I'm All Alone, More or Less
After all of the planning and the worrying and the hustle and the bustle around Kimberly's visit to Winnipeg since I first brought it up, how did everything work out?
Pretty relaxed, actually.
Thursday, October 1
Armed with a number of options and plans for the visit (thanks in large part to input from amysisson, dontmentionlove, foryoursplendor, ninthscompanion, twinkiegirl, and others offline), but concerned about the cold weather, I picked up Kimberly at the airport on a rainy afternoon and immediately began the Canadian indoctrination process with a visit to Tim Hortons. ;)
Although I already knew that "double-double" was a piece of Canadian slang, I was quickly surprised to learn that apparently, "parkade" is also a uniquely Canadian term, describing what (I'm told) Americans call "parking decks," and I was surprised yet again later when I discovered that using "suck" as a noun (e.g. "she's a total suck") is a Canadian thing. (Despite the rhyme, there are no video games to be played in a typical parkade, but the airport itself does have an actual arcade on the second floor.) Even when you pay a lot of attention to American culture and notice its differences, these little things can still startle you.
Since this was Kimberly's first significant visit to Canada, though, I was conscious of the more obvious differences (like the rampant bilingualism on our signage), and I was aware of Kimberly's linguistic interests, so I'd even gotten her Only in Canada, You Say: A Treasury of Canadian Language in case more background was needed than I could provide.
I took a creative route from the airport which allowed me to give something of an "Edgar Tour" through Winnipeg, featuring notable personal landmarks (like my high school, for example), but once we got to my place and Kimberly unpacked, we had a bunch of time to chill and catch up before heading out to Haunted Winnipeg Investigates, a ghost tour which proved...somewhat less investigative than either of us had hoped.
(While we waited for the tour to start, Kimberly also had the opportunity to try another local delicacy, Old Dutch ketchup chips.)
Another one of those differences I wouldn't normally notice is the predominance of animal imagery to be found around here--from Canadian coinage (of course) to how the levels in the parkade were identified--and as a symbol of Manitoba, the bison is particularly common. (Unfortunately, we didn't see any of the MTS commercials with bison in them during this visit.) When we stopped at the Manitoba Legislative Building during the ghost tour, Kimberly was keen to be seen with the bronze bison who flank the Grand Staircase, but my photo didn't make this especially clear:
After the tour was over, the only restaurant I definitely knew was going to be open for such a late dinner was Papa George's in Osborne Village. (We might've been able to squeeze in a meal at Dessert Sinsations, which had come previously recommended, but I didn't realise at the time that it was open late on Thursdays.) I initially found this option convenient, if unremarkable, but Kimberly was surprisingly impressed with the size of the portions there, especially given the price.
Despite it being later than late by the time we got home, we ended up finding a marathon of different editions of Top Model on Fashion Television: The Channel featuring not just Canada's Next Top Model, but also Britain's Next Top Model and Australia's Next Top Model--all of which I knew would appeal to Kimberly as a reality-television connoisseur--so we ended up watching those in a compare-and-contrast exercise until we couldn't stay awake any longer.
(Canada benefits in general where television is concerned by getting programmes from throughout the English-speaking world, so we often get to see American versions of such series alongside their foreign counterparts, but Canadian editions of reality shows tend to be limited to skill-based competitions. As such, we have Canadian Idol, Project Runway Canada, So You Think You Can Dance Canada, and so forth, but no Big Brother Canada, for example. Two other series Kimberly didn't get to watch were Canada's Worst Driver and Canada's Worst Handyman, adapted from similar British series.)
Friday, October 2
We didn't have specific plans until the evening, and the weather had taken a turn for the decent, so Kimberly and I spent much of the day travelling around on foot, even though she'd sprained her ankle recently--she assured me it was fine and there hadn't been any problems the day before. We started going north on Osborne Street (a main thoroughfare which runs by my place) while I tried to offer some personal or cultural observations about whatever we happened to pass on our way. (Sample Factoid: "Did you know Winnipeg is the Slurpee Capital of the World?") Once we were in Osborne Village again, we stopped in at Gags Unlimited, which was already in full-on Hallowe'en Mode.
Kimberly was taken aback at the row of Barack Obama masks which greeted us as we walked in, especially given that we also ended up seeing masks for both Clintons, Reagan, and Nixon, but not a single mask related to a Canadian politician such as current Prime Minister (and part-time LEGO-impersonator) Stephen Harper. To a Canadian, the lack of such masks isn't going to seem that weird--I mean, would Stephen Harper even want to be Stephen Harper for Hallowe'en?--but the predominance of American culture (including political culture) in this country can seem rather strange when first encountered.
Lunch was at Stella's Café & Bakery, the local eatery recommended most when I asked about restaurants, and large portions were again in evidence--as were "Hardcore Brownies," the first in a number of items labelled with adjectives like "Hardcore" or "X-Treme," which I'd never noticed was such a common thing in Winnipeg. Having said that, I had to tell Kimberly that the number of places offering tattoos and piercings on Osborne is atypical of the city as a whole...we're not that hardcore.
Having reached the Legislature again after lunch, we had the option of going straight downtown or taking the Assiniboine Riverwalk to The Forks, a popular local destination (particularly for tourists), and chose the latter. By the time we got there, we were in the mood for gaming--and my existing board games and such are scattered about rather than centralised in a rec room the way I want them to be--so after doing a general tour and picking up some Canadian items for Kimberly's family back home, I thought we should search for Fluxx, which a lot of local people I know like to play but (for some reason) I've never owned myself.
Usually, I would turn to Kite and Kaboodle at The Forks to solve this sort of problem, given their excellent selection, but when they didn't have any version of the card game, I did something (apparently) very surprising: I consulted a phone book. It seemed so strange and anachronistic that I not only knew where to find one at The Forks but would think of it as a natural option to look for other game outlets that Kimberly took a photo for posterity. I noted a couple of possibilities, but we resolved to halt the quest for the moment because those specific evening plans were rapidly approaching.
Since the only people who expressed interest in joining us for anything after I threw it out there were members of my family, Kimberly and I met up with my brother Tony for dinner before going to see Zombieland, which was actually shot in Kimberly's current home state of Georgia. (The movie is great, by the way, and I've already sat through it twice.) I was grateful for the opportunity to take her to SilverCity Polo Park, the same cinema used for many an übergroup outing--though it occurred to me later that we could've gotten a gaming fix by playing air hockey or some arcade games there, but didn't. Still, Kimberly was suitably impressed by the ability to eat frogurt at a movie theatre.
My favourite part of the actual screening, though? After the (obligatory) trailer for The Twilight Saga: New Moon in front of the movie, one girl near the front applauded, and she was met by a chorus of booing, followed by applause for the booing. :)
Saturday, October 3
Still wanting to get our game on, I phoned around searching for a store that might have Fluxx, but no one I rang had a deck to spare, so we caved and went to Toys "R" Us to look for a possible alternative, eventually coming across the tile-based Carcassonne. ("Especially good for two players!") Since we were right there already, we also stopped in at the nearby Party Stuff to check out possible Hallowe'en gear. Upon returning home, we had enough time to give Carcassonne a try before going out for the evening, and it is a good two-player game--not overly time-consuming, but involving elements of strategy which keep you thinking.
Our main plan, however, was to check out that night's bonspiel at the St Vital Curling Club. Kimberly is a big curling fan, but had never actually seen it live, while Winnipeg has around twenty-five separate curling clubs. Ideally, I would've liked to sign us up for a Learn-to-Curl class, but it was slightly too early in the curling season for that. :/ Nevertheless, I wasn't worried about being able to find some hard-hurrying action to watch as spectators. (This was the view from our seats.) I'm not sure what other people there might have thought about our watching what was basically just a local match, but we had a good time, grabbed some snackage, and then checked out the cover band playing mostly songs from the Sixties--fitting, since the members of the band looked to be in their sixties--in what was possibly the most Manitoban activity we could've chosen on a Saturday night. (As Justin Timberlake would say, this was Classic 'Peg.)
It was still relatively early, even when all that was done, so after Kimberly questioned why I wasn't on a curling team--and I told her she could at least be on a virtual curling team by getting Deca Sports for the Wii--we also stopped in at The Billabong Bar & Bistro, an Australian-themed place in Osborne Village (which there was a certain logic in trying, since we originally met in Sydney), before watching that night's Saturday Night Live (Ryan Reynolds/Lady Gaga) at my place and marvelling at how Reynolds seemed to phone it in despite his comedic chops. I took his performance and threw it on the ground!
Sunday, October 4
Now that we had a ready gaming option, we could start the day off with a couple of Carcassonne rematches at the kitchen table before heading back to The Forks. The weather had started to get chilly again, but there were some (temporary) amusement park rides set up there, so we took a ride on the Ferris wheel (allowing me to point out some more Winnipeg landmarks from the top), nurtured our natural competitive streaks on the bumper cars, and checked out Sugar Mountain Express, a pair of train cars converted into a confectionery store. We didn't get anything there, but eventually managed to score another local food favourite, Clodhoppers, which several people had reminded me Kimberly should try whilst she was here.
It should be clear by this point that I'd endeavoured to have one "headline" event of interest for each evening of the visit--and for the last night, that was A Maze in Corn, a little south of the city, which I hadn't been to in a long time. We got there around dusk, somewhat later than anticipated, so we asked if there'd be enough time to check out both the Haunted Forest and the maze itself (since it costs more to try both). We were assured that there would "definitely" be enough time (possibly because such an assurance meant that we'd pay more), but after waiting quite a while in a strange corral-like structure for the haunted tour to start, we gave up and headed for the maze.
Another disappointment followed when none of the promised scavenger hunt items (each relating to a different town in Manitoba) were anywhere to be found (by us, anyway) in our trek through the corn maze. The maze is admittedly extensive, and it was getting progressively darker, but we spent a good deal of time in there and covered what we considered to be a majority of the maze's tracks, so both of us felt like we'd somehow missed something really obvious about the nature of the scavenger hunt--especially when other people told me later that they'd found the items inside without much of a problem.
Returning to Winnipeg, items unscavenged, I realised that there were only a few hours left before I'd have to drop Kimberly off at the airport, so I stayed up and let her get a few hours of sleep with the knowledge that I'd be awake for the obscenely early departure call.
As you can tell, the visit was laidback, but fun, with the fact that it ended and the absence of Kimberly's husband Scott as the only parts which made me a sad panda. I really hope that his work commitments won't keep him away next time.
As you can also tell (and as I expected), a lot of the trip involved comparisons between many aspects of Canadiana and Americana, most of which I haven't even mentioned yet--everything from the dominance of Kijiji over Craigslist in Winnipeg to the nature of provincial equalisation payments to how companies sneak in a maple leaf on their Canadian logos (the middle of the McDonald's Golden Arches, the apostrophe in "Wendy's," and so on), just in case you forget what country you're in when you're dealing with them.
There was less talk of home redecoration than expected--mostly discussion of potential changes to the apartment rather than actually shopping for new decor or furniture. Kimberly and I seem to be on the same page of ideas, but we never devoted an afternoon to this sort of thing as I'd originally imagined.
On a(nother) side note, I had the rental car for an extra day on either side of the visit, and it becomes immediately clear in that sort of situation how much more oriented Winnipeg is to its entrenched car culture than it is to cyclists, pedestrians, or frequent users of public transit. I was pretty much aware of this already, but the difference in practice is astounding.
All in all, I'm happy with my first attempt at offering some Canadian hospitality here in the new(ish) place, and I can only hope my next opportunity goes at least as well. :)
Pretty relaxed, actually.
Thursday, October 1
Armed with a number of options and plans for the visit (thanks in large part to input from amysisson, dontmentionlove, foryoursplendor, ninthscompanion, twinkiegirl, and others offline), but concerned about the cold weather, I picked up Kimberly at the airport on a rainy afternoon and immediately began the Canadian indoctrination process with a visit to Tim Hortons. ;)
Although I already knew that "double-double" was a piece of Canadian slang, I was quickly surprised to learn that apparently, "parkade" is also a uniquely Canadian term, describing what (I'm told) Americans call "parking decks," and I was surprised yet again later when I discovered that using "suck" as a noun (e.g. "she's a total suck") is a Canadian thing. (Despite the rhyme, there are no video games to be played in a typical parkade, but the airport itself does have an actual arcade on the second floor.) Even when you pay a lot of attention to American culture and notice its differences, these little things can still startle you.
Since this was Kimberly's first significant visit to Canada, though, I was conscious of the more obvious differences (like the rampant bilingualism on our signage), and I was aware of Kimberly's linguistic interests, so I'd even gotten her Only in Canada, You Say: A Treasury of Canadian Language in case more background was needed than I could provide.
I took a creative route from the airport which allowed me to give something of an "Edgar Tour" through Winnipeg, featuring notable personal landmarks (like my high school, for example), but once we got to my place and Kimberly unpacked, we had a bunch of time to chill and catch up before heading out to Haunted Winnipeg Investigates, a ghost tour which proved...somewhat less investigative than either of us had hoped.
(While we waited for the tour to start, Kimberly also had the opportunity to try another local delicacy, Old Dutch ketchup chips.)
Another one of those differences I wouldn't normally notice is the predominance of animal imagery to be found around here--from Canadian coinage (of course) to how the levels in the parkade were identified--and as a symbol of Manitoba, the bison is particularly common. (Unfortunately, we didn't see any of the MTS commercials with bison in them during this visit.) When we stopped at the Manitoba Legislative Building during the ghost tour, Kimberly was keen to be seen with the bronze bison who flank the Grand Staircase, but my photo didn't make this especially clear:
After the tour was over, the only restaurant I definitely knew was going to be open for such a late dinner was Papa George's in Osborne Village. (We might've been able to squeeze in a meal at Dessert Sinsations, which had come previously recommended, but I didn't realise at the time that it was open late on Thursdays.) I initially found this option convenient, if unremarkable, but Kimberly was surprisingly impressed with the size of the portions there, especially given the price.
Despite it being later than late by the time we got home, we ended up finding a marathon of different editions of Top Model on Fashion Television: The Channel featuring not just Canada's Next Top Model, but also Britain's Next Top Model and Australia's Next Top Model--all of which I knew would appeal to Kimberly as a reality-television connoisseur--so we ended up watching those in a compare-and-contrast exercise until we couldn't stay awake any longer.
(Canada benefits in general where television is concerned by getting programmes from throughout the English-speaking world, so we often get to see American versions of such series alongside their foreign counterparts, but Canadian editions of reality shows tend to be limited to skill-based competitions. As such, we have Canadian Idol, Project Runway Canada, So You Think You Can Dance Canada, and so forth, but no Big Brother Canada, for example. Two other series Kimberly didn't get to watch were Canada's Worst Driver and Canada's Worst Handyman, adapted from similar British series.)
Friday, October 2
We didn't have specific plans until the evening, and the weather had taken a turn for the decent, so Kimberly and I spent much of the day travelling around on foot, even though she'd sprained her ankle recently--she assured me it was fine and there hadn't been any problems the day before. We started going north on Osborne Street (a main thoroughfare which runs by my place) while I tried to offer some personal or cultural observations about whatever we happened to pass on our way. (Sample Factoid: "Did you know Winnipeg is the Slurpee Capital of the World?") Once we were in Osborne Village again, we stopped in at Gags Unlimited, which was already in full-on Hallowe'en Mode.
Kimberly was taken aback at the row of Barack Obama masks which greeted us as we walked in, especially given that we also ended up seeing masks for both Clintons, Reagan, and Nixon, but not a single mask related to a Canadian politician such as current Prime Minister (and part-time LEGO-impersonator) Stephen Harper. To a Canadian, the lack of such masks isn't going to seem that weird--I mean, would Stephen Harper even want to be Stephen Harper for Hallowe'en?--but the predominance of American culture (including political culture) in this country can seem rather strange when first encountered.
Lunch was at Stella's Café & Bakery, the local eatery recommended most when I asked about restaurants, and large portions were again in evidence--as were "Hardcore Brownies," the first in a number of items labelled with adjectives like "Hardcore" or "X-Treme," which I'd never noticed was such a common thing in Winnipeg. Having said that, I had to tell Kimberly that the number of places offering tattoos and piercings on Osborne is atypical of the city as a whole...we're not that hardcore.
Having reached the Legislature again after lunch, we had the option of going straight downtown or taking the Assiniboine Riverwalk to The Forks, a popular local destination (particularly for tourists), and chose the latter. By the time we got there, we were in the mood for gaming--and my existing board games and such are scattered about rather than centralised in a rec room the way I want them to be--so after doing a general tour and picking up some Canadian items for Kimberly's family back home, I thought we should search for Fluxx, which a lot of local people I know like to play but (for some reason) I've never owned myself.
Usually, I would turn to Kite and Kaboodle at The Forks to solve this sort of problem, given their excellent selection, but when they didn't have any version of the card game, I did something (apparently) very surprising: I consulted a phone book. It seemed so strange and anachronistic that I not only knew where to find one at The Forks but would think of it as a natural option to look for other game outlets that Kimberly took a photo for posterity. I noted a couple of possibilities, but we resolved to halt the quest for the moment because those specific evening plans were rapidly approaching.
Since the only people who expressed interest in joining us for anything after I threw it out there were members of my family, Kimberly and I met up with my brother Tony for dinner before going to see Zombieland, which was actually shot in Kimberly's current home state of Georgia. (The movie is great, by the way, and I've already sat through it twice.) I was grateful for the opportunity to take her to SilverCity Polo Park, the same cinema used for many an übergroup outing--though it occurred to me later that we could've gotten a gaming fix by playing air hockey or some arcade games there, but didn't. Still, Kimberly was suitably impressed by the ability to eat frogurt at a movie theatre.
My favourite part of the actual screening, though? After the (obligatory) trailer for The Twilight Saga: New Moon in front of the movie, one girl near the front applauded, and she was met by a chorus of booing, followed by applause for the booing. :)
Saturday, October 3
Still wanting to get our game on, I phoned around searching for a store that might have Fluxx, but no one I rang had a deck to spare, so we caved and went to Toys "R" Us to look for a possible alternative, eventually coming across the tile-based Carcassonne. ("Especially good for two players!") Since we were right there already, we also stopped in at the nearby Party Stuff to check out possible Hallowe'en gear. Upon returning home, we had enough time to give Carcassonne a try before going out for the evening, and it is a good two-player game--not overly time-consuming, but involving elements of strategy which keep you thinking.
Our main plan, however, was to check out that night's bonspiel at the St Vital Curling Club. Kimberly is a big curling fan, but had never actually seen it live, while Winnipeg has around twenty-five separate curling clubs. Ideally, I would've liked to sign us up for a Learn-to-Curl class, but it was slightly too early in the curling season for that. :/ Nevertheless, I wasn't worried about being able to find some hard-hurrying action to watch as spectators. (This was the view from our seats.) I'm not sure what other people there might have thought about our watching what was basically just a local match, but we had a good time, grabbed some snackage, and then checked out the cover band playing mostly songs from the Sixties--fitting, since the members of the band looked to be in their sixties--in what was possibly the most Manitoban activity we could've chosen on a Saturday night. (As Justin Timberlake would say, this was Classic 'Peg.)
It was still relatively early, even when all that was done, so after Kimberly questioned why I wasn't on a curling team--and I told her she could at least be on a virtual curling team by getting Deca Sports for the Wii--we also stopped in at The Billabong Bar & Bistro, an Australian-themed place in Osborne Village (which there was a certain logic in trying, since we originally met in Sydney), before watching that night's Saturday Night Live (Ryan Reynolds/Lady Gaga) at my place and marvelling at how Reynolds seemed to phone it in despite his comedic chops. I took his performance and threw it on the ground!
Sunday, October 4
Now that we had a ready gaming option, we could start the day off with a couple of Carcassonne rematches at the kitchen table before heading back to The Forks. The weather had started to get chilly again, but there were some (temporary) amusement park rides set up there, so we took a ride on the Ferris wheel (allowing me to point out some more Winnipeg landmarks from the top), nurtured our natural competitive streaks on the bumper cars, and checked out Sugar Mountain Express, a pair of train cars converted into a confectionery store. We didn't get anything there, but eventually managed to score another local food favourite, Clodhoppers, which several people had reminded me Kimberly should try whilst she was here.
It should be clear by this point that I'd endeavoured to have one "headline" event of interest for each evening of the visit--and for the last night, that was A Maze in Corn, a little south of the city, which I hadn't been to in a long time. We got there around dusk, somewhat later than anticipated, so we asked if there'd be enough time to check out both the Haunted Forest and the maze itself (since it costs more to try both). We were assured that there would "definitely" be enough time (possibly because such an assurance meant that we'd pay more), but after waiting quite a while in a strange corral-like structure for the haunted tour to start, we gave up and headed for the maze.
Another disappointment followed when none of the promised scavenger hunt items (each relating to a different town in Manitoba) were anywhere to be found (by us, anyway) in our trek through the corn maze. The maze is admittedly extensive, and it was getting progressively darker, but we spent a good deal of time in there and covered what we considered to be a majority of the maze's tracks, so both of us felt like we'd somehow missed something really obvious about the nature of the scavenger hunt--especially when other people told me later that they'd found the items inside without much of a problem.
Returning to Winnipeg, items unscavenged, I realised that there were only a few hours left before I'd have to drop Kimberly off at the airport, so I stayed up and let her get a few hours of sleep with the knowledge that I'd be awake for the obscenely early departure call.
As you can tell, the visit was laidback, but fun, with the fact that it ended and the absence of Kimberly's husband Scott as the only parts which made me a sad panda. I really hope that his work commitments won't keep him away next time.
As you can also tell (and as I expected), a lot of the trip involved comparisons between many aspects of Canadiana and Americana, most of which I haven't even mentioned yet--everything from the dominance of Kijiji over Craigslist in Winnipeg to the nature of provincial equalisation payments to how companies sneak in a maple leaf on their Canadian logos (the middle of the McDonald's Golden Arches, the apostrophe in "Wendy's," and so on), just in case you forget what country you're in when you're dealing with them.
There was less talk of home redecoration than expected--mostly discussion of potential changes to the apartment rather than actually shopping for new decor or furniture. Kimberly and I seem to be on the same page of ideas, but we never devoted an afternoon to this sort of thing as I'd originally imagined.
On a(nother) side note, I had the rental car for an extra day on either side of the visit, and it becomes immediately clear in that sort of situation how much more oriented Winnipeg is to its entrenched car culture than it is to cyclists, pedestrians, or frequent users of public transit. I was pretty much aware of this already, but the difference in practice is astounding.
All in all, I'm happy with my first attempt at offering some Canadian hospitality here in the new(ish) place, and I can only hope my next opportunity goes at least as well. :)