Volume 6: Pete in Canada Part 13. Beaver Las Canada. 1 Continent, 2 Blokes, Infinite Weird Sh*t
Day 29 – Calgary
Today was all about finding some tents and an esky for the upcoming road trip. The day before in my hours of freedom I’d only noticed the one camping store which was selling 3 men tents for over $300. That seemed excessive, so we continued the search for a better-valued tent. As for the esky, explaining that concept to the staff in the countless stores we went into was as difficult as travelling back 500 years in time and asking if ye olde storeowner sold Televisions. I knew esky was an Australian brand name, so tried to avoid asking specifically for an esky, instead asking if they sold ice boxes coupled with motioning with my hands a small box and finishing the sentence with “you know, the small box you put ice in and it cools your beer?”. After that constant game of charades we were constantly told they didn’t sell them, although I’m sure in half the instances they still had no idea what we where looking for. In one store they suggested Walmart. Having enjoyed the Walmart and Walmart Superstore experience a few years earlier in the US, I felt quietly confident it’s there that we would find our esky, along with any firearms or baby care products.
Now fully focused on just getting some tents, we headed a few blocks further to a camping co-op. There the price of a 3 man tent fell to $205. That was still too extreme and would mean we could only afford 1 tent, forcing us to share the 1 tent and the associated dangers of 2 grown men in a confined space that were sure to be farting a lot after a big night on the grog. Dejected, and almost at a Morgan Freeman Shawshank Redemption level of no hope, we crossed the street to the last remaining camping store in town. This camping store was to be our preverbal Tim Robbins sewerage pipe to freedom, or in our case cheap tents. In an incredible stroke of luck this camping store was having a tent special. Only $40 per tent! Yes indeed, the only farts we would be smelling on this camping trip would be our own! We bought a tent each, picked up some other supplies, with another highlight being the foldaway chairs being half price at only $14 each.
Proud as punch, we took our newly acquired prizes back to the hostel. On the way back we walked past the recycle centre and a number of homeless people cashing in trolley loads of cans. They would have seen our tents as great holiday homes, a chance to leave the busy hustle and bustle of the recycled can business and the stresses associated with living at their usual place of residence, namely the park out the front of our hostel. Let’s hope karma never finds me after that last comment.
After dumping our camping goods, we headed back into town and stumbled across “Expo Latino” in a square off 7th Avenue. We were both still dog tired from the night before, so we sat down, chilled out, and enjoyed the festivities, namely watching various dances and dodging the ridiculously high number of bees. One such dance finally fused together 2 forms of dancing that I feel have been screaming out for years to be married; break dancing and salsa. It was a marriage made in heaven, one that could only be achieved in a city with such a high level of crack cocaine use. At one particular time we were encouraged over the loudspeaker to buy raffle tickets to pay for these fine festivities. I was tempted to yell back “HOW ABOUT TAKING A CUT FROM THE 25 FOOD STALLS?” littered around Expo Latino but didn’t have the energy. It would appear too much thought was put into getting the break dancing salsa correct, and not enough into the logistics of running such an ambitious event that dared to marry the 2. It was about 10 minutes after the call to buy raffle tickets that a middle aged Latino woman was on stage asking for volunteers to sell food and drinks, with the promise to pay those that helped out. The abundant number of homeless people picking up cans didn’t even bat an eyelid, instead choosing the career option to remain their own boss (not such a bad a idea on this day as they were collecting heaps of cans).
With our fill of Latino culture, and the chance to see break dancing salsa (a day we will no doubt recount many times to our grandchildren), we left Expo Latino, purchased a six pack from a bar that’s activities included playing pool and breaking pool cues on peoples heads, and headed back to the hostel. On the walk back I noticed that “P” on the neon sign for the Calgary Public Library was not illuminated, and how much funnier it would have been if instead it was only the “L” in the word Public that was not working.
We enjoyed the 6 pack in the TV room, met a few people, while working out the itinerary for this forth coming road trip on a giant fold out map. After finishing the beers we tidied ourselves up and headed back into the town to check out the nightlife. I wasn’t overly fired up, but didn’t want to miss the opportunity of the chance for a night of weird sh*t on a Saturday night. We went to Ceili’s, but it was a shadow of it’s former self from the night before. The place was empty. The most likely cause of this is that a lot of the locals’ head away for the weekend to take advantage of the 4 minutes of sunlight this region receives a year.
As Ceili’s wasn’t really pumping, we kicked on to a huge venue called Cowboys just one block away. Inside Cowboys is a massive dance floor, and when your not on the dance floor you can receive “Hooter Shooters” from the roaming female bar staff. A Hooter Shooter is pretty much what the name implies, with a bar chick climbing a ladder, pouring a shot down your throat, finished with an “outboard motor” between the girls breasts. One such surgically enhanced lass (while they were doing her boobs, they surely could have found some time to give her some eyebrows) insisted I do one with her as she wanted to do one in front of her parents. I initially thought she was joking, but nope, there they were…talking to Brad. Brad spent quite some time talking to her mother, who revealed that her daughter had 2 degrees (one from clown college, one from the Ponds Institute?) and that she was making more money working at Cowboys than what she would make in a job that used the skills she gained while getting her 2 degrees. I politely declined, as her lack of eyebrows was such a big distraction that I wasn’t even talking to her chest when I replied.
At a place called Cowboys you have to expect redneck music, so in between the top 40 music the DJ put on 4 or 5 consecutive country songs. Like a chip being thrown to a seagull, all the rednecks in the house swarmed to the dance floor and something in the vicinity of 2 or 3 hundred people started line dancing. It was quite a site to see as these rednecks danced with military precision, all in time all in sync. This awesome sight blew me away. I knew that I would not be able to top this moment, so shortly after I suggested we leave.
Got home just after midnight, and counted line dancing rednecks to send me off to sleep.
Day 30 – Calgary
What better way to start the day after the surreal experience of seeing a few hundred rednecks dance in time then to walk past a walking answer to “what would I get if I mixed Amish culture with someone who looks like they’re on their way to a ‘Three amigos’ movie convention?”. I’d noticed these 3 or 4 guys the day before and just assumed that some of the crack pipe fumes from the homeless camped out the front of my room window had floated in and affected my perception of reality. I’d refrained from punching one of them in the arm to see if they were real the day before, but today’s citing confirmed their existence. There they were, dressed head to toe in black suits with big black hats that may well have been stolen from the Three Amigos film set. Not wrong, just different. What was wrong, was coming back into my room after a shower and being greeted by some shirtless bloke with more body hair than a sasquatch. The only distinct feature he had that stopped me from yelling “Help! Bigfoot!” was the beret he was wearing. In all the dodgy footage I’ve seen of Bigfoot over the years, I’ve never seen one wearing a beret so I figured the mammal sitting before me was human.
Coming back to the reality I’m more used to, we met our new roommate, some Frenchy who was on a break from studying in Paris. He was on his own, so we did the right thing and offered to let him hang with us for the day. He acknowledged our Top blokeness and accepted the offer. Having come to this agreement, we headed to Calgary’s redneck equivalent of the Muslims Mecca; Stampede Park. Each year for 10 days rednecks make their pilgrimage to the Calgary Stampede with many of the holy experiences happening at Stampede Park. It doesn’t quite attract the millions that the Hajj does, but 100,000 ten galloon hat wearing rednecks come to pay homage to anything with 4 legs that can be ridden or lassoed (or 2 legs in the case of their cousins). It was as Brad and I were taking photos of the Stampede Park entrance and the great mural on a nearby building paying tribute to the “Romping Rangeland Rumpus” that is The Stampede that Frenchy discovered he’d left his camera back in the hostel. He panicked when he realised he’d left it on his bed fearing that someone might steal it (although, it did have a sasquatch to protect it). He said aver voir and went back to the hostel, while Brad and I continued our journey into Stampede Park.
Our first experience in the redneck holy lands was watching a beauty contest for horses. Without the swimsuit section or interview section (a shame because maybe one these horses may have known how to solve world hunger) coupled with the constant smell of horse dung it didn’t take us long to search for some other activity. That activity was to be gambling and drinking beer. Deeper inside the park there was a trots race meet so Brad and I settled in with some beers for a few races. In one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen, Brad ordered a beer and then proceeded to watch the barman squeeze tomato sauce into it. Tour life is all about embracing cultural differences but to be frank this cultural difference is quite fucked up. In what was becoming a surreal day where I’d walked past the 3 Amigos, confronted a sasquatch, I was now seeing tomato sauce mixed with beer. Up was down, east was west, and cats were friends with dogs (playing poker is fun so I could see how that could happen). Brad stunned, somehow managed to get some words out of his mouth that were enough to say he wanted a tomato sauce free beer. The barman from this parallel universe then went and poured Brad a standard beer with no condiments.
Having had a few beers and lost on a couple of races we decided to try one more race. Now, the thing you need to accept about being on tour is that your luck can increase by at least 2 fold. For one thing, you’re lucky enough to be able to afford to be able to go to far off countries. Secondly, we hadn’t been robbed by crack addicts, and thirdly we hadn’t been attacked by a sasquatch despite near misses on both counts. It was this sort of luck on tour that had seen me win on a 60 to 1 horse race in Monaco. Embrace your good fortune and accept that weird sh*t can happen when you’re on tour. I was about to embrace that weird sh*t in the form of a horse paying $76.20 for the win. Stuck in line behind 2 bloody Americans who took something just short of forever to make their bets, I foolishly let sound reason enter my head. This is something you don’t want to do on tour. At over $70 for the win my stupid sound reasoning was starting to grow some voice as the effects of beer wore off as these 2 bloody Americans took an eternity make a decision. By now sound reasoning had stormed my brain and seized control after overpowering the now weakening beer led defences. By the time I got to the betting window I instead went with some horse paying around $11. I tell you what; nothing will make you curse out 2 Americans more (except maybe for having them drop a bomb in your village on a “chemical weapons plant” which looks a lot like a ice cream factory) than seeing a horse paying $76.20 fly round the outside to a comfortable win. I couldn’t believe it. I was going to have $5 on that donkey which would’ve seen the $381 payday wisely invested back into the economy in the form beer purchases. Bloody Americans! If they’re not bombing your ice cream factory they’re destroying your great gambling stories. The pain of seeing that race forced me to hang out for 1 more race. By now I had embraced the weird sh*t, and invested my $5 on a horse paying over $20. When that horse blew a 5 length lead off the last bend, with the kiss of death coming when Brad said “I think you’ve got this one Pete”, we cut our losses and went on the search of the esky.
We caught the C-train on the Whitehorse line to Marlborough. This wasn’t a Marlborough country filled with smoking cowboys, but more of a shopping mall country. It was there we found Walmart and the esky that had eluded us for so many days. It was the last one on sale, so while I’d had no luck at the track, I’d more importantly had luck in the esky department. We stocked up on other camping supplies like pillows, cups, lamps, a lighter, and headed back to the hostel content on having finally found an esky. While waiting at the Marlborough train station we were greeted by a homeless fellow trying to offload some baseball caps of various Canadian NHL teams. He said “he had a friend who worked in a factory who got him the hats” (what? Couldn’t get you a job as well?). When he said he was selling them for only $5, while they allegedly retailed for $30, we couldn’t resist the purchase. It wasn’t so much the great value, but the fact the hat would have the accompanying story of “I bought it off a homeless guy at a train station in Canada”. Brad took the piss by marvelling at the fine craftwork of the stitching, something the homeless guy used in his next sales pitch when we were on the train. Also on the train were some ticket inspectors. After they looked at our tickets they bought it to our attention that we were now 3 hours into a 2 hour ticket. In true the tradition that got us out of a fine on that New Jersey beach, we played the role of stupid tourist to perfection and again avoided a fine.
Back at the hostel we chilled in the TV room in the basement, watching a documentary on Crystal Meth and then a different one on alcohol abuse. While Brad was out of the TV room 2 attractive English chicks came in asking if they could watch Shrek. In true Peter Hart tradition I easily gave into the request of a couple of hot chicks and we were soon watching Shrek. Brad returned to the TV room and was keen to spend our last night in Calgary out on the town. Torn between trying my luck with the attractive English chicks and one last night on the town, I foolishly choose the latter option. We headed back to Ceili’s for one more time and did well to avoid being hit by the tumbleweeds in what was now a ghost town. We had 2 pints, watched some Family Guy, then gave up and went back to the hostel. Not wanting to purchase any crack cocaine or risk being robbed by someone who did, we caught a taxi the 10 blocks back to the Hostel.
A quiet finish to an interesting day.
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