[removed because it didn't fit the new site width]
create your own visited states map or write about it on the open travel guide

Another map, this time of the United States.

I’ve been on umpteen road trips through the States in my lifetime, many with my parents and brothers in our trusty Volkswagen campervan when I was growing up in Winnipeg, and — thankfully — many without them!! When I was young, most of the trips were for the purpose of visiting relatives in Michigan, Illinois, and Kentucky, but we did cover a lot of territory in the surrounding states. Counting the cousins, aunts, and uncles, it was a large-scale production for all of us to head to one place, but when you’re a kid, all you have to worry about is coercing as many relatives as possible to buy you loot — candy, souvenirs, clothing — without them cottoning on just how many of them you’ve hit up.

When we moved to B.C. when I was 13, that campervan sadly took its last journey from Winnipeg and did not survive a rather spectacular highway accident near the Saskatchewan/Alberta border. (I was spared, but my younger brother ended up in Regina hospital for a month and my dad had stitches in his head.)

You don’t see those Volkswagens much anymore, but I have fond memories of that combi-van, as they call them in Oz, the ones with the pop-up top. I travelled with a Dutch guy and a Scottish guy from Melbourne to Sydney in one of those. I’ve been told you can drive that stretch in 12 hours, but we took two weeks. See, we kept having to stop because we’d have to keep refilling the little fridge with beer. Then we’d deplete our stock in a matter of hours and would be too drunk to drive, so we’d stop again… stories for another day…

In 1988, my dad bought this great ‘83 Volvo wagon and the five of us took a road trip to Southern California. We were older then, teenagers, and not having the space of the campervan made everyone squirrelly and the three of us in the back were constantly on the verge of maiming each other.

Something possessed my father to buy a Jeep Cherokee SUV some years back — something evil I say — and I acquired the Volvo wagon. I did a big favour for him, but I got the better end of the deal, I’m certain. Seven-odd years later, I still have the Volvo, having poured a fair amount of dosh into it after 2000 when its age started to show. My mechanics in Sechelt know it intimately, but say it’s still a great vehicle and it’s built like a tank. Two years ago I was coming home from L.A. and the plane was late arriving into Sea-Tac Airport, so I was caught in a snowstorm in the middle of the night near Bellingham, spinning out on black ice on the I-5 and crashing headlong into the steel highway girders. Amazingly, very little happened to the car, and nothing happened to me. The headlights remained intact, the hood was only slightly crumpled, although the grille was nowhere to be seen — Idaho, maybe? ICBC covered it, and I made $50 out of the deal, since my deductible was $200, and the adjuster cut me a cheque for $250 for the cosmetic damage on the bumper (read: barely a scrape on the rubber). When the car’s 20 years old, you’re not about to send it off for something you can barely see. I got my money’s worth out of that Volvo, though, taking it on road trips, camping, moving furniture, people, animals, you name it. I take it on forest service roads to go camping, which is why there are so many pock marks on the windshield. My friend Serg says it looks like someone tried to assassinate me.

The Volvo’s also got another seat in the back that fits two people — kids, ideally, or stunted-growth adults — so it can legally take seven people, better than any SUV. Plus, it’s got a turning circle that I have never seen on any other vehicle — it can turn on a dime. OK, at the risk of sounding like a Volvo used car dealer, I would say it’s the ultimate all-purpose vehicle. It’s running fine, but I can’t bear to part with it, even though I’m in the car co-op now and have a transit U-Pass. So I’ve assigned my brother as the principal driver as the car is better suited to their growing family in Surrey, not here in downtown Vancouver, where it sits in a parking stall for a week at a time.

Back to the U.S. road tripping — I’ve seen a lot of the U.S., but I haven’t included the states that I mainly just passed through to get to another state. I’ve rented cars, rented cars with other people, caught lifts with other travellers, taken the Volvo, but didn’t hitchhike anywhere (only a bit in Canada, and *LOTS* in Australia and New Zealand). Also, I didn’t do any driveaways — the system where you sign up with a driveaway company and you take a vehicle from Point A to Point B — as it was never convenient for me, but I know of lots of people who’ve used them. I never seem to have enough time off to take a leisurely drive, so I usually fly. What I would like to do is drive all the way across the country, all the way to the Atlantic provinces, but I would need a helluva long time for that trip.

Now, I’m often poking fun at Kits people — the neighbours on the other side of the Burrard Street Bridge — calling them granola (I’m really asking for it now), but I actually like granola, and this stuff is the absolutely the best I’ve ever had. I don’t even put milk in it, I just eat it with a spoon. It’s 80% organic, according to this article, and for the past few weeks I’ve been including it with my weekly order of organic fruit and veg that comes every Thursday. Until yesterday, I was ordering it in smaller bags so I wouldn’t go overboard — that’s how addicted I am to the stuff — but I broke down and got it a larger bag this time… that’s like sending an alcoholic off on one of those booze cruises… save me from myself!!

We all make ‘em. We all break ‘em. It’s nearly the end of January and — surprise surprise — 2004 is bearing a stinky resemblance to the undisciplined ways of 2003, at least here at The Balcony. I didn’t make any resolutions this year, not just because it is perennially futile, but also because there’s nothing more fun than a weekend of debauchery, say, and having all those resolutions go to pot in one fell swoop.

At some point over the holidays, I even considered making up some mock resolutions to be more uncouth, self-indulgent, and adopt a more devil-may-care attitude than in 2003:

** SWEAR MORE **… not that I’m self-censorious on my blog — this is the way I talk normally — but in a recent spate of nostalgia I cast my mind back to my Australia days in the early ’90s, when I was swearing like a sailor, living communally on a campground, sharing a tent with this wacky French guy named Bruno (with the wildest dreadlocks and teeth that threatened to fall out of his mouth when he spoke his very limited Aussie slang bastardized English), laying around swimming pools and the beach all day to escape the heat and playing pool all night to win free beer. At that juncture in our relatively carefree lives Berit and Jez were picking tobacco in Mareeba during the week and would hitchike into Cairns on Saturdays to meet me and play volleyball so we could get a free BBQ… Those were the days!!! I would phone home occasionally, and after six months I had this bizarre broad northern Queensland accent and it was all I could do to spit out a sentence without danger of offending my parents. Not that swearing more today would evoke a magical nostalgia and miraculously draw me out of my current funk, but sometimes a little swearing goes a long way to making one feel better. In those days the phone calls home would usually end with either party hanging up angrily, so swearing became not only habitual but as natural as breathing. After 13 months in Australia, my speech was so deep in the gutter it was in danger of never seeing the light of day again. (Then I went to Scotland for two years… ha! ha! — where it got even worse at one point.)

As far as the usual resolutions go, there are certain items that appear on every New Year’s Resolutions list because self-improvement is drummed into us from birth (especially those of us who are the children of the ’80s):

LIVE HEALTHIER, i.e.
* exercise more
* eat more fruit and veg

–blah blah... — for others, that might include ‘watch less TV’, ‘read more’, ‘drink less’, ’shop less’, ’save more money,’ what-have-you. However, these are behaviours that wouldn’t necessarily impact our lives in a major way if we didn’t follow them. We could just carry on as is. Then, there are the things that bear influence on work ethic and our ability to self-finance or advance ourselves vocationally:

WORK HARDER, i.e.
* be more disciplined
* stop procrastinating
* put more effort and energy into work/school/etc.

Then there’s the stuff that pertains specifically to me, and anyone who knows me will recognize my bad habits and tendency to self-neglect:

* go to bed earlier, get up earlier (or, go to bed at all!)
* don’t be late for appointments of any kind
* spend less time on the computer and go out more (believe you me, this wasn’t the case until I started working from home then going to uni)
* be a bit more girly, like maybe get my hair done professionally more than once per year
* look after my feet (when boyfriends lodge complaints, it’s time to get out the pumice stone)

I mean, I pride myself on being low-maintenance, but sometimes I take things a bit too far…

So, here I am, tomorrow is the last day of January, and I am one day behind on my first assignment of the term. There’s no REAL excuse for it. In fact, I was discussing this with a colleague today, how hard it seems to get my act together on a paper similar to one I wrote a year ago with perceptually less difficulty. Here I am, typing into my blog, NOT doing the paper. She suggested to me that I’ve got a case of the 3rd-year-unmotivated blues. I think she’s right, but for different reasons — it’s not that I’m down on getting this degree, it’s not that I don’t think it’s worth it, or that I’m even wondering what I’ll do at the end of it… I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m still mentally burnt out from the end of 2003. I thought the Christmas break would cure me, would revitalize me, would give me a renewed sense of resolve. I was hoping it would recharge me, and I did show a glimmer of promise when I did cover some of the assigned reading a couple of weeks ago, but then — POOF! — it was gone, and I’m back in my bad old procrastinating ways. My brain just doesn’t seem to want to co-operate. I procrastinated plenty before, but I always managed to get the assignments done ON TIME. I never handed in anything late, and by the marks I received, I kept the calibre of the writing consistently decent. But now…

NOW…

Do I need to check myself into an ashram or something? Go to a spa? What?? (I’m not going to a spa, though, that’s too far a leap into high-maintenance territory.) Maybe when I hit 40. Am I going through some kind of pre-mid-life-oh-no-I’m-past-30-crisis??

After a long hiatus, The Savage Files Journal has been updated. Looks like Steve has been busy renovating houses and staying out of mischief, although he couldn’t help taking off his clothes to run through the mere dusting of snow they got in the south of England (unlike the big dump in the north), and giving the locals a fright… I can just hear the twittering going on in Bletchingley now:“Mary, Mary, take a look outside! There’s a young man scooting about the neighbour’s garden with work goggles and barely a stitch on!”

Sheesh, these Aussies, always wanting to show off! I posted this cheeky piece on his messageboard:

English Pasty (not to be confused with Cornish pasties! er, maybe yes!)
Posted on January 29, 2004 at 02:36:23 PM

Steve, do they make paint in that fleshtone you appear to be sporting nowadays? It’s beyond white, it’s incandescent. Put some of that in a tin and it will look brilliant next to ‘bright jade’. Oh, I’m so cruel. But, in all seriousness, I’m loving the updates — UHT milk and Portuguese sardines!! I will bring along whatever treats you want at Easter, a big pack o’ finger plasters, and shout you some of that warm stuff the Poms call beer.

I arrive in London on Sunday evening, so the plan is for a catch-up with Steve — a big boozy gab session — before making my way to Wolverhampton on Monday for the bridesmaid dress fitting.

About bloody time! I am finally the bearer of good news.

1) My mother was released from the hospital this afternoon, after two months in Surrey Memorial.
2) Cheryl’s readings were normal today, and she will be released tomorrow afternoon from BC Women’s Hospital, pending good results on another test.

By the way, the twins were named some time ago. Maribeth (aka Twin B on the ultrasounds) is smaller than her sister, Megan (Twin A). I know their middle names both start with J, in keeping with my brother’s bizarre — but consistently bizarre — desire to have all his children’s initials as MJE, but I can’t recall at the moment what their middle names are.

A panicky end to a rather long day was courtesy of Shell’s EasyPay tag. I stopped by a station to fill up before racing to BC Women’s Hospital to take a bag to Cheryl that Allan had packed. It was nearly the end of visiting hours (10pm) and I had to return the co-op car by 10pm.

TAG NOT ON THE KEYCHAIN! Where the hell was the tag?? Did I give it to Allan? Did it fall off the keychain on Saturday when I was fumbling in the dark with the lockbox on the co-op car??

What to do first — phone Shell/EasyPay and cancel it? Get gas? Phone Allan? Skip gas, go straight to hospital? I decided I might as well get gas since I was standing there parked beside a pump, and was quickly reminded why I use the tag in the first place — I had to get out the credit card and the Airmiles card, swipe the damn things, get the cap off the tank, and make sure I didn’t do anything stupid, like put the wallet on top of the car. It’s so much quicker with the tag, and the wallet doesn’t come out. After all that malarkey, the screen at the pump told me to go inside, anyway, for the receipt! While I was in there, I grabbed the EasyPay brochure to phone the number on the way to the hospital.

While speeding along Oak Street, I phoned the EasyPay number and tried to remember the last time I’d used the tag, trying not to imagine how many tanks of gas a person could buy in what could be WEEKS. The fuel is included in the use of the co-op car, so I could easily find out from the mileage logs, but with a sinking feeling I realized I hadn’t filled up on the last few outings.

One thing they should do is make the tag look nondescript. According to the other Shell sites, like in The Netherlands, the fob is just gray. So if someone picked it up, they wouldn’t necessarily know what to do with it. It would reduce fraudulent use.

Dialling, dialling, dialling, EasyPay answering service, ‘Thank you for calling Easypay’, blah blah blah, press 1, press 2, blah blah blah, office hours are — OH CRAP!!! — then… ‘If you are reporting a lost or stolen tag, press 1′– YES YES YES!

I got a live person while I was maneouvring past 12th and Oak, so I had just enough time to tell the operator what was going on, cancel the tag, and order another one before reaching the hospital at 29th. It was, in fact, very simple, unlike the brouhaha a year ago while I was sitting in Grand Central Station, NYC, trying to explain to the EasyPay operator that my tag was stolen along with my keys, which were stolen from my friend’s car parked in an underground in Vancouver, and no I was not in Vancouver but New York, and no the person who called Shell to report it was neither in Vancouver or New York but in Calgary, since I didn’t have the number and I had to reach someone who could look it up for me and give EasyPay instructions to call me in NYC to verify I was indeed the keytag owner!

[An aside: not five minutes after that phone call at Grand Central Station, my accountant called, very confused to be drowned out by announcements for trains to Poughkeepsie... he still tells me that's how he remembers me out of the scads of T-2200s he does taxes for, so that's probably a good thing.]

Anyway, this was a relatively simple phone call to EasyPay, and they report it was last recorded to have been used on Jan 16th, but it didn’t include today’s activities. So, unless someone picked it up and used it today, I was more or less convinced it was not being used to thieving ends, filling up getaway cars, stolen armoured trucks, or joyride vehicles. What a relief.

That’s all I need after today, a day that started off far too early — before 6am — then wandering down an alley off Denman Street in the pre-dawn darkness, in the rain, peering at a piece of paper which was supposed to tell me where the co-op car was parked. It all looks so clandestine. I think this was my 6th co-op car, another Mazda Protegé, this time a teal 2001 model. (My favourite is still the Toyota Prius, even though it isn’t as zippy on hills.) Most of the time I use the cars to go to the office, so I catch the first ferry — 7:20 — out of Horseshoe Bay. Which means when I use a new car I am running around the West End in the early morning darkness to find its location, trying not to appear shifty as I strain to look at parked cars and license plates and trying to make out the Co-operative Auto Network logo on the back of the car. When it’s that early in the morning, I am not usually 100% awake — yeah, a bit dangerous where driving is concerned — and unless they’re parked under streetlights or lit spaces, it’s pretty hard to make out colours. There are, after all, 40,000 people living in the West End, and while not everyone has a car, there are still a lot of cars!! I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these days I’m going to have a run-in with a police officer in a back alley as I mistake someone’s sedan for a co-op car.

The prognosis for the twins, while not dire, is far from good. We await further word from BC Women’s Hospital. Meanwhile, my father flies off to New York in the morning for his sister’s funeral, and I’m behind on my first assignment of the term. All in all, not a good start to the week. Or the year.

So I thought I would post a photo of the twins’ big sister Melissa (age 4 — my brother’s nickname for her is Sweet Baboo, from Charlie Brown), who is happily oblivious and wiling away the days in rural Maine with her doting grandparents and three aunts:

Bucketful of Boo.

My father’s eldest sister, the matriarch of a very large family, died at the age of 84 (?) in upstate New York yesterday morning. Was considering going with my father to the funeral, but felt it best to stay put. My aunt had a series of strokes, the first one even before her husband passed away in 1995, and was never told that her son, daughter, and brother also passed away in the last few years. She managed to outlive them all. But her kidneys were failing, and in the end, which we knew was coming, her health gave way.

My Auntie Jane practically raised my father, being nearly 20 years older than he, and I think her firstborn came along even before my grandmother had my father. This was back in the day when bigger families were economies of scale — that is, mass production brought good results at a lower cost. Big families also met the demand for labour. I’ve heard enough hardship stories from my father to last a lifetime, but in pre-war agricultural northern Philippines, how much did one really need? There was no television to remind you of what you could have, wear, eat, or otherwise covet from other people. Nobody even kept track of birth dates. My father only knows the season he was born in, because everything revolved around farming cycles, i.e. planting, harvesting, rainy seasons, and other agrarian concerns. So when it came time to produce a birth date for documents, he picked one he found scratched into the bottom of the house — March 8. As good a date as any.

I was in upstate New York a year ago for a brief visit before getting back to Manhattan for New Year’s Eve, and discussed with my cousin how she would live after her mother passes away. I’m hoping she takes another job and moves closer to Manhattan to get back to the life she had before she became her mother’s caregiver. As admirable as she has been in this role, for so long, I recognize it’s been a major sacrifice.

Then I heard from my brother this afternoon, who was with my sister-in-law for their regular testing at BC Women’s Hospital today. The test results were not as positive as they should be, so now Cheryl is admitted full-time, and a caesarean is planned, the timing of which will be determined by further observation.

My mother is still in Surrey Memorial Hospital. Her WCB claim was denied, so ICBC had better cough up for her home care.

The phone rang at 5:45am. Perchance, I was awake and on the computer sending out a report, but by the time I got over to the mobile phone to check out the number, it went to voicemail…. ????

By the number, I knew it was from Germany. The last time I got a late-night call — 2:30am — it was from Crazy German Chicken (Iris), but it wasn’t Iris this time, it wasn’t the code for Hamburg. I didn’t think it was Michael in Bavaria, either, since he often goes to the U.S. for work and deals with North American time zones on a regular basis. I was going through a mental list in my head of German friends while I was waiting for the voicemail to start playing, but I really should’ve known it was…

Crazy Berit! Nutter… the message was that she was going to the States and wanted to see if I could meet up. We did this before in San Diego, which turned into a bit of a palarva as Jez was immediately deported back to Germany from San Francisco (he’d overstayed his American visa 12 years before), and Berit had to work a trade show in Las Vegas with their son Vinny in tow, while nursing a broken leg in a recent and rather spectacular skiing accident. By the time she met me in San Diego, she had had enough of the States. What a trip… anyway…

I spoke to the nutter a little later this morning and she sheepishly told me she calculated the time from the East Coast, where she goes for business meetings, instead of West Coast time. Also, her meeting is in Orlando. Florida. It’s about the furthest point away from me that she could be. That’s the thing about Western Europe — time zones and distances are a non-issue, unless you get shipped off to Russia or the Middle East for a business meeting. Here, on this big land mass in the New World, pathetic creatures like me who work from home in practically the last time zone on the planet have to contend with phones ringing at ungodly hours of the morning. In Canada we have bloody FIVE time zones. Count ‘em, five. If I wasn’t such a deep sleeper, who can snooze through registered seismic rumblings, I would never get any sleep at all. I’ve got my direct line (home) as part of my e-mail signature to our (200-odd) clients, and nearly all of them are based in the East, the financial centres: Toronto, Montreal, New York…

Not long after getting off the phone with Berit, to make arrangements to possibly meet in Spain instead, the phone rang again at 7:15am. It was a double-ring this time, the intercom. Sitting in my shorts and t-shirt, I wondered if I really wanted to know what this was about. Then I remembered the UPS slip stuck to the intercom with my apartment number on it on Friday. Then I fuzzily recalled getting buzzed on Saturday morning, too, then rolling over and going back to sleep. Curiosity got the better of me, so I picked up the phone.

“Hello?”
“It’s UPS. I have a package for you.”
“You deliver this early????”
“Oh yes.”
(grumble grumble)“OK, come up.”

The UPS driver was much too good-looking. I mean, it’s not as if UPS is at an advantage hiring attractive people to deliver their goods — are they?? — except maybe for regular customers who put in standing orders. (Or flirty receptionists who have some say in which courier to use.) Residential recipients like me have no idea who’s bringing stuff unless I could be bothered to turn on the telly and scrutinize the CCTV image.

The UPS guy was holding a largish box stamped Thermopak and I realized it was a cooler. A market research company I get paid to provide consumer opinions for had sent me a product to try. He told me he was given instructions to deliver by 8:00am. Why, oh why??? Meanwhile, I was feeling rather self-conscious standing there in my flannel shorts making small talk with the very attractive UPS man, who has probably been awake for hours by then, while I was only half-awake. I was just happy to be able to write my signature on his screen without too much trouble. I made him laugh, too, so I couldn’t have been that out of it.

Five of us went to the Everything to Do With Sex Show at the Vancouver Trade and Exhibition Centre earlier. I took a photo, but can’t post it here as the friends would kill me — we were checking out the vast array of vibrators on hand (pun intended).

My cousin gave me four tickets to the show last week. That was very thoughtful of her, although I had to laugh when it occurred to me that:

a) perhaps I was her only (or best?) candidate for actually using the tickets?
b) I was the only person she knew who knew three other people who would go, too?

Hardly, I thought afterwards, surely there would be other people in her social circles who would go to a sex exhibition?? Some friends I mentioned it to had to know more about it before they would consider going. I can understand that, but it wasn’t like we were shuttling off for a stag at the infamous Number 5 Orange, or even Brandi’s (the even more-famous site of Ben Affleck’s alleged infidelities to his now-ex-fiancée, J.Lo). Even if that were the case, who cares?? Is prudishness replacing curiosity these days? (More on this in a mo’.)

We didn’t go to the show until after dinner, around 10pm, and even two hours before it closed for the day we found the Exhibition Halls at the Trade & Convention Centre jam-packed. For all intents and purposes, it was like any other trade show, except for the X-rating. No sprogs running about. Demonstration videos were of devices that located G-spots instead of, say, GPS positions. Instead of filling out draw slips for home improvement gadgets, it was for reading material with titles such as Book of Dicks (I flipped through it — amusing, not titillating).

My friends and I were definitely amused, and a wee bit enlightened as well. And no, not because of the beefy (in all places) exotic male dancer over by the show stage, or by the dizzying array of sex gadgets, peek-a-boo clothing, battery-powered devices for every imaginable orifice/s, and what-have-you. There, bobbing conspicuously alone in the sea of toys and lube and videos, was a Sexual Health booth manned by, well, a man. Who seemed only slightly discomfited by our questions of, “So, which is more effective, the diaphragm or the cervical cap?” or, “Can you show me how you insert the diaphragm into this plastic model?” I wonder if this guy was hired by the Ministry of Children and Families or he was just one of the workers in a muncipal outreach office who picked the short straw when they drew lots for the booth. What a way to spend a weekend, filling up the baskets of giveaway condoms and lube, fanning out pamphlets on planned parenthood, and trying to be serious and professional while flanked by hangers of bondage outfits and fur-lined thongs.

Here are some random snippets of our conversations:

“How can the Diving Dolphin have ‘Device Not Waterproof’ on it??”
“I like this one, it feels more like the real thing.”
“Look! You can make your own dildo! It comes in a bucket, just like Play-Doh.”
“A mini-vibrator disguised as lipstick (I think it was called Powder Room Fun or something like that)… the next time someone says she has to go powder her nose…” and “I’ll never look at lipstick the same way again.”
“How on earth do you wear this??” (I couldn’t figure that out, myself, and I have a pretty good imagination)

When it came to the stage shows, it wasn’t anything to write home about. I supposed I’m a bit spoiled for quality (ha ha!) after seeing a live sex show in Amsterdam. It was a real eye-opener, that. I was there with a couple of friends, a Brit and a German. It was just before Christmas 1997, my first time in The Netherlands, but both friends had been there lots before and persuaded me that no first-time visit to Amsterdam would be complete without seeing a bonafide sex show. How could I argue with that? I’d already seen the Sex Museum — including the Back Room with the prominent disclaimer — and that left absolutely zero to the imagination. (If it were not for my inability to get nauseous from visual displays, I would have lasted 5 seconds.) They bought tickets to Pink Elephant, which my friend assured me was more upscale and worth the money. It even included a free drink (a requirement, I suppose, or a necessary accompaniment, like crackers with brie or melon with prosciuttio).

What I did expect — for the guilders we forked out, anyway — was attractive and well-endowed performers. Details such as a revolving stage on a turntable so you had a 360-degree view. Cheesy sketches with nurses and everyday situations that inevitably led to the requisite clothes-shedding and subsequent shagging. What I didn’t expect was how well-choreographed the whole thing was. It was ballet-like in its dynamics and the performers were agile and lithe, even the silly fella in the Batman costume. It would not be fair to attribute this opinion to one drink playing with my brain, either, I’m not that cheap a drunk.

What we didn’t necessarily expect (and I have no idea why, since nearly all manner of shows have it) was the audience participation segment. You can imagine the horror when my German friend was dragged unceremoniously onstage along with nine other men to “play” with a lady dressed like Carmen Miranda. My Brit friend and I nearly collapsed with a fit of the giggles, we felt so badly for him. She lay down on the stage, plucked one of the bananas from the bunch she had on hand (she was, after all, Carmen Miranda), and inserted it lickety-split, her athletic legs splayed with complete control. Each of the participants had to take a bite out of the banana, which doesn’t sound all that difficult until you imagine she was gyrating and writhing about the stage.

As each participant took a bite, we glanced over at my German friend, who was becoming increasingly more anxious as each poor sap before him — with his hands tied behind his back — had to dart to and fro, trying to chomp a piece of banana that was getting too short way too fast… Our eyes tearing, our guts aching, we couldn’t take our eyes off our friend, who had the lucky position of being the 10th, and last, in line for the banana. It was every man for himself in this event, too — each guy was more intent on nabbing that banana than taking small bites to leave enough for the next guy…

We did other things in Amsterdam, of course. My German friend and I continued what was becoming our habit of sneaking label beer glasses in our coats as souvenirs (although when we did this a year later in Germany, I felt a bit guilty and asked the pub worker, and he just gave them to me! I even had the cheek to ask for the gold-rimmed ones, and he fetched them from the dishwasher. I have those, still).

One night my Brit friend begged off the late night shenanigans, and my German friend and I carried on walking the streets near our hotel off the Amstel river in search of a pub that was still open. We zigzagged down the side streets, and eventually he spotted a little place called Cupido Bar, with thick velvet drapes covering the frontage. I said promptly, “it’s a gay bar, are you sure you want to go?”, to which my friend replied, “How do you know?” Geez, man, the fact that you can’t see inside?? We went in. We’d already closed the gay clubs with the transvestite bartenders sporting giant purple bouffant hair, so we figured we’d just keep on going. It was that late, but somehow having tins of Heineken from the vending machine in our hotel lobby didn’t hold the same appeal.

Well, it was like walking into the Old Saloon in the archetypal Western flick. We swung the door open, stepped in, and of course everyone in the tiny place — mostly old, gay men — stopped all their chatter and stared at us, as if to say “You ain’t from around these parts, are ye?” We just ignored them, and tried to order a beer. The bartender just ignored us and kept serving everyone else. After everyone else was served, he took our money and gave us beer. We acted like we just didn’t care. After all, it was a local place, and this wasn’t our neighbourhood. We were like a couple of cheerleaders at a Star Trek convention. After being ignored so long, I wondered if anyone would notice me looking for a ladies’ room. Was there even a ladies’ room?? All eyes were on me as I ventured off to search for one, leaving my German friend to fend for himself. I did find a toilet, but there was no lock on the door. I had to go badly enough to ignore it, and when I returned, my friend told me that when I left, the old geezers were giving him the nudge-nudge-wink-wink, saying, “Hey, why don’t you go join your girlfriend, there’s no lock on the door.” Then we witnessed something that told us it was time to ditch the draft in favour of our hotel vending machine: there was a lover’s quarrel between a young black guy and his old geezer, who was convinced the young guy was diddling some other guy at the bar. Next thing we knew (the exchange was all in upper-decibel Dutch, so we didn’t have quite all the warning signals), the accused infidel’s alleged lover wound up and socked the accuser in the nose, his nose smashing with a very audible *crack* and his head rebounding off the wall like a basketball with the force. Needless to say, the sounds of bones breaking and skull on wall was not a pleasant one, and everyone winced and froze. I have never seen a nose broken like that before, even at a hockey game. It was suddenly on one side of his face and bleeding like the dickens. We just stood there, only a few feet away, horrified… The bartender was ready to get rid of his regulars just to avoid the fall-out, so we took that as a cue to leave. We spilled out of the Cupido Bar and headed towards our hotel, still reeling from the sight of a nose that would probably never be restored to its former… ehm, glory?? Each trip back to Amsterdam I find myself walking around that neighbourhod; I try to head over to the straat to see if the Cupido Bar is still there, but I can’t quite recall the zigging and zagging pattern we followed to get there, so I’m not sure if it has new proprietors or I’m not zigging or zagging properly.

My Dutch friend, who at the time was still living in The Netherlands (now he’s in Brussels doing contract work for Mastercard), couldn’t stand Amsterdam — the traffic, the lack of parking, the hassle, the prices, the glut of tourists. He picked the three of us up one day and took us to the countryside for some sightseeing, checking out villages, the seaside, and played classical guitar for us in his houseboat. I recall that time fondly… I think we were pretty tired by then — too many late nights, loud venues, and neon lights. We were ready for a time-out from the assaults to the senses.

Amsterdam - April 23, 2003

I found myself in Amsterdam again last April, and took a little canal cruise to admire the Dutch architecture in the warm sunshine. Then I took a train to Utrecht to visit some friends who’d just had a baby. No sex museums, sex shows, or coffee shops. I’m sounding like an old geezer, myself!

Which brings me back to my talk of prudishness, much earlier in this post. We’re pretty prudish here, although I don’t think we’re quite as prudish as Americans. We don’t use that little fuzzy thing over nipples, for example. The old joke is that American kids grow up thinking the fuzzy bits are part of the female anatomy. (The same way that Alaska and Hawaii, shown as insets on maps of the United States, have no real geographical location, they’re just floating somewhere in the ocean near the continental U.S. in inset boxes.) Moses Znaimer, founder and producer of Toronto’s Citytv, was cited to have said that on American television, you can’t show a nipple. But, you can show a nipple with a bullet hole through it… (a nod to American acceptance of violence)… OK, I’ll save this topic for another day. Back to prudishness.

Last night when three of us were having dinner at the restaurant Manhattan in the Fairmont Delta Suites Hotel, every time our cute (their word, not mine) waiter came by to attend to us, everyone would lower her voice to a whisper when talking about going to the sex show, or just say “the show”. It seemed more like an involuntary reaction than feeling unable to say sex in a regular tone of voice. What’s with that? The other people dining were far away, it’s not like they could hear us. And even so, what did it matter? My point is, it did matter, and we were taught that it matters. I think it has more to do with context than anything else. If we were at some diner on Commercial Drive, like Wazubeez, we’d let ‘er rip. Sex! Sex! Sex! (It’s pretty loud in there, anyways.) No such thing as impropriety on Commercial Drive, proud bastion of alternative lifestyles and home to Womyn’s Ware. This also goes back to when I mentioned that some friends wanted to know more about the sex exhibition, eg. location. Somehow, the fact that it was at the Vancouver Trade and Convention Centre, which also houses the famous sails from Expo ‘86 days (part of the Vancouver skyline and ubiquitous on postcards), the cruise ship terminal, and the tony Pan Pacific Hotel in Coal Harbour commanded more cachet and lowered the sleaze factor. I’m sure that’s what CanWest Shows had in mind when they booked the venue.