Honestly, when I was asking people what to do in Edmonton, I didn’t get a lot of suggestions. Whyte Avenue is close to where I live, and to the university, so a lot of people recommended it. There’s the West Edmonton Mall, obviously (look it up - I’ll wait). After that, most people struggled for a few minutes to come up with things. We did wind up collecting some suggestions for nice places to eat, trails to bike down, etc - but never wound up taking advantage of any of those.
We did explore Whyte Avenue a bit. The Chapters I mentioned in the last post was the farthest we went, though - about fifteen minutes of walking, maybe. Aside from browsing different small shops, we tried and failed repeatedly to get decent sustenance. We got ice cream at a really disappointing Dairy Queen near the University (it’s by Sobeys, don’t go there). We also had an atrocious milkshake from a place called Mike’s Famous that, as I later learned, tends to mostly serve drunk people (also on Whyte Avenue, and best avoided).
Then we got dinner at an Irish pub, where the wait for food and our bill was long, and the service was… well, there wasn’t really much service at all. Every patron who wandered in spent five minutes looking for a place to sit, because they give you the liberty of seating yourself. We had a nice spot by the entrance, where we got to watch the confusion first-hand. So that was our evening entertainment, free of charge!
We went to West Edmonton Mall for an entire day, just shopping and looking for stores that Ottawa doesn’t have. I bought a light cotton hoodie to replace my trusty old XKCD one, now stained one time too many. M- felt that green went well with my complexion, and like most things she tells me about fashion, she was right. She mostly browsed, but tried on one extra-small dress at Suzy Shears that didn’t quite fit. One of the cashiers got the item code for us, though, so she could get her mother’s expert opinion on whether it could be altered to fit. Incidentally, the cashier was a neuroscience student at UofA, and generally a lovely person. She told us we seemed like a great couple, which was cute.
We actually went back a few days later to see the amusement park. Back to the West Edmonton Mall, I mean - you know it has an amusement park inside, right? And a water park, and a hotel, and two mini-putt places. It was Friday when we went, though, which is apparently a bad idea - that’s when nearby schools send their kids on field trips to the park. The folks at the information booth were kind enough to let us transfer our passes to Saturday, actually, which was pretty smart. Otherwise I’d be telling you about how we wasted sixty bucks!
Instead, I’m here to tell you that it’s a pretty alright amusement park. Admittedly, it was more to M-’s taste than mine. I’m a fan of variety and medium-ish adrenaline - I’m generally satisfied if I do a roller coaster once, and even then I’m not big on the craziest ones. Neither of those things are true of my wonderful partner in crime. There aren’t really that many rides in the amusement park, actually, so M- did a couple things multiple times while I sat aside and read. I went on most of them once, for her sake. Oh, and we bought all the pictures where we were visible, at least one of which shows us grimacing painfully.
Eventually we moved on to Southgate Mall, where a new Lego store had opened more than a week ago. They were having a grand opening event this particular weekend: visitors could help build an 8-foot tall statue of Yoda. M- and I contributed one “brick” each (mine constructed with painful slowness), which we built according to instructions out of 39 regularly sized bricks. They were having a prize draw for the 50 people with the best estimates on the number of bricks used in the entire statue, and we spent some time trying to calculate the number. Pretty quickly I gave in to pessimism and let her work it out, which I’m not proud of, but there you go. The actual store itself had a two-hour long line to get in, despite being empty when I was there a week ago. Needless to say, we didn’t wait.
We took buses to travel to/from the malls, which cost $2.50/person each way. You get a three-hour (I think) transfer slip, but unlike in Ottawa, taking a new bus doesn’t renew your transfer. The buses themselves were a bit less… advanced? than Ottawa - ours have a speaker that declares the next stop, a display for the stop name, and have recently moved to an NFC-enabled bus pass. Luckily for us, it’s obvious when you’ve arrived at the West Edmonton Mall, but we could easily have missed our stop if we were going to a street address.
We also borrowed bikes from two of the linguistics PhD students. However, M- nor I really knew how to adjust them, and both bikes needed it badly. So we never used them. After M- had left, my landlord and I rode the bikes to campus to return them. At this point, I realized that I hadn’t ridden a bike since 6th grade (plus or minus a year). Also, the helmet didn’t seem to fasten correctly. So while we were riding down the back streets, I was utterly terrified of all the potholes. I went pretty slowly the whole way, and in the end I did survive. But I had to be reminded that the bike had handbrakes and kicking the ground wasn’t the best way to slow down.
Oh! And we also went to the farmer’s market early Saturday morning. Didn’t buy much, but M- grabbed business cards from the interesting spots. I tried to buy Belgian waffles, except they only took cash, and I had none on me. But one of these days I’ll go and stock up and then have waffles and be happy.