Rich and Strange Aeons

Woke up at 1pm, argued about prison abolition, and Zoomed a Roberta Rogow concert, so not exactly an exploration day. Did eventually leave, and despite the windy cold, was glad to be in motion. Walks are good.

The local branch library is open to 8:30 PM every weeknight. This seems unusual to me, though between travel and covid it's been a few years since I patronized public libraries, and many years since I patronized a branch library. (In Cambridge I was 20 minutes from branch or central, so I went to central.) Seems like it just opened for Sundays, 1-5 or so. Masking was mostly good, though bad at one end of the library.

Had a couple pieces of spicy dark meat chicken from Popeye's. I wasn't expecting much, but it was pretty decent for deep fried battered chicken. I remember Popeye's as being unmemorable, but I might have had their popcorn chicken nuggets rather than actual leg and thigh.

Had my first oysters. 6 malpeques. Decent, but expensive, like $1/40 calories. I think I prefer mussels, though I don't feel comfortable steaming mussels in someone else's house.

Long walk today, east along Bloor to Koreatown. But first, a note on the weather.

The last couple days have been 6 C whenever I check my weather app, but this has varied in feel. Yesterday afternoon I was prudent, wore my jacket over my hoodie, plus my winter hat, and still felt a bit chilly, especially in my legs, which usually are pretty tough. I'd been fasting all day, I dunno if that's part of it. Still, I had my walk. Coming back with Greek takeout, walking west I think into the wind, felt *particularly* chilly, and I put on my gloves (which lurk in the jacket pockets, unused since Feb 2019.)

The noon walk today was comfortable in my hoodie and sun hat. Definitely more sun, maybe less wind.

At 3:30 today the same outfit felt chillier, but I wanted to challenge myself, and figured it couldn't get cold enough to endanger me. After a while of movement, it stopped feeling chilly.

Conclusions: non-committal shrug. I'd still like to flee south to Barcelona, even if Canada is like the best covid country I can go to.

Anyway, Koreatown. Basically a long stretch of Bloor. Lots of Korean restaurants, some Asian markets. I noticed multiple fruit/produce shops, and there are a couple near each other on College too, Toronto (or Canada) just plain has a lot of them. Nothing too exciting about the area but I marked a lot of highly rated restaurants to maybe go to or pick up from.

Random note: Toronto seems to call convenience stores "variety stores". I'm still not used to them not being 'deppaneur'.

Other random note: At least three different parks here are sunken into the ground. Either Toronto had a bunch of pits that got turned into parks, or it's a design choice. Maybe to hide the street from people in the park? I wonder what it's like in the summer, if you're being hidden from breezes too. There was a sign in Quebec City about French gardens being sunken, but I'm not sure it's the same thing.

I ended up dining in an empty Japanese (probably Korean pretending to be Japanese, given 'bulkoki' on the menu) at 4:30, though it started filling up after that, including with an elderly woman coughing without a mask on. Yaaaay.

Bought some frozen dumplings.

brin_bellway had suggested cheaper groceries could be found at a No Frills in the mall. I'd been going to walk home, but walking 38 minutes to a grocery store felt too much; happily, the subway was *right there*. So I zipped over. "No Frills" makes me thing of something small and limited. It's huuuuuuuuuge. I can't say if it's cheaper overall, but did seem to have the cheapest bread I've seen in Canada, while still purporting to have flavors. And the store is about as far as the Metro store, though with a more residential walk -- OTOH, also less walk down those depressingly long blocks.

Hopefully I'll finish my work tonight, then I can go tackle Kensington Market and Chinatown tomorrow.

Cold and rainy today, but I planned to spend most of my time in a streetcar, and did. This is 100% genuine streetcar, running in a traffic lane; was okay on Sunday but must be hell in rush hour. Plus having to cross a lane of traffic to get on/off. (US streetcar-like things IME tend to be more approaching light rail, with secure right of way and passenger platforms -- still get stopped by red lights, though.) Still, nice way to see a good chunk of the city.

Masking was good, and like half the seats are marked "don't sit here" for distancing. There was a token/cash fare machine.

Twice someone got on, then got off again before the streetcar moved. ???

Thrice there was honking which I suspected was some driver honking at the streetcar, as if that would accomplish anything. Can't prove it, though.

506 to East Chinatown, walked around, had some bad dumplings from a bakery, better Vietnamese food, back to College station to reload my Presto card, which I'm told cannot take passes. Feh.

TTC pass pricing is high. You need 5 fares to have a day pass make sense, and 49 fares for a monthly pass. I'm used to US prices of 38-39 fares for a monthly pass, meaning anyone who commutes to work 5x a week might as well get a pass and be able to ride as much as they want.

Also the monthly pass is *monthly*, not 28 or 30 days from purchase. So wouldn't make sense for me anyway, coming in the middle of a month. Reminds me of Montreal's weekly pass, which outright starts on a Monday rather than being a 7-day pass.

Toronto is more American than Quebec: there was a camp of homeless tents in Allan Gardens park. Montreal had homeless people but I never encountered such clusters.

It's been a quiet week in Montreal; I haven't left Monkland/Villa Maria, despite having 9 transit fares to use. I thought about it yesterday, to get mugicha and dim sum, but everywhere I want to go is 30+ minutes away, and I found little enthusiasm for it just to doing a bit of shopping. And today it's raining. Which might be all the more reason to spend time on a train, but meh. Bit behind on work too, and waiting for laundry... Though I've barely seen the 'underground Montreal' this visit, I should maybe check it out properly.

Shogun changes all the names. A friend pointed out that this means I don't necessarily know how it ends, perhaps the not-Tokugawa doesn't actually become shogun?

Finished Shirobako. Still fun. Reading Bakuman, the manga about making manga, now. The romance plot is hilariously terrible, even granting that the people involved are shy romantic 14 year olds. Well, 15 now. A friend said the writer wasn't good at romance in Death Note either, though my dim memories are that romance there was scarce and unhealthy, not unrealistic. She agreed that maybe he's not great at female characters in general.

I procrastinated on buying a plane ticket to Lisbon, and now it's notably more expensive. Feh. Also Portugal covid rates are ticking up a bit; a source says that Spain seems to be the only heavily vacced European country not throwing masks and caution to the wind. All the more reason to just go there I suppose, but there are no direct flights from Canada. Grrr.

I'm in Quebec City now, as of a few days ago. The train ride was okay. Luggage wasn't as strict as a Not Just Bikes video made me fear: someone did measure my big bag, but supposedly for 'statistics'; they didn't weigh it in my site; they did take it away to be checked, which on boarding seemed reasonable, there's not a lot of luggage room. Seats were padded, curved, non-inclining; most of them were raised, but mine wasn't. Cart service provided food. Clean bathroom, no water tap. Possibly a dining/lounge car I didn't walk forward enough to find. Power, didn't try the wifi.

I'm staying in the Old City, within more or less intact city walls. Pros: very easy access to lots of touristy stuff, good views of the water, old buildings, exercise via hills. Cons: obligate exercise via hills, little cheap food. There are a few cheap restaurants: Subway, McDonald's, a shawarma place. But most tend to US$16 burgers on the low end. I don't think there's a single decent grocery story in the place; I've found three convenience stores, two of them nearly useless for groceries, one of them very limited. There's a half decent store 10 minutes away outside the wall, but very downhill, and beyond an annoying intersection. In small shops, there's a cafe that may double as a bakery. But if I wanted an easy food life, I should have been 20-30 minutes west, near Rue Cartier, with two full supermarkets, and a shopping gallery with boulangerie, fromagerie, poissonerie, charcuterie... In Montreal I quickly found cheap fried chicken and such places, and had to remind myself to go get groceries; here I haven't eaten out yet at all, apart from some fish I got at the remote poissonerie.

I haven't timed it, but the Old City feels maybe 10 minutes across, wall to cliff. Perhaps longer in the orthogonal distance, if only because you're going straight up hill.

So far I've just walked around a lot, stumbling upon a plaza, an old fort museum that was closing, the Governor's Promenade, the outside of the Citadel, and the wall itself.

To explain my snarky title, the Old City was obviously built long before the car. What would have been wide streets for people, and perhaps moderate ones for carriages, have been given over to a lane of parking and a lane of car traffic, with narrow sidewalks left for humans. Despite narrowness that feels like it should be low traffic, my street (Sainte Anne) is rather busy, often with a car every few seconds. At least my street is paved with asphalt; some have brick, which probably slows the cars down but makes them even louder.

Beyond the wall, the city likes its big intersections to be car-car-pedestrian scramble -- with only 20 seconds allocated for the scramble.

My apartment is a decent size, and less unpleasantly quirky and dark than my Montreal one, though I think perhaps not vacuumed well before me, that or I've somehow tracked in a ton of junk in a few days. Sound isolation isn't great but people are usually quiet at night, so far. The kitchen is way bigger than my old one, or the one before that. I have an actual separate bedroom, not a studio, though the BR is small; separation matters for isolating you from fridge noise, among other things, though this fridge is a lot quieter than the last one anyway.

Going for a walk really can help. Helped in January, when there was a catastrophic blowup in my life. And tonight, for pettier causes. After losing my last Airbnb to house sale, I reserved this place for 5 weeks. But the old place had a 30 day minimum, so turnover wasn't that high. This place has 5 rooms and high turnover, which is *really fun* in a pandemic. But tonight's thing was that I'd anticipated a quiet Thanksgiving -- fewer people traveling, I'd been told last week no one had booked it, and so I figured it was just me and the other long term guest, a very quiet girl.

But last minute bookings happen. Two nights ago, a couple and a baby, in the room that shares a very thin wall with mine. Okay. Today they left, yay... and then *four* people move into the same room, lots of stomping, cooking too.

It's not like I can blame anyone. They're renting a room just like I do (though why are they traveling, and for only five days?) and the landlady is of course making money, it's not like she promised no one would check in over the holiday.

But having my expectations, shattered, LOUDLY, really got to me. I was already on edge from the host puttering around cleaning for two hours -- she's diligent, probably natural for her to do so as soon as someone checks out, but it's the day before Thanksgiving, take a break! And now I know why she had to: more guests -- and then, bam.

I feel calmer after the walk. Also after meeting some of them and telling them about the THIN WALLS AND CREAKY FLOOR.

I'd also been mad about them not wearing masks in the kitchen despite being Asians speaking Asian language, but they were apologetic enough when I brought it up and wearing them now.

New policy: when renting long term private rooms, try to find ones that have a 30-ish day minimum, to avoid this turnover problem.

I guess I've noticed my irritation before, but not as strongly. Pandemic doesn't help. Thin walls don't help. And it hasn't been much of an issue in a while: Most of my places for a while have been entire (Osaka, for less than I'm paying for a room here), the only guest room, or multiple guest rooms but fairly isolated (like an ornate garret I stayed in in Berkeley).

Well, two Saturdays from now I start splurging on an entire bungalow for six weeks. Expensive but I started figuring it was worth it to avoid people, especially the sort of people doing short term travel now. Spend on rent instead of medical bills.

Wow, I haven't had an airbnb tag before.

S wanted her living room back and I didn't have anywhere urgent to go as I look for a new job, so I moved over to a Craigslist sublet in Hollywood for the month. My housemate Alex is a composer from Germany, very pleasant to talk to. Given that S's family has me redefining my scale of possible introversion, that's a nice change.

I've mostly been exploring locally, but I took the Red Line one station over to get to TJ, and a couple stations back today to get home after heading west for a while.

* There are open seats at 5 PM. A subway that isn't standing room only at rush hour?! Feels wrong. It's not like it's super high frequency either, just 10 minute headways (which is pretty slow for rush hour!)

* Audible but not visual stop announcements.

* Line map inside cars but no system maps.

Other notes:

* cheap Thai food; lunch specials for $5.50.

* Barnsdall Art Park, including the LA Municipal Art Gallery, which has an exhibition celebrating loitering.

* I grew up reading various books of essays, e.g. by Lewis Thomas, Loren Eisley, Russell Baker, and others, but haven't read such in a long time. The exhibit suggests The Book of Delights by Ross Gay. What I sampled was interesting, and a black essayist would add a bit of diversity to my reading.

* West eventually brings me into Hollywood 'proper': Walk of Fame, Mann's Chinese, Ripley museum, Madame Tussaud's, etc. A few cosplayers on the sidewalk: Vader, Joker, blue person from Avatar. Lots of Scientology buildings around the area, I guess it probably started in LA?

* A two-story strip mall, which at least makes more efficient use of the parking lot in the middle, though I wonder if it's in violation of the modern parking codes.

* Daiso, basically a 100 yen store. Default price $1.50, but lots of prices in yen, and scaled so that obviously maps to 100 yen. That's with a big import markup, by exchange rate 100 yen is 91 cents right now. They had bottled hojicha though it did not match my memories of Japan.

* Years ago I used to go out for Thai every week with Jane, usually ordering some curry. I never did sort out what kinds of curry were what, and the Web was young and nascent then. Since, I've tended to order basil rice, drunken noodle, larb, or pad thai, and not concerned myself with curries. But they're some of the cheap lunch options, so I finally looked them up, 26 years late...

* This place doesn't have a microwave. I haven't lacked one since some of my stays in Europe. Kind of crimps my usual approach to cooking leafy greens and broccoli, not to mention warming up leftovers.

I've actually just stayed in a lot. Part of it was staying off my ankle, part of it is minimizing encounters with the no-sidewalk zone. Also I've had a 3BR house to myself for the past week, so I was enjoying that! Another guest finally arrived today, though.

Highlights:

* A secular book Meetup I found at the last minute, which was discussing 3 books 2 of which I'd read before (Lies My Teacher Told Me, Sapiens). The discussion was tons of fun.

* Foster Botanic Gardens. Only went for half an hour before closing time (so free!) but seemed pretty cool. Not huge but decent size, and very well labeled. $5 to get in, vs. free in Australia, but hey cheap. Not like the $20 museum.

* 7-11 here is more like the ones in Japan than the ones in Australia, even some of the same products. I finally had some of their hot food and the siu mai, "pork mash" here, was suprisingly good! I liked the yakisoba too. The egg roll didn't leave a huge impression but I may try again. No bathroom, unlike the Japanese ones. That 7-11 did have more groceries too, like bread, milk, and some meats.

* I met up with an alum for lunch, had a pretty good conversation.

* I bought some discount seafood, the tuna (I'm pretty sure, wasn't actually labeled) smelled funny but tasted fine when cooked. Then I made some very tasty shrimp.

* Experimented with making pancakes from scratch, unleavaned, just flour water egg oil salt. It was... edible.

* I entered my first Wal-mart. Hey, they usually don't enter city cores or transit zones, but there's one downtown here. Man it's big. Has one of the few public bathrooms in Honolulu.

* W told me about finding imported Shinto shrines here, and I found one. Probably the same one. Engrish lives: "How to pray... crap your hands."

* Night sky above my house can be moderately dark.

I've also walked a lot around downtown and Chinatown, as I do. This has not really been a highlight. Chinatown is pretty Skid Rowy, lots of empty stores, lots of homeless people. Sitting seems an invitation to bizarre interactions. Outside the shrine some guy with his face covered biked up and asked if I wanted to buy something. He wasn't very intelligible, and I was mostly flinching in "go away". Then yesterday I was reading outside after eating a meh bento, and this guy sat down, flipped open a book, and asked me to choose a chapter, for no intelligible reason, until I fled. Beyond that, it's just not been all that exciting.

I did find a passport place right after that though, so I now have photos to renew with.

Nov 23

Mostly stayed home reading and cooking, then went out to the St Kilda games. The cute girls from last week weren't there. :( But I got to teach people Settlers of Catan, and to my surprise ended up winning after a long game. My expansion sucked but I bought lots of dev cards, got largest army and longest road and manages to break out a bit, then build a sheep port, then get lucky rolls, trades, and the sheep port to build cities and win. Sheep were usually abundant -- rolled on 5, 6, 8, or 9! -- but I think my final trade was in fact to buy an extra sheep so I could port it into stone and build my city.

Then played more Bang! the Dice game. Couple with 5 players, couple with 7. I think the AWOL organizer had a houserule last week for 7 players, where you randomize whether there are 2 deputies or 2 renegades; I applied that and people seemed to like it. Also the one where you deal out two characters per player so people can pick an ability.

Chatted about accents and politics before going home.

Nov 24

Went to the Royal Botanic Gardens. Any actual botany was mostly wasted on me, but as experiences I liked some lake with islands (and a gondola), a rather large fern gully, and a rather small and hot tropical greenhouse. There are also various signs about plants and ecology used by the aborigines.

Went to a Meetup to see that penguin colony at dusk. The organizer messed with the times so I walked in earlier, running into a couple from the stargazing Monday, so we hung out. The penguins don't really come in until half an hour after sunset, but if you wait until it's dark and the people go away, you can have a pretty rocking penguin experience. There are streetlights so you can actually see them, also rangers with red flashlights (torches, here). They swim out before sunrise and return after sunset and spend their time deep in the water, so apparently they can't see red light and have no ability to protect their eyes from bright white light. No flash!

Tram out announced stops, tram home on the same line didn't.

17 Nov

Made travel plans (one more week in Melbourne, 2 weeks in Hawaii, LA.) Had a nice phone call with a friend. Went to another Japanese exchange meetup, more about culture than language per se, was pretty fun. Checked out the Night Noodle Market, was crowded and expensive and my nose kept running, I fled home.

18 Nov

Took the 109 to Port Melbourne beach. I preferred St Kilda beach, less any difference in the beach (which I stay off of because of sand) and more the surrounding area. Kilda had shops and a Coney island clone and penguins, Port had a cruise ship and trucks loading it. I did find a parking meter saying $5/hour or $13.30/day, which I think overrides the "thirty" I thought I heard Saturday. I had to blow my nose nearly continously and wondered what kind of pollen was blowing off the ocean!

Later I looked up my allergy results and yeah, I'm allergic to grass pollen, the levels of which are HIGH and EXTREME.

Took the 1 tram downtown. Some trams like the 96 are spiffy. Some are old and poorly air conditioned (but have opening windows) and no stop announcements and horrible narrow tram platforms in the street inches away from traffic.

Spiffy or not, tram speeds aren't that much faster than walking, if nothing goes wrong.

Checked out a Japanese market, got mugicha, no hojicha available.

Tonight's meetup was a stargazing trip, taking the train out to some stop with no obvious reason for existing. I was the only white person. Had fun talking to a couple of Korean girls on the train. This is a real train, with bathrooms, and conductor checking tickets, and 30 minute headways if that. At our gaze point the ground was pretty dark but there was still a fair bit of glow from Melbourne, especially off the clouds as they moved over. More stars than you see in a city, but sure not Dark. I did see two satellites (one of which I found), two clear shooting stars, and maybe two more. The organizer took photos. I didn't realize what the multi-exposure ones would be, I thought they'd be superimposed in one place, not 'walking'.

19 Nov

Went to the St Kilda tram stop, which is several minutes earlier than St Kilda beach. It wasn't too exciting, just a modest and not entirely thriving commercial district. Some "New Orleans" ornate buildings. Also a Madame Spaghetti gelato shop, which sounded confused, but is actually https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettieis

16 is another horrible tram, which I took to go pick up the keys of my next place. But some tram broke down and we were stuck for 15 minutes until the passengers rebelled. There were at least 11 trams backed up head to tail, and apparently everyone rebelled at once, or one tram rebelled and triggered the others. So something like 1000 people marched toward downtown Melbourne, in surprisingly good humor. I almost felt sorry for the cars trying to make a simple turn and having to wait for a human river to pass.

Tried taking another tram after my keys, but it merges onto the tracks of the broken down lines, which were jammed with late trams or something. Remember I said they were only somewhat faster than walking if nothing went wrong? Yeah, if something goes wrong then they are not at all faster than walking... I found that meditating while I walked really did reduce my annoyance levels.

Meetup was a Spanish language thing. A Colombian guy talked faster than I could understand easily, and ended up seeming annoyed with us and reading; he said he was a professor of Spanish literature back home, but is here with his girlfriend and just works as a laborer. I walked with an English woman, whose levels matched mine.

Took a bus home. Yeah, no stop announcements.

Skype call with W. Woo!

20 Nov

New place. Really hot -- 32 or 33 C -- and high grass pollen levels, so I hid indoors apart from a grocery run. I'm in a desert of reasonably priced food: the close market is an IGA which is small and overpriced, and the alternatives are IGA Xpress which are even more so. In the evening I went to a general language thing, running into the aftereffects of *another* broken own tram. The event was loud and disorganized and I fled earlier, getting some Japanese food. A possibly drunk guy walked in demanding chow mein, which the staff hadn't even heard of; they eventually sorted out that that was a Chinese dish and this was a Japanese place, and he left abashed rather than belligerent. I waggled my eyebrows at the waitress, who later asked if I'd been there before, she thought she recognized me. Was pretty friendly, I was trying to weight the odds of 'flirt' vs. 'being friendly'. Bayesian prior is against me.