Day 6
Ukrainian Refugee Camps
Boring day, but no dome car to fall asleep in.
I'd discovered on the previous day that my sinuses were what was causing the headache that'd been dogging me almost since the vacation started. Good thing, too, because I was out of Advil. Thus, I took more antihistamines, and thus, I spent most of the day drifting in and out of a semi-conscious state (from a non-conscious one, that is).
When we got up in the morning, we were both at a total loss as to what to do with the day that would be productive in any vacation sense. We'd done the West Edmonton Mall, which to be quite honest, is what you do in Edmonton. Only trouble was that we still had a few more days in town (mainly due to the train scheduling), and not enough activities to fill them.
I would have been pretty content to sit in the hotel room and read some pulp science fiction and the Michelin Travel Guide's version of Canadian history, but we had spent all that money to get there, so we did kind of feel obliged to go outside and look at all that Canadian stuff I was reading about. (I have long since decided that vacations are a lot more fun if I stick with my original instincts to stay in the hotel room.)
I found a Ukrainian settlement re-creation site in the travel guide and it wasn't too far out of town, so we figured that we ought to go have a look around. It also sounded like a good opportunity to answer one of those questions that we'd been wondering about all along (aside from the "what does CN stand for" question), and that was "what are all those Ukrainians doing in the middle of Alberta?".
The answer is (was) cheap land available for homesteading back when the area was settled. Good enough reason, but it still doesn't explain to my satisfaction why the Ukrainians picked Alberta above all the other places to homestead, and why there weren't many other flavors of immigrants from that period that settled the area. Just Ukrainians. Maybe I'll never know.
It was a pretty interesting settlement just the same. It wasn't a real settlement, renovated for tourism, but rather a collection of real buildings that had been collected from all over the province, moved to a single site and restored in a historical timeline layout.
Before we could go into the settlement part, we had to stop and hear a lecture from the counter help in the tourist center about how they had real people living in the settlement, and they were all role playing the parts of whatever time frame the building was supposed to be from. We were supposed to go in there, ask the people anything we wanted, but make believe that we were really visiting a real 19th century settlement. Keep questions about favorite radio stations and Twin Peaks arguments out of it, in other words.
I don't like this role playing thing, because I just never got into playing make believe when I was a kid, and it doesn't strike me as a good time to start now, either. Even still, it came off medium well, maybe because we tried to avoid contact with the residents if at all possible. We did get roped into one place, though, and the guy gave us his little talk about what it was like to move over from eastern Europe, and how nice it was to live in Alberta. He asked where we were from, so we said "New Hampshire." That's fair. They had New Hampshire way back then. He said, "Gee, that's a long way away". I thought for a while about how this train of questioning could easily lead up to a break in protocol, since most modern forms of transportation are a bit more recent than 19th century. He went on to ask "Did you come by train, then?", to which we answered "Yes, as a matter of fact."
He gave us this 20th century "Yeah, sure" look, and we figured it'd be a good time to exit.
Anyway, seeing the settlement was sort of interesting. Ever since we'd got into Canada, we'd seen no shortage of Ukrainians in their traditional garb all over the place. And, to tell the truth, seeing Cyrillic text all over Canada was also sort of surprising.
The village was very picturesque, and they had a nice collection of restored churches to show off (Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic). We also got a very good collection of that really black Canadian soil stuck to our shoes. I can still probably pick bits of that mud off my shoes if I want.
After we'd finished the expedition, we ran short on things to do for the day. True, we did have to go by a store and pick up more ribbon cartridges for the typewriter, so that's what we did.
Different mall, different food court for lunch. I going to harp on this some more, but this mall was about the same size as any large mall back home, yet the food court they had at this "little" Edmonton mall really puts the one at American mall food court to shame. Robert had some Ukrainian fast food, which he thought tasted wonderful, but was difficult to eat, because he had to fight me off his plate the whole time. I probably should have got some of that too, opting for a gyros sandwich instead. In Canada, they call gyros sandwiches "Donair." No point behind mentioning that, except that it might come in handy sometime.
While we were at it, we also picked up some thermal paper for the typewriter (which it also supports), which is only marginally cheaper than going through a ribbon cartridge every 10 pages, except that with the thermal stuff, you can't make mistakes, because there's no thermal correction ribbon.
We went back to the hotel, where I attempted to sleep off the rest of my Contac. We didn't do much for dinner, just going to a sub shop across the street from the hotel. There, I ordered a sandwich without cheese and the guy made me a sandwich WITH cheese, handed it to me, then took it away before I had a grip on it, saying that there was cheese on it and he'd have to make me another one. I see a pattern forming here.
This brought us back to the hotel room, just in time for the last game of that hockey contest thing that was going on between the Boston hockey team and the Edmonton hockey team.
Now, I hear that I have a (deserved) reputation for being a "sports hater," but I do kind of like hockey, even if I don't understand the part about getting all religious about the home team and talking about them in the first person and all that other sports junk. If I was rooting for anyone that night, I was rooting for the Edmonton team. I had two reasons for doing this:
- So I wouldn't have to go back to New England and hear nothing else from my coworkers for the next year
- I think it'd have been pretty life shortening to be rooting for anyone other than the Edmonton team while we were in Edmonton
Well, as we all know now, Edmonton's team won. For the rest of that evening (or at least as long as I stayed awake, which believe me, wasn't difficult), there were drunken mobs wandering up and down in the middle of all the downtown streets, waving hockey sticks and jerseys, and generally making all manner of ruckus. At the time I wrote the notes for this day, it'd had been going on for over two hours, and there were no signs of it letting up. I was awake until well in the morning afterwards, and it still wasn't letting up.
It made it really hard to hear the TV set, and our room wasn't even at street level. By far, the most irritating aspect of this business was that I couldn't have any frozen drinks in the bar that night without putting my hearing in serious danger. I swear, I've never seen a scene like that that didn't have shooting and looting to go along with it.
The overall sense that I got from the town, though, was that there just might not be much else for the people there to do. It's a nice cosmopolitan town, about the same size, or slightly smaller than Denver (if you omit Denver's suburbs). Driving around town, it kind of reminded me of Phoenix, only a lot smaller and in a lot less need of air conditioning.
With all of that, I didn't see much more that the town had to offer beyond hockey teams and shopping malls. I know I've already said this before, but those Canadians sure do take their malls seriously, but now, I think I know why. The big question forming in my mind was whether there's life after shopping for your average Edmontonian.
I know the gentleman in the office back at work (the one who hails from Calgary) told me that "the only things in Edmonton are whores and hockey players." Well, the hockey team was out of town half the time we were there, and we didn't see any of the other. Well, we weren't looking for the other, but we didn't see any, anyway. Still, I guess I can see his point, even if I do have to revise it a bit to be "malls and hockey fans."
One interesting aspect of this hockey thing, though: It was one evening we spent in Canada that we didn't hear anyone mention anything about that Meech Lake business. Maybe it's good that they had something to take their minds off their fears of the country falling apart.
Well, that was it for the day. No drinkie-poo in the bar. Just didn't seem worth getting killed just to have a sissy frozen drink.
On to Day 7 and Yet More Malls
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