…but it isn’t.

While wandering around downtown today with my gay-sian friend (yes, you CAN contract gay and Asian into one word!) and he says
“have you peed in that toilet yet”

And I say
“in what toilet?”

because Keith thinks that everyone can hear his thoughts.

Anyways, it turns out he was referring to the robot potty on 17th Ave SW, which is part of a “City of Calgary Sanitation” project. There is seriously no website about this thing or information. Useless city.

It’s basically this weird roundish box plopped on a street corner. It looks kind of like something they would protect a major electrical center in or something. I decided, as I needed to pee anyways, to make use of it! Plus, I thought it was on my list, even though it is totally not actually on it. The toilet itself is fantastic. It tells you how to use it in a robot voice and cleans itself. You press a BUTTON and a CLEAN TOILET SEAT APPEARS OUT OF THE WALL!!! It also plays calming music for you as you make your business. Rad and a great idea for public bathrooms. Clean and calming!

I’m sad it’s not on my list, but whatever. I peed in a robot today and that in itself is fantastic.

I think by now my list has every continent, and possibly even every country, on it. Of course, like with all things, I have a few favoured destinations, ones that distract me from everything.

Snow = like Iceland. Boring roofs = not like Iceland

1. Iceland
Most people like warm destinations, but being Canadian, I prefer familiar temperatures and not having to buy new clothes to travel. I also like colourful roofs, which Iceland has an abundance of. Oh, and there’s a penis museum.

2. Morocco
Whenever I dream I’m travelling, I dream I’m in Morocco. There was this one time I dreamed I was in Italy but people were trying to kill me and I stabbed someone in the neck, very vividly, so you can see why I opt more for Morocco. One time someone asked me if it was the beaches that drew me towards it, and I replied “Morocco has beaches?”. There’s something about the food, the giant deserts and the culture that I like, all of which I, of course, learned about from Brad Pitt in Babel.

3. Russia
Adam says if I go to Russia I will get stabbed and die. Why does he think I want to go? Can you imagine that twitter message? EPIC! “Landed in Moscow, went through customs, agent stabbed me in the eye”. Really, I just want to go to Russia for two reasons:
a. My Russian history teacher had a mesmerizing moustache and was totally hot.
b. That same teacher told me about a guy who dresses up like Lenin and runs around in St. Petersburg

4. Los Angeles
I’m going to find the Zachary Quinto and follow him around until he files a restraining order. Hopefully he’ll spend some time at tourist hot spots so I can see those too.

5. Cuba
I just want to be a Communist and lay on the beach without abandon.

6. Afghanistan
While I hate to see myself as being too good for a war zone, I can also see how deciding to travel freely to one as people try to escape it is a bit…well wrong. I met a guy from Afghanistan when I was in high school and he was one of the nicest people in the world and looked really good with a popped collar. He told me once about how he had shot a gun and my tiny white 17 year old Canadian brain exploded. I really want to go there, but I think I might wait for it to settle down a bit there, which I hope it does eventually.

7. Yemen
I was once told Yememi men do it better, and I now want
a. a shirt that says that
b. to wear that shirt in Yemen
Plus it might be the closest I ever get to being in Saudi Arabia.

8. Peru
I think a lot about the fact they eat guinea pigs. It fascinates me. I want to see the farms they keep them in. And try eating one, maybe. They also have alpacas which are indisputably the most awesome animal ever to exist in the entire Universe. They do not eat the alpacas from what I understand, except in rare cases, which makes Peru super cool in my books.

mmm Asian stuff.

9. Japan
Adam really got me into Japan. I used to have no interest in going at all, but after Adam kept blabbing on about wanting to go there, he totally changed my mind. And I love Asian stuff, like the food and wonderful English translations on packages.

10. New Zealand
I have a secret passion to be a sheep herder. And they have the steepest hill in the world and I want to roll down it in a garbage can.

Last summer I packed up my school bag and an over-sized purse, met my friend Chris at the airport and took off for a month. I roamed through Montreal, Toronto, Guelph, Oakville, Kingston and Manhattan. I took the Greyhound, VIA rail and the Metro. I crashed on couches, slept in cramped, stinking hostels, and rested in my mom’s childhood bedroom. I saw cockroaches, watched Central Park become aglow with fire flies, witnessed the tallest French transsexual this side of the Atlantic, and had a conversation en francais with a man about his pen.

That’s all nice. But the best part? I escaped Calgary for the entire duration of the Stampede.

The Calgary Stampede is a 10 day adventure that draws in tens of thousands of people a year, packing themselves onto our already stuffed C-trains and transit system to get down to the Stampede Grounds in order to drink, hurt small animals, and risk their lives riding 40 year old amusement park equipment run by homeless drug addicts (seriously). The best part is that the Stampede Grounds are technically within the downtown limits, which means trying to get to work and back from “the Core” becomes par with having the ability to shit out fluorescent pink llamas.

Most people who live in Calgary love the Stampede. Love it. 10 days of with a city full of foreigners just waiting to have a drinking contests and a one night stand. Or, you know, they own a downtown hotel and make several million in this one 10 day span. I am not one of these people. These 10 days mark the worst time of the year to live in this city.  It makes me feel so badly for people who live in truly hot tourist destinations, like Amsterdam. People who might never see their favourite bar without a loud, drunken buffoon again. Or, even worse, to live in a country where the only form of employment is to serve the rude, self important jerks who think their $900 vacation package bought them the country and all of its inhabitants.

I’m not sure if it’s simply that I was born without the cow-wrangling gene, refuse to define myself as “country western” in any manner of speaking, or that I was raised by liberals in the East, but I seriously have my hate on for the Calgary Stampede. Enough so that I intentionally travel to other tourist destinations to get away from the one I live in.

One of the many anti-meth photos I collected when I went to Montana a year ago.

So I took a break from cleaning, studying, writing and all that good stuff this afternoon and used it to clean up my music collection. Since part of the cleaning process let me properly set up my giantess of a laptop that holds my music collection, I’ve also been able to listen to it for a few solid hours. Between the downloads, moving, deleting, and – sure enough – grooving, I got to thinking about how important music was to my travels this summer. It kept me company during lonely nights in Guelph, drowned out chatting people on the overnight bus to New York, and distracted me on long flights across the continent. My Ipod only holds 2 GB, but it provides me with hours of entertainment on the road and gives me some solace when I’m missing certain people’s company.

Here are my fave songs for certain travel situations!

Needing Sand and Sun: Madera – Hey Ocean!
Packing: In Love With a Bad Idea – Matthew Good
Pre-Flight Jitters: Time Bomb – Beck
First Leg: The Distance – Cake
Roadtrips: Running Down a Dream – Tom Petty
Overnight Travel: Turn Up the Stars – Hey Ocean!
At the Hostel: What I Got – Sublime
No Itinerary: Ruby Soho – Rancid
Traveling Alone: Two Hoboes- DJ Champion
Train Travel: On A Train – Waking Eyes
Lost and Confused: Sing Me Spanish Techno – The New Pornographers
Homesickness: I Wish You Were Here – Pink Floyd
Destination No Where: To Here Knows When – My Bloody Valentine
The Ride Home: Jimmy – Tool
Back At Home Blues: Everyday is Exactly The Same – Nine Inch Nails

I’m sitting at the Las Vegas airport, taking advantage of the free wireless, and have decided to combat boredom by wiritng my first post regarding Las Vegas. Here’s a brief list of things I realized whilst in Sin City.

1. You walk on naked ladies everywhere on the Strip. The amount of people handing out the little call girl cards on the Strip is insanity! The ground is littered with pictures of naked women, quite literally. It’s bother disgusting and amusing. Do men actually call for these women while in Vegas? I mean, they must, otherwise they wouldn’t be in business. But SERIOUSLY?

2. It’s impossible to find anything here. I’m convinced most places in Vegas should be charged with illegal confinement, because it seems the main goal of all the major hotel/casinos is to make it very hard for you to leave. I spent several hours lost in them while trying to get back to the Strip or to a different hotel. The only place with decent signage was the MGM Grand.

3. There are more McDonalds than people in the city. Ditto for 7-11s.

4. The build out instead of up. In most cities, as they grow population-wise, you get a boom of tall apartment and condo buildings, so you don’t end up with a city 8 hours across. Apparently Las Vegas either missed the memo on how awesome multi-story buildings are for living accomodation, or they have some law against building high-rises off of the strip. The tallest condo building I saw was maybe 10 stories, which even by small Canadian town standards is small. We have grain silos bigger than that!

5. Drinking is so much more fun when done out of drink-ware that is shaped like the building you are in.

6. If there weren’t topless women dancing, you didn’t actually see a show in Vegas. I reccomend you get your money back or demand topless women.

7. Las Vegas is a black hole in which time stops. After about an hour here, you’ll already be trying to figure out what day things happened on.

Chelsea: Did you already register or whatever how many bags we are checking?
Adam: No it didn’t ask.
Chelsea: Oh, can you check a bag for me maybe? I would like to bring an extra one to bring our shopping home.
Adam: Yeah we can do it at the counter. And we have priority status at the counter.
Chelsea: Why do we have priority status?
Adam: Because we’re flying first class, bitches. Coach can’t hold our awesomeness.

I must say that my boyfriend and I travel in two separate worlds sometimes. I stay on friend’s couches and in cockroach filled hostels. He books the best suites he can and upgrades to first class on flights. I’m not going to complain, not for a second, because he always takes me to “travel in style” with him and I generally get a free trip out of his vacations. I just find it funny that we manage to travel together and not kill each other. Granted, I do prefer nice hotels and rental cars over non-air-conditioned subways and shared bathrooms. We’ve been talking about going to Europe together next summer and while I estimate we need 2-3 grand each, he seems to think he’ll need $10,000 CND to keep us in hotels as opposed to hostels (though with fuel prices we may need $10,000 just to get across the pond).
Regardless of our travel differences, we manage to have fun when we go away together. And he does help me cross things off of my list. This little surprise is going to fulfill #172 which is to fly somewhere first class. I can’t think of a better place to go first class than Las Vegas! Less than 20 hours until take off!

Sign in found on the backroads of Southern Ontario, near St. Catharines.

I don’t know why I was so fascinated with the prospect of seeing a giant figure of a Mennonite boy, but I assume it has something to do with my interest in Hutterites. When I saw on Road Side Attractions that in Cambridge they had a Mennonite boy, it was added straight away to my list. Since Cambridge is only about 30 minutes away from Guelph where I was spending about two weeks, I figured this latest excursion out east would be an appropriate time to cross this particular item off of my list.

Located next to a giant bed in a field out between the Mennonite furniture store and the 401 high way, there is the smiling, waving Mennonite boy, who actually isn’t that big, but I will forget that fact because he was just so cool! What a random thing to make into a big sign…Mennonite boy. Haha.

A shot of the CN tower from the ground care of myself.

Back in Canada today, via Amtrak. Off to Kingston pronto.