Day 5
Mall Fever
I think I overdid it just a bit on the previous day. I woke up on this day sometime too early in the morning. Well, I only half woke up, which was a good thing, because since I was still half asleep, I only felt half dead. I needed a trip to the bathroom, but it could have been to the moon given the way I was feeling. And moving. Even though I was on the solid ground of the hotel room, I felt for sure I was still on the train, given the way everything kept rocking around in front of me. I'd also been sleeping on my right arm all night, so it was only moving about half as far as commanded. A spectator would have been very entertained at watching me try to reach the light switch in the bathroom to turn the lights off, since it took me several minutes to do it, and only after I used my other arm for a brace.
I attempted to go back to bed after that, and just laid there wondering if I really was going to live through the day, and decided that I didn't know, but either way, it was going to be rough.
I finally got back to sleep and woke up again at around 12:30 in the afternoon, with Robert fully dressed and looking a little amused at how inert I'd become. I managed to make enough burbulent noises at him that he eventually figured out ("what is it, Lassie?") that I was in dire need of some medication. He went and fetched the universal nausea cure-all (Coca Cola), some antihistamines and the last of our Advil. While he was gone, I got a chance to get a little more sleep without all those chuckling noises in the room.
When he did return, I had an extra large handful of pills, and hoped that the caffeine and phosphoric acid in the Coke would kick in before last night's dinner kicked up. It took about a half an hour for all the dope to take. By then, if I didn't feel human, at least I felt enough out of it to pretend that I was a normal functioning (hung over) human again.
The plan was to return to the West Edmonton Mall and finish off the second floor. We started around the floor, and after a while, I could add hunger to the list of other things that were entertaining me (nausea, headache, stuffed sinuses and the pain left over from having gnawed out the inside of my right cheek sometime during the night).
We went to the food court on the first floor (one of the ones we hadn't been to yet). The hardest part of this was the variety: Japanese, Chinese, Mongolian, Greek, Ukrainian, Mexican, Italian, Pizza and oh yes, traditional North American slaughtered livestock flesh with starch.
We returned to the upper floor of the mall, and finished the tour of the second half. Afterwards, we figured it'd be sort of fun to go see what the Edmonton Space Science Center had to offer. The answer was that aside from an IMAX theater, not much. There were a few traditional space science museum displays, but the Canadian contributions to the subject concerned the Canadian astronauts and the CanadArm remote manipulator on the US Space Shuttle. Not wanting to put down the importance of those people or the arm, I'll just say that it ain't a lot of material to build a museum around. Still, the IMAX theater was as good as any other IMAX theater, and well worth the money.
After the IMAX, I decided it was about time I did something for real about detailing our exploits. I'd given up on the longhand bit days ago, as you might recall, and I didn't see how I was going to be able to remember three weeks worth of junk in such excruciating detail as this, without some means of recording it as I went along. As we've already seen, the details of the second and third days had already faded from my memory.
My solution, since I couldn't afford a real laptop computer that would be at all adequate for the task, was to get a portable laptop, battery operated typewriter and a bunch of paper. This could actually be achieved for under $200, although I later came to discover that the ribbon cartridges for the thing, which needed replacement every nine pages or so, could easily double that figure before the trip was over.
At first, we'd gone to Sears (that great Satan), and found a model that seemed perfect for the occasion, except that it cost $200, and that it was at Sears, meaning that they don't take any credit cards other than their own. We went instead to "The Bay" where we found the same model without the Sears nameplate, and for only $150. The rest, as you can see, has been excruciatingly boring, living well up to my expectations.
"The Bay" is an interesting store, though. This chain is descended from the old "Hudson's Bay Trading Company" that I remember from my childhood when my family was stationed in Labrador. Every weekend, we'd hop in the family car, and drive on out to "Happy Valley," which was the nearest civilian town, and hit the Hudson's Bay store for basic supplies, all of which had quaint Newfie names. It really did feel like an outpost general store back then. Wooden floors, bad heating, everything you'd want, but only in one size, and all under a single leaky roof.
Well, checking back with the Michelin Travel Guide (which is my primary source of history anymore), I find that "Hudson's Bay Trading Company" is what they used to call central and western Canada. Anything and everything between Ontario and British Columbia belonged to them. Well, for a while, some other company, "Northwest Trading Company" tried to muscle in, but they merged, and Hudson's Bay still reigned supreme.
Therefore, it's pretty impossible to talk about the history of Canada without also talking some about Hudson's Bay company, which makes it even more obvious to see how much they've lost in the last hundred years. Sometime in the 19th century, the British Government put a lot of pressure on them to sell their land off to the British Government, and the rest is what we now know as Canada.
And, what of the Hudson's Bay Trading Company since then? Well, by the looks of it, they're just another chain of glitzy shopping mall department stores. For all that fall from grace, though, they still seemed to have decent enough prices on their typewriters. Just out of nostalgia's sake, I'm sure, they did look properly puzzled when I presented one of those new fangled credit card things for payment.
We finished off the evening with dinner at the hotel restaurant, which was entertainment in itself. We had this not-so-mildly ditzy waitron who seemed overwhelmed at the task of putting water glasses in front of his customers, and didn't handle any of the rest of his chores any better. I ordered a club sandwich with no cheese and Robert ordered their pesto dish.
After running around the dining room at a frantic pace for an appropriate length of time, the waitron returned with a plate containing a club sandwich with cheese, and another dinner sized plate containing only a slice of garlic bread (which comes with the pesto dinner). Before I could tell the guy that I could peel the cheese off the sandwich myself, and before Robert could ask where the rest of his dinner was, the guy removed all the plates from the table and announced that he'd have to go back and have them remove the cheese and find Robert's pasta.
You know, if he'd already decided this, it's beyond me why he brought the stuff to the table in the first place. Maybe he just wanted to prove that he was on the ball and was watching out for our best interests. Any such feeling on our part vanished after watching him take a few more quick laps of the dining room, only to return with a club sandwich with cheese, and a plate of Alfredo instead of pesto. Neither one of us was in any mood to argue with him at this point, because he was kind of skinny, and we figured any more frantic activity like that would just push him over the edge.
Well, it was good food, even if it wasn't quite what we ordered. We finished off with slices of peach pie, which was a pretty delightful end to any day.
That was pretty much it for the day, except the part with me sitting up until all hours of the night in the hotel room, using up four ribbon cartridges in my attempts to type up our exploits. I took a break about halfway into the typing to watch the tube to see who killed Laura Palmer, then typed some more until the Contac, Advil, and Cola had worn off, and I ceased to function.
On to Day 6 and the Ukrainian Refugee Camps
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