Chapter 78

I forgot to put my alarm, but I had a secondary alarm to remind me to bring my passport to work. So I slept in 20 minutes. I still did my tai chi, but abstained from taking the dog out as it was raining pretty heavily. So my bike commute to work sucked, but hey it’s only 10 minutes, and that’s if the light turns red as I’m 50 meters away from the intersection, if I catch a green light it’s more like 8 minutes.

I chilled in the office a bit, looking at the exam paper to make sure there are no errors before sending it to the photocopy guy. I browsed Facebook a bit, one thing that made a few waves is a Vancouver-based “immigration consultancy” company (taking a cut from Chinese, Indian, Latin American and Middle Eastern aristocrats and corrupt embezzling politicians when they get their paperwork done to emigrate from their hellholes) that published an ad with the pros and cons of moving to Canada, and in the cons column they put that a lot of people speak French. Of course a bunch of Quebecers got mad and the cunts backpedaled by saying inane shit like “Oh, we just means there might be a language barrier, we don’t hate them stinking pea soups UUUHH I mean French-speaking Canadians” but the damage was done. I just shrugged, it’s not as if I didn’t know already how much the squareheads from Victoria to St-John’s despise our existence. Canadians will fellate the turgid wand of multiculturalism and lick each ball counterclockwise in an effort to virtue-signal about how progressive they are, airportizing the big cities with hundreds of thousands of new yearly arrivals from the Caribbean, Asia and Africa, but they don’t see anything remotely wrong with spouting hateful shit towards those damn Frenchies over there in Kwuback and how they’ve always managed to resist assimilation. And then they wonder why so many of them (not me, though, I swear) have such a chip on their shoulder and don’t identify with the red maple leaf flag at all.

Some people pointed out how ironic that in the pros, they listed poutine, in a quite ironic blatant display of cultural appropriation. I remember a YouTube video my dad showed me, a CBC clip from the 80s or early 90s, in which they introduced pooteen to Anglo audiences and mocked it as disgusting slop that only poor people eat. But then one day, Toronto hipsters discovered it, and now it’s “Canadian culinary tradition”. At times I feel bad for them, after all, nearly every notable thing coming out of Canada in the past several decades, aside from the Trailer Park Boys perhaps, is straight out of the Great Q: pooteen, Saleen Diawn, Sark Dah Saley, Bom-bar-dear airplanes, hell might as well lump Georges St-Pierre in there. If it weren’t for Quebec, Canada would have an even bigger inferiority complex, with their culture that is totally indistinguishable from the USA’s aside from, I don’t know, a shitty coffee n’ donuts chain and saying “eh!” at the end of sentences, eh.

Some friends from a Facebook craft beer enthusiasts group were having a little Zoom call, so I went to an empty room and joined. One dude in Massachusetts caught covid and though he feels much better now, his sense of taste is gone. That’s terrifying, especially for a guy who likes hoppy IPAs and strong stouts.

At 9:30 I went to some big joyless government building to renew my residence permit. At least it didn’t take very long, just have a picture taken, sign a form, hand in my passport, and get a receipt that I have to present in three weeks to get it back. In the meantime, I can use this paper to buy bus tickets or other things that require a passport.

I made it back to school a bit late, had a class with the eleventh-graders, and then rode home. I ate leftover pasta while watching the UFC prelims, Quebec’s Charles Jourdain had a banger of a fight. He loves flying knees and other jumping attacks, which earned him the clever nickname Air Jourdain, but it’s mostly his boxing that gets the job done.

The afternoon flew by, I had one double with Attitude Class that I used for exam review, then I went home an hour earlier than usual, as per the Friday schedule. I relaxed a little bit, watching random YouTube videos about other planets, and later went to the driving school. I told the instructor to send me a message when he’s on the way there, and I got the message when I was out walking the dog, so it took me a bit longer to make it there. He was mad that I made him wait, and later I saw I had a bunch of missed calls and that he ranted about me in a way that could be construed as racist in the WeChat group with the other trainees. Remember what I said about how the whole “third-worlders don’t care about time” is pure bullshit? He’ll make me or others sit around for hours without a single concern crossing his autistic sociopathic mind, but if he has to wait 5 minutes for me, all hell breaks loose.

Driving practice sucked balls as it always does, but at least I was on the clock from the very beginning and punched out exactly as the two hours came to an end. Not that the whole thing didn’t feel like a tremendous waste of time, in fact for about half an hour I sat with another trainee in the car while the instructor went to eat dinner. I did the circuit only twice and read my book the rest of the time.

Back in the city after a taxi ride, I hopped on my bicycle and went to a Sichuan eatery, where I ordered three servings of spicy chicken to go. While it was being cooked, I went to the ATM and transfered a few thousand yuan from my main bank card (where my salary is deposited) to my old card (which is linked to the phone payment system). Paying by scanning QR codes with my phone is damn convenient, but I like to keep it separate from my main bank account.

I then went to the beer tent nearby. There’s a long-haired guy who went to university in North Carolina and opened a tiny microbrewery in the city, I haven’t been for a while and had a bit more time to kill before my chicken would be ready. I had his new creation, a delicious IPA with three different hops, and he also gave me a sample size of the coffee porter. We talked brewing for a bit and then I said goodbye, I should come back soon, now that I’m out of no-beer prison and my Covid vaccine is nicely incubated.

I picked up my chicken boxes and went to the main foreigner bar. It was early and still empty, so I ate my chicken while talking books with a British guy who also reads quite a lot, in fact he’s the one who lent me the book on Norman history. People slowly came in, there was a St-Patrick’s Day party, so Guinnesses and shots were consumed, jigs were danced and laughs were had. I stayed for a bit longer than the one single drink I thought I’d be there for, but still left a bit early, tired from that long week. I stopped at the wine bar that also doubles at an imported food shop to buy bags of good British chips and deli meats, and when I got home, I ate a whole bag of them delicious salty chips like a pig. Oops.