Day 7
Wasting Away in Mallville
By this time, I was pretty burned out on Edmonton, and there was still a couple days of it left. I was asking myself that famous question (already posed), no doubt known to Edmontonians worldwide: "Is there life after shopping?".
OK, I know that for some people, mere mention of this question is heresy, but I for one don't live for shopping. Anyway, everything in Edmonton is a bit overpriced, and some of it is even sort of strange.
Here's an example: We went into one store called "240 Volts". Everything in the store was designed to run on 240 Volts, 50 Hz, or whatever European electrical outlets do to your equipment. The TVs in the store were also PAL (People Are Lavender) and SECAM (Something Essentially Contrary to the American Method) instead of good ol' NTSC. I thought this might be an interesting place to shop for multistandard TVs and VCRs, but about the time I started browsing, the store owner ran over and told me that nothing in the store worked on US or Canadian power.
"Yes, I gathered that from the name of the store and all the signs with stern warnings that you have all over the place."
"Well, you can't use an of this equipment here, so why are you even looking at the equipment?"
Good question. Here we have a new concept, which is a store designed to be of no interest to anyone in the position to be shopping there, and if anyone looks interested anyway, there's a storekeeper to come run them off. This reminds me of something I could see on Monty Python or Saturday Night Live. I waved and mugged at all the mirrors, thinking that Allan Funt might be ejected from a secret compartment at any moment, but when the storekeeper made like he was going to call the looney hatch, I lost interest.
Anyway, back to this boring day. I slept in real late, and when I did wake up, I instructed Robert to organize a day of interesting activities for us that I'd even like. Tall order, but he did his best. He came up with a trip to the "Provincial Museum." I'm pretty sure that the name wasn't selected to be an insult, but it did kind of fit, anyway.
So, to answer the original question: "Probably not."
All right, it was a nice museum after all. Still, what can you say about a place that even calls itself "provincial." Not "cosmopolitan," that's for sure. Robert spent a couple of hours at the museum. I spent about an hour there, too, spending the other hour sleeping on one of the benches while Robert looked at the rocks and butterflies. After he woke me back up, he reported to me that they looked a lot like the rocks and butterflies that you'd find anywhere else, but that he (somehow) found them to be fascinating anyway. He even took me back to show me his favorite moths and crystals.
After all this excitement, Robert had to take me back to the hotel so I could rest up. If it sounds like I was doing a lot of sleeping that day, it's because I was. For the first few days of the vacation, I had this nasty headache that I couldn't get rid of. Taking Advil did just about as much good as being out of Advil (and, as I said, there wasn't going to be anymore of that stuff until we got back to the states). Taking Contac worked great, though, which told me that my headache was probably "The Return of the Killer Sinuses." Well, as much as this Contac stuff did for my sinuses, it did just as well to separate me from wakefulness. Come to think of it, maybe my head didn't hurt because the Contac made me sleep all the time.
Robert woke me up after an hour or three and suggested a movie. Just for variety, we decided to go to a theater in a shopping mall (a downtown shopping mall), that was in walking range. Fancy that: a shopping mall in Edmonton.
It was only a half a mile from the hotel, but even if I could pretend to be awake by then (which I really wasn't), I couldn't seem to coordinate my feet, legs, arms and all my other bodily appliances that get involved in walking. It was a very slow half mile, but all the other people on the streets did give us all sorts of encouraging looks, as if they were so proud of me for overcoming whatever physical handicap I had.
On the way back from the movie, only barely more ambulatory than before, we stopped at the Har Bin Chinese restaurant and had some pretty good Chinese food. Quick geography lesson: If you look at China as being the same shape as the US, except viewed through the eyes of Bill the Cat, then Har Bin is the name of a town that's roughly in the same place as Merrimack NH. Since it gets as cold as Edmonton, the two consider themselves to be "sister cities", even though I don't expect that the shopping in Har Bin is quite as good.
After dinner, I stumbled back to the hotel bar with Robert where we had some dessert and a couple of pansy frozen drinks. All that remained of the day was me laying awake all night because I wasn't sleepy from all the naps I'd had, and because the Contac finally wore off.
On to Day 8, the Living Hell
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