Day 10 - Calgary

So we didn't.

We got up, puttered about, and went to dim sum with Mitch, Scott, and Lauren. Calgary has a small but vibrant Chinatown; we had pretty good dim sum.

After lunch I left Darin in the room and went down to the Eau Claire Market (a happenin' Calgary mall) with Mitch. There were a lot of stalls haphazardly set up in the market, which made us both think that they didn't belong there and perhaps they'd come inside from the rain. (The rain was intermittent, from mist to downpour.) But Darin's mom said that those vendors had been inside the mall the previous year, the first time she'd visited Calgary with Darin's father.

Back at the hotel Darin and I decided to go to a walk in the other direction, toward the movie theatre where we'd seen Face/Off We ran into his dad, who decided to accmpany us. Steve wanted to use the Plus-15, a pedestrian walkway that stretches over great areas of downtown Calgary 15 meters (natch) over the street.

But it doesn't run everywhere over downtown. We kept stopping and starting, looking for some path that took us towards 8th Avenue. One of the weird things was that the Plus-15 was open and allowed us to walk through deserted office buildings, where there was no one around -- well, maybe a security guard, somewhere -- and all I could think was, Wow, you could do crimes here. It was so strange just being allowed to walk through there.

We finally came to a locked Plus-15 door and went down to the street. Despite all of our wanderings, we'd made it a whole three blocks towards 8th Avenue (though we'd ambled quite a few blocks to the side, like a crab).

We walked over the Stephens Avenue shopping area and stopped to look at the graffiti spray-painted, with proper grammar and punctuation, by the ABC -- the Alberta Bomb and Burn (to Hell) Commission. It was the only graffiti I saw in Calgary. I looked at boarded-up buildings and wondered why they looked so strange, until I realized there was no graffiti of any kind, including the 8 million posters for movies or shows that you sometimes see in cities. No graffiti at all.

If it weren't for the weather...

We walked around the Bankers Hall mall (very little was open) and then back to the hotel. I fell asleep for an hour before dinner, and it occurred to me as I dropped off that I substituted walking around Calgary malls for hiking in the Rockies.

For dinner the 7 of us went to TOPS, the rotating restaurant at the top of the Calgary Tower. It's not very good, but I didn't care because a)despite the overcastness and occasional rain, the view was still great and b)all I had for dinner was a green salad. Lauren was the same way. "I'm tired of eating," she said. "Plus I want to save room for dessert."

After dinner Darin stayed in Scott and Lauren's room with Mitch to play hearts. I stayed in our room and edited my screenplay a little.

I debated logging in and getting my mail. As Mitch said, one benefit would be that getting my mail the day before going home would give me that much of a headstart to taking care of it. But I was still on vacation and logging in seemed kind of gratuitous. So I didn't.