physical and involuntary, but could be willful and chosen. However, he managed to show he got what I meant about this kind of blindness while at the same time demonstrating he was blind in this way. “The Japanese,” he said, “were blind to the truth about the islands.” He was referring to those disputed Fishing Islands.
• Every once in a while, a student embued with political emotions will expose himself to me and the other trainers bringing up issues of political controversy in the midst of a discussion. I sometimes choose to parlay with these students but mostly I don't bother because I can't speak in a manner about these topics that the students could understand. In the case of the student at my Blindness SPC: I had taught him in a the class the evening before, and I saw that he loved to talk, but had poor listening.
• All the best restaurants in China serve white rat meat, I was told.
• December 13^th was a solemn day in China, especially in Nanjing where the anniversary of the Nanking Massacre was marked.
• December 15^th, I went to the underground of an apartment building in our community – that is, not our building – to retrieve our e-bike which was being recharged, and discovered that the extension cord we had been using had been stolen. We had had the charger for six years. Likely culprits? Some other e-bike owner or maybe some worker who needed an extension cord very quick and knew that e-bike charging areas are a great place to find one quickly.
• Refer to the first bulleted item of this entry and you may guess my feelings of bemusement are the fact that I may be going to the 60^th birthday Party of Someone's grandmother this month.
• Tony's Canadian grandmother had cataract surgery done on one of eyes this month. I have confess that I feel guilt that she is living by herself in the harsh climate of Brandon, Manitoba while I am here in China. For 24 hours, her eyes were bandaged and she had to pay someone to look after her for that time. [Tony's Canadian grandfather had similar surgery done on his eyes. He had to go to Minnedosa (a hour's drive from Brandon) to have the surgery done. There were no local operating rooms available. Mom had her surgery done at the Hospital where Dad had died.]
• The Damnedest thing. Some buildings in Wuxi are heated. You would think this was a good thing and that I would love going into those buildings, but I in fact hate them. I don't mind cold weather because I can dress for it. What I really hate is being overdressed. So when I go into a heated building when I am dressed for a cold building, I suffer.
• One of my students works for a company that designs satellite dishes. The users of his products are in the poor and rural parts of China that don't have access to cable or internet. I asked him if he could point his satellite dish at foreign satellites and he told me “it was forbidden.” [How often students tell me something is forbidden.]
• The Wife is on the ball. Jenny is already thinking of booking a flight to Canada in June. I have floated the idea of her and Tony staying in Canada for an extra week. I only have three weeks to spend in Canada. She wants to spend a month.
• Someone gave Tony a Lego Fire Rescue Helicopter toy. It took an hour for me and Tony to put the thing together. When I say “me and Tony,” I mean to say that I tried to get Tony to help in the building but as it got to the end of the process, I lost patience and did the finishing assembling touches myself.
• With the two cops being shot in New York, I can't help but be tempted to say the Left in the United States, starting at the top with Obama and working down to De Blasio and Sharpton and the hash-tagging mobs have blood have on their hands. For they have all been propagating a lie that the police are out to kill young black men every chance they can get. So big a lie it is that has been advanced, that you would have to think they were crazy, like the cop killer was, to actually believe it. In their sane moments, the Left, from Obama on down, surely does recoil from the assassination of the two cops. So it probably is over the top to say the American Left has blood on its hands in this particular incident, but it doesn't excuse the stupidity or willful blindness of the irresponsible rhetoric the Left has advanced in their stupid lie-filled campaign against supposed violence of cops against black people.
• Before Christmas, Tony spent many an evening leafing through the Lego catalogue I had snagged from a toy store in the Hen Long Plaza.
• For the secret Santa exchange held at our school’s Christmas Party, I bought a Lamborghini.
• A toy Lamborghini.
• On December 27, Tony & I rode the Wuxi Metro Line #2 for the first time. We took it to the Ikea station where I bought much needed shower curtains and was gladdened to see that Tony liked eating Ikea hot dogs.
• I walked past what looked like protesters at the big government building near our apartment complex. As I was approaching, I decided to cross to the other side of the street and get as far away from the scene as I could.
• Stupid man walks into elevator entrance blocking those trying to get out. I swear at him and turn around and give him the evil eye as the door closes.
• I worked Christmas Eve. Thoughts of the modest circumstances in which the nativity happened made me enjoy the fact of it.
• I buy Tony a lot of Lego toys for Christmas.
• Tony watches the Lego movie twice.
• On a Saturday morning, I parked the e-bike in front of our apartment building for Jenny and I later learned that it had been knocked down so that both its mirrors had been smashed. I suspect that a car may have backed into it.
• Part of the Wuxi Metro Line #2 runs above ground along empty fields which are surely going to be developed.
• Christmas Day was a day off for the Kaulins Family China. We slept in late, did some chores around the house, and then had a big supper at a Japanese restaurant in the Hen Long Plaza. I did post a lot of nativity scene paintings to a social app to try to impress upon my Chinese contacts, the real reason for the holiday. Most of the students I talked to however, told me they weren't going to do anything to celebrate Christmas. They saw it as a foreign holiday that had nothing to do with them. Feeling somewhat annoyed at one student who said this with a smirk, I said that Spring Festival was a parochial Chinese celebration that had no significance, no positive message for humanity in general.
• Come to think of it, almost anything Chinese is only of significance for the Chinese, not humanity in general.