December 22nd, 2010

Washington Recap (long-delayed)

Writing about travel and Fred reminds me that I never recapped when went to Washington, DC, to visit said Fred. We had planned to write a joint blog post while we were there, but were too busy frolicking and never did. We attempted to proxy-blog by retelling the experiences of the trip together over Facebook chat. Facebook, annoyingly, does not save chats, and even if you attempt to cut and paste the whole of one, it won’t let you have the earliest parts if your chat was very long (ours was, of course). So here, below, is a very small refraction of our DC adventure, way back in mid-November (well, Fred’s DC adventure continues, because she lives there…you know what I mean).

NB that some cuts have been made for coherency/non-embarrassment. We catch up with FD and RR having brunch at Kramerbooks’ Cafe with some friends, old and new.

***

FD
the danish dude was Bo!
yes all were nice

RR
In my mind, it was spelled “beau”

FD
we chatted easily
oh that also makes sense.

RR
Then we parted, after our historic brunch…

FD
right to eastern market
we didn’t even spend that much time in the market
we walked around the flea market for a bit
then the art dude was rude to you
WHAT A JERK!

RR
The market was interesting, but we bought nothing. I think I was afraid of having anything odd on the plane, because of crazy customs

FD
I have not forgotten!
or forgiven!
how does he sleep at night?
yes so…
on we went
towards capitol hill
and we stopped at that charming used bookstore

RR
For the record, he told me left leg was blocking passersby’s view of his art, and could I move?

FD
appalling!
APPALLING!
Our readers will hear about this!

RR
He had painted an american flag on…what?
I love your outraged loyalty!
I also really liked that bookstore!
Riverby!

FD
it was hideous and pointless whatever it was.
no I’m being too harsh
but you know.

RR
I do know!

FD
Your leg’s presence did not do his artwork any disservice.
okay yes riverby

RR
Thank you! I feel that way too!

FD
I’m better now.
we were basically kicked out (gently) by the security guard.

RR
I bought a book at Riverby’s because I thought it was edited by my long-dead cousin, but it turned out he was Irwin Stone, not Irving (though everyone called him “Irv”)

FD
oh it wasn’t your cousin?
sad…

RR
But since I have it, I’m reading it, and it’s pretty amazing (selected letters of Van Gogh to his brother).
They were nice about it. Then we went to…Supreme court building, yes?

FD
right right..
supreme court.
it was closed
but we ran up and down the stairs and took photos by the columns
and were just generally happy to be there.

RR
I was fascinated by those columns, and the statue of a woman with a tiny woman in her lap!

***

Trust me, even though I was only able to provide a snippet, IT WAS ALL THAT AWESOME! But FBchat sucks for eating our chat.

Reverb 22

How did you travel in 2010? How and/or where would you like to travel next year? (Author: Tara Hunt) (www.reverb10.com)

This is a fun one–so fun that Fred has been drawn into Reverb-land, too–yay! Fred also posted her Cities I’ve Visited in 2010 list already, and I haven’t, so I’ll start there.

Montreal
Saint George
Hamilton/LTH/Dundas/Waterdown (it’s all the same area code)
Kitchener/Waterloo
Guelph
Riviere-du-loup
Moncton
Halifax
Charlottetown (and environs)
Winnipeg
North Bay
Washington, DC

Not as adventerous as last year, but definitely good times, and also I’m finally seeing a bit of my own country, which feels good.

How did I travel? A lot in Mark’s car, which is where I came upon the revelation that I’m not as god a driver as I used to be–there’s a resolution for 2011. Also via plane a couple times, and tonnes and tonnes of public transit within Toronto and in a few other cities. And then there was my epic Northlander bus trip to North Bay.

Where to in 2011? Actually, I have a lot of airy plans–I hope a bunch of these materialize. Among hoped for destinations are Florida, South Carolina, Montreal, Ottawa, Buffalo, Niagara Falls, and London (the big one). The only that’s actually booked is the Falls, but I’m pretty stoked about that one. Let’s hope that the adventure continues after that!

December 5th, 2010

Reverb day 3

More from Reverb (yep, I’m behind now):

Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).
(Author: Ali Edwards)

Oh, I do *not* like superlatives. I remember being quite annoyed in grade 9 when I was assigned to write a paragraph about the “happiest day of my life” in English class. Who knows the answer to that–hopefully one has enough happy days and alive moments that it would be too complicated to classify them as “first best” “most alive” etc. For the record, for that assignment, I picked a lovely day when I was about 10 or so, and my great-aunt babysat my bro and I in Queens while my folks attended a conference in Manhattan. We went shopping at a small plaza, and ate some pizza. It was very sunny, and I really liked my great aunt–I stand my that choice.

And now, a moment when I felt *quite* alive in 2010:

I went to Montreal for my birthday (Montreal and my birthday being two of my favourite things), and this was the evening before it. I was walking up Union with my travelling companion, around 9 or so at night. We’d been out for a very nice dinner with cool Francophones (I lived in Montreal long enough to feel dramatically inferior to Francophones–whenever one is nice to me, I’m thrilled).

After dinner, I tried to figure out how to get some Bilboquet ice-cream, which is a Montreal-only delight. I had worked in an ice-cream place when I lived there, which has since gone under, and I knew of only one other place who sold it at that time, very far north. Our French friends new of more, but they were all way west, too far to walk at that hour. Though it was very tempting. Also, satisfying to learn that the Bilboquet brand was expanding.

So we were just walking up Union, on this dark warm pretty evening in Montreal, and I was feeling so happy to be back in the city and that it was almost summer and to be with Mark and that I was about to turn 2x2x2x2x2, and then on Sherbrooke, we passed a cafe with a little Bilboquet sign in the window.

It was like the universe saying, “I love you”–because I was already so happy and didn’t need the ice-cream, but what the hell, why not throw all the good stuff we can? I got raspberry and it was divine, and Mark got some chocolatey thing, and we went up to Prince Arthur and there were so many other happy people, and I felt I could have walked a hundred thousand miles.

October 12th, 2010

Do you ever get that feeling

…when you are driving or bussing or walking in the dark past a lit-up building, that there’s probably a person looking out each window? And that if you could get close enough and slow down enough and somehow make eye contact with all those people…it would matter somehow? The *how* I’m not sure of at all, but I always get that flash of sadness that I can’t do it.

October 8th, 2010

Loneliness

The short story I chose to take with me to read at Circus Wonderland in North Bay is called “Loneliness.” It’s from my forthcoming book, *The Big Dream,* not out until 2011, but I chose it because we were planning to set the story to music and it is the most rhythmic things I’ve written in a while. As it turns out, we set the piece to a video (by Andy Williamson, who did a great job), so it didn’t matter.

I’m still glad I chose the piece, though the theme, which is also the title, did not entirely agree with me, as I seem to be going through one of those sucky periods that everyone has, where I prefer not to be by myself for any length of time (everyone does have such periods, right?) and once you start to think that the weekend has a theme, you know you are sunk. Though everyone in North Bay (and en route) was nice, I didn’t get a lot of companionship on the trip. I love travelling for writing, and usually have a ball, but this trip was a bit tough. So I made the following photo essay as a way of giving myself a little company.

I got up very early and took the first bus of the day. I am wearing my glasses so that I will be able to sleep on the second (much longer) bus of the day.

I took the bus to the subway. People on the subway very early on weekends are sad. But oblivious to people taking their picture.

From Dundas station into the light.

This part of town is incredibly commercial and vibrant, yet the bus station always manages to look seedy.

It’s nicer inside, though.

Bus station bathrooms are not as bad as you’d think, but this stall lock is seemingly designed not to lock. Distressing.

I don’t know where these people were going.

Um, we stopped somewhere. Gravenhurst, I think. I bought a sandwich that wasn’t very good.

The foliage was nice, but you can’t really tell from this picture.

Yep, still on the bus.

Welcome to North Bay!

The sun coming out makes everything better. Even a really chilly parking lot.

I stayed in a lovely hotel, the Inn on the Bay.

Walking down Main Street. It’s pretty here.

In the background, a body of water. Maybe it’s the North Bay? I never found anyone I could ask.

I’ve never had a dressing room before, so I had to take a picture of myself in front of my vanity mirror. You can’t tell from the picture, but there are two men asleep on the floor behind me. I never really worked out the story there.

I’ve never read on a serious professional stage like this one, at the Capitol Theatre. Very impressive.

Eep, the audience assembles!

Cue smoke machine.

Dermot did a wonderful job as host of the evening.

Brilliant modern dance troup whose name I cleverly forgot to write down.

Somehow my crappy photography makes them look even cooler (just go with that, ok?)

The fabulous Pandora Topp, accompanied by Brian Quebec.

I was onstage next, but I couldn’t find anyone to get to take my picture. Bob Wiseman was after me, and he was great–I don’t know why I don’t have a picture of him.

Then the straight-ahead rock of Ethel and the Mermen.

The Bellwoods were on next but I had to go back to the hotel and sleep. Sorry, Bellwoods–I am sure you were great!

Solitary breakfast with my true friend, The New Yorker. North Bay is very quiet on a Sunday morning–I thought for a while I wouldn’t find anywhere to eat at all!

That was nice, but I’m ready to go home now, please.

And then I did.

So for this, my Thanksgiving post, I would like to express my thanks to everyone who hangs out with me, regularly or occasionally, who tells me stories or listens to them, shares fries, goes for walks, gives hugs, and keeps me from having to take my own picture. I am lucky to have you guys; life wouldn’t be much fun without you!

July 1st, 2010

Literary Pilgrimage

I think I might have written about visiting the house that inspired Anne of Green Gables in December, but that was all snow-covered and non-functional for the winter (though still splendid). In summertime, you can tour the house, which was actually originally just the house of some people LM Montgomery knew, that she transformed in her imagination to be the Cuthbert farm. But the descendents of that family donated the house to be an Anne sanctuary, and it has been redone as LM imagined it. And whoever did the decor did a pretty good job of making it coincide with how I pictured it during my approximately 20 readings of the original book. I thought Anne’s bedroom particularly accurate.

Anne's room at Green Gables.

But other spots were less so, and those I just admired but then dismissed. Seeing the house was really cool and interesting from a historical perspective, but as literature, the book remains separate for me. What happens between a reader and the page builds a world, and I found I really couldn’t add anything from some other world (even if it is the “real” one) into the one LM and I created as I read (and reread). I had a lovely time and would be curious to make other literary pilgrimages, but I think curiosity is the total of my feelings on these. Which is an interesting discovery, really.

I might feel differently if the book were nonfiction…if I read any nonfiction.

June 29th, 2010

Riviere-du-Loup and Charlottetown

Two days worth of driving brought one Toyota Corolla from Ontario to Riviere-du-Loup to Charlottetown. It was an extremely pretty drive. Two things to point out: the sunsets in Riviere-du-Loup are awesome:

Sunset view from the Days Inn, Riviere-du-Loup.

And the drivers in Quebec City are *so mean*. I have never been tailgated with such obvious intent to kill. Nuff said.

This post would be longer, but I am off to tour the Cows Ice Creamery. Ah, vacation!

June 25th, 2010

Laterz

I’m sitting here, waiting for my laundry to be done drying so I can trudge downstairs and retrieve it before someone removes it from the drier and tosses it about the dust-filled laundry room (ok, this has never happened, but it might). My fantasy right now is about a washer and a dryer just for me, in the privacy of my own home. If I had that, I could finally achieve laundry nirvana, which is (of course) to have every single article of clothing I own clean at the same time. And in order to do that, one has to work out a way to do laundry naked. This is my dream.

Clearly, I need a vacation. So–I’ll take one. And probably blog about it, but maybe not as frequently as my usual blogging rate, due to the freedom of the open road and the lack of wireless connections on said road.

If you get bored in my absense, or even if you are under the impression you are sufficiently entertained, you should really go check out The Scream in High Park litfest over the next couple weeks. It is a sizeable downside of this whole vacation project that I won’t get to be there. So you should go on my behalf, ok?

And if you are missing me/my prose terribly, you can check out my essay, No More Mr. Bad Guy in the new issue of Maisonneuve.

Whatever your plans are for late June and early July, I hope you see some fireworks on the first, eat something charred over a flame, and generally a stellar summery time.

December 27th, 2009

Still festive, mainly

I had an awesome Christmas, and I hope anyone else celebrating did likewise. I was given a new watch to replace the one that broke a month ago, so everyone I normally hang out with will now stop being plagued by me reaching for their wrists every (approximately) five minutes. I also got a zillion awesome books, peanut-butter bonbons, pickled carrots, a scratch-n-win Bingo that won me $3 (which I immediately blew on a second card, which won me nothing), slippers, a cloche hat (just like Virginia Woolf!), a tiny table, and dozens of hugs.

I also got another sinus infection!! This was not a gift but rather, I suppose, just payback for so much awesomeness. I still resent that I spent most of *Sherlock Holmes* yesterday a) sleeping or b) trying not to vomit (I didn’t–win!), and thus have no idea what happened. But I still think it was a very good movie anyway. And the more I consider it, the more I actually think that this incident was the result of my over-the-counter sinus medication, because as soon as I stopped taking it the desire to puke and lose consciousness went away. So now I’m medication-free and largely functional, and if I can just get on a plane and travel across the country, I am pretty much guaranteed more hugs, plus naniamo bars. So that is today’s goal.

So I gotta go pack, instead of writing a year’s end list of best somethings or worst somethings, but I was likely not going to get around to doing that anyway. Thank goodness Maisonneuve did one of books and let me contribute.

I hope you guys have a great fake-boxing day tomorrow, and who knows–if I have a little downtime in my travels, I may yet get you a list of best/worst somethings, or possibly a picture of me in a cloche hat.

RR

November 13th, 2009

Rose-coloured reviews Kimchi House, Jasper, Alberta

Note: this is review is in conjunction (but not consultation) with a review by my dining companion, AMT. Please see her blog for another perspective on the same meal (I’ll edit this to add a link when hers is up).

Right, so the small mountain town of Jasper, Alberta, is beautiful, semi-remote, mildly touristy and not at all the first stop on anyone’s Asian cuisine binge. Nevertheless, there is both a Chinese and a Korean restaurant in town, and as my dining companion had had previous good experiences at KimChi House, we decided to go there for our one dinner in Jasper.

I needed little convincing, being a lover of Korean food and inhabitant of a city that is a much more probable destination if one were seeking to (over-)indulge in the stuff.

So the first thing to report is that the kimchi was subpar. I eat a lot of kimchi, the spicy pickled cabbage that is so much of the Korean diet. I can’t really be called an expert, as I can’t make it (I think it actually takes a village to make kimchi) but I know what I like–lots of sticky bright red chili paste and salty-sweet-spicy flavour. This kimchi was overwhelmed with brine, and had very little chili paste–it was sort of pinkish beige, and very drippy. Also not so spicy, although it was the drippiness that really put me off.

Ok, that’s it for the negative–the rest of the food was excellent. I didn’t sample AMT’s bulgogi because I don’t eat beef, but it looked and smelled great. My own dak bulgogi (bulgogi only chicken instead of beef) arrived all sizzling on a cow-shaped platter and was stellar. I especially liked the random little bits of veggies–one broccoli floret, three mushrooms, a bit of celery, etc. The sauce wasn’t super-spicy (I’d ordered “medium”) but it had a good kick to it.

There was a thing of steamed rice that I didn’t eat (I don’t care about rice; sorry) and that was it for free side dishes. Unusual for Korean restaurants in Toronto, at least, which usually throw in two or three little dishes of pickles or somesuch. We paid $3 for the dribbly kimchi, plus $3 each for a wonderful if salty seafood salad (AMT’s choice) and a platter of lettuce leaves (my choice; the menu promised “leaf-lettuce salad). I made lettuce wraps out of my meat and the lettuce, which was quite tasty but not quite orthodox.

Ambience: a nice big restaurant, well-appointed but undistinguished. I appreciated the lack of “look, Asian stuff” art–it was just comfortable. The music was, unfortunately, some sort of classical hits album. When we entered, something from the Nutcracker was playing (full disclosure–AMT id’d everything that played, but I only nailed the wedding march.) The aspect that of course the restauranteurs didn’t directly control was the other patrons. On the night we dined, these were: someone waiting for takeout and fiddling with a laptop; a man eating alone who later came over to ask us what we’d ordered and if we liked it (I couldn’t tell if this was genuine culinary fascination or loneliness–I ran out of things to say about dak bulgogi, but I would have chatted with him more about something or other if I could have discerned what he wanted); a young couple in ski jackets, he with pants and a shirt underneath, she in a wedding down. Perhaps the classical march was appropriate. Anyway, it was all interesting.

The meal was a bit on the expensive side. Even leaving out the a la carte sides, $18 is more than most Torontonians would pay for bulgogi. But well, it is the mountains, I suppose you pay more for the ingredients being trekked into the mountains. And perhaps we were subsidizing the lack of other patrons. Anyway, the owner came out and talked to me while AMT was in the bathroom, and she seemed charming and dedicated and very very nervous about our liking the food. Her family immigrated 9 years ago.

So while I do have to disclose that my dining companion spent a small but striking portion of the night throwing up, I am not sure what to make of it. It seemed like such a nice place–maybe everyone screws up once in a while.

RR