Category Archives: Pop Culture
Best Bucket List Everrrr
The articles over at Cracked are pretty much the only reason I get out of bed each morning. This morning they outdid themselves with this amazing Bucket List of things to do before (or while) you die. I like things that are both relevant to my life but also written well enough that I no longer want to punch a whole through my computer using my phone.
I’m not sure if my favourite is “cause an eclipse” or “touch Christian Bale’s face”…either way, a little ridiculous inspiration for you.
Bonjour, mon petit chat!
The title of this post is pretty much the only sentence I can say in French. It’s probably wrong, but I say it all the time just to prove that all my time in French classes was not for nothing. I took French until grade three, on and off between grades 4 and 9, and all through high school. I came out of high school with an alright understanding and the desire to take it further, but I hit a roadblock in my first year of university. Sitting in my first day of class, the professor spoke nothing but French and everyone in the class seemed to be already fluent. I dropped it after the first day because I literally had no idea what was going on or what the expectations would be (beyond already speaking French…).
Being the giant lazy sloth that I am, I just stopped. Well, that’s a lie, I attempted, poorly, to take an independent class through Athabasca University, but that was a complete wash and a waste of money. Now, I have decided to finally get back on tackling #6 on my life list to become fluent in French. I have been fairly dedicated so far, listening to podcasts everyday, reviewing old French textbooks, listening to French news stories to get an ear for the spoken rhythm of the language. I’m hopeful. I also will be enrolling in J’explore a French learning program offered at various locations across Canada, care of the Canadian government. The program is 5 weeks long and I hope to be able to do it in either Montreal or New Brunswick. The goal is conversational French fluency, but of course they have varying levels of classes. My personal goal is to not end up in the beginner’s class!
So far, my absolute favourite tool has been Coffee Break French, produced by the Radio Lingua Network. Radio Lingua has several different French podcasts, including One Minute French and the video-based Walk, Talk and Learn French, but so far, Mark and Anna at Coffee Break French have been the absolute best at helping me get a new lease on the French language. I highly recommend you check them out if you are also trying to learn or relearn Francais, either at their website or on Itunes!
Monday’s Picture of the Week
Peggy’s Cove in Nova Scotia, Canada. I loved being there but it was quite cold (in February). Apparently, this is the most photographed thing in all of Canada. Odd.
Dear Iceland
So Adam and I have been slowly going over the details of our trip to Iceland, but not too much since
1. I don’t know when I can actually go
2. We don’t know if my friend-ette Irma is coming
Now, I am a fan of doing things that make little to no sense. It makes life more interesting. Hence, I desparately want to drive the ring road around Iceland despite it being one way bridges and dirt roads. True there is a bus that goes around it (thanks to one of my lovely commenters) but Adam is not one to take buses. We want to rent a car. Problem is, a car rental even for a few days gets up into the thousands of dollars range in Iceland. Seriously. Why? Iceland, according to Wikipedia, has one of the highest car ownership rates per capita in the entire world. You think some nice Icelandic person with 4 cars would just let us have one on good faith and maybe a nice bottle of maple syrup.
Planning this trip is slightly more difficult than I had originally thought, but I am just going to assume this will make it more fun in the end. Though, to be honest, I can’t stop thinking about that movie about the vampires in the Arctic. Iceland would make a way better vampire destination because it is a tiny isolated island. On the bright side, it would be safe from zombies in the even of a living dead outbreak (at least for a while – zombies can swim/float).
And this is what I think about while planning a trip.
A Beginner’s Guide to NYC
After a sleepless 12 hour over night Greyhound stint, stuck sitting next to the bathroom, Manhattan can seem a little daunting the first time you see it from a distance. And from there, it only gets worse. You climb off the bus into the August heat, trying to find the right Subway entrance. You have you map, your hostel reservation and the driving need to experience everything “New York”.
Whatever your actual itinerary looks like, bus or plane, hostel or hotel, weekend or several weeks, New York can be a little overwhelming on your first visit. Here are a few tips to maximizing your first trip in NYC and keeping your wits about you. I’ve kept frugality in mind since I was just about broke when I got to New York.
1. You won’t learn to navigate Manhattan if you stay hidden inside your room. When I was in New York I stayed in a run down hostel, in a room with a tiny window and no fan. In the middle of August. It was horrible to be in and smelled like curry and peanut butter. I found a cockroach in the bathroom. It was perfect. I never wanted to be there for any reason which motivated me to spend all of my time wandering around and taking in the sights. Taking a break in the room was never an option. Even the Subway was preferable since it had air-conditioning. While you don’t necessarily need to book the worst rated hostel you can find, but consider the fact you’re not in the city to enjoy a nice room. NYC is big and scary but hiding in your room won’t help you learn the city.
2. Get the New York City Pass if you’re planning to go to most of the major tourist attractions. If you end up going to even half of them you’ll have saved yourself quite a bit of cash. A lot of the bigger sites also have special fast-tracked line ups for people who have their tickets already which is a huge time saver (especially at the Empire State Building).
3. Spend your evenings in Central Park. Assuming you’re in NYC in the summer, Central Park offers the perfect place to relax and cool your heels after a long day of roaming the city. It’s a great place to people watch and grab a late night pretzel or slice from the surrounding shops for a picnic dinner. If you’re especially into getting a romantic New York experience, make sure to catch the lightning bugs coming out as soon as dusk hits. Central Park is like the eye of a hurricane, a little rectangle of calm in the middle of a hectic city. If it’s good enough for the hardened New Yorkers to use, it’s good enough for even the most frazzled tourist.
4. The Staten Island Ferry gets your reasonably close to the Statue of Liberty. I had a discount ticket for an actual Statue tour, but it was almost four hours long. I just wanted to see the statue, not learn everything about it and be stuck on the island for four hours wasting time with a bunch of people wearing fanny packs. After asking a nice agent at the ferry terminal (who made my friend and I imitate Terrance and Philip from South Park, because we’re Canadian) let us in on the fact you can easily see the Statue of Liberty from the Staten Island Ferry and, best of all, it’s FREE!
5. At least make yourself a rough plan before you go. I’m not a fan of the over-planning but if when I went to NYC I only had three days and I had quite a few places I wanted to hit up. The night before we left my travel partner and I sketched out a rough map of the city and placed all the places we wanted to go onto it. Using a highly technical “circling” system, we grouped the destinations into three days. Manhattan offers a lot and if you don’t employ some sort of planning you’ll end up spending a lot of time running around and catching the Subway and trying to get all over the place. Try and roughly group where you want to go according to where the are located so you can do them all in one shot rather than going back and forth.
6. Give yourself at least an afternoon just to wander around aimlessly. Try to do this as soon as possible in your trip to give yourself some pace of the city without over-thinking where your are trying to get to. Let yourself fall into the pace of the city, learn some of the landmarks, how to navigate if you have a map, and just wander. It won’t be a total waste of time either. Guaranteed you’ll see some attraction or building you forgot to put on your itinerary. If I hadn’t spent some time aimlessly wandering the the streets I would have missed the Central Library, Grand Central Station, Wall Street and the Flat Iron Building altogether.
7. Pick and choose which museums you really want to see. New York has hundreds of museums to chose from, even aside from the bigger name ones like The Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and the Guggenheim. If you have a limited amount of time you might want to choose just one or two or you could find yourself spending your entire trip inside museums. The Met and the Museum of Natural History can each easily consume five or six hours of your day on their own if you truly want to appreciate them and get your money’s worth. Considering the sheer amount of places you can go in New York and everything there is to do, make sure you are setting a realistic amount of time for museums.
8. Don’t get your hopes up about everything you go to do and see. New York is built up as a giant romantic metropolis teaming with interesting things to be discovered. There’s supposed to be excitement around every corner. Reality strikes quick though, and you need to be prepared for that. Not everything is going to meet your expectations. You will stand in line for at least at hour at the Empire State building only to realize the deck is so full you can hardly see over the ledge. The World Trade Centre site will look more like a construction zone than a memorial site. You probably won’t understand most of the art in the Guggenheim. Don’t let the occasional disappointment turn you off of enjoying the rest of the city, these things are to be expected. New York has some big hype surrounding it and not every aspect is going to live up to your expectations.
9. It might be tempting to stick with what you know and grab Starbucks and McDonald’s but eat at the local places. I’ll admit I was pretty sick on my last night in the city and chicken nuggets seem to contain some sort of Pepto Bismal medicinal properties, at least as far as my stomach is concerned, so I opted for for the Golden Arches. Aside from being sick, it was my least favourite meal during my stay. Between warm pretzels, fresh garlic bread from pizzerias and fresh fruit from a local market, your common fast food joint just isn’t going to cut it. Make sure aside from eating you stay hydrated too!
Relevant Reading – the Thanks but No Thanks Edition
This week is all about things that aren’t about to make it onto my life list any time soon. I’m trying to be adventurous and open to new experiences, but some things are just beyond my personal threshold. Case in point: Pulpit Rock. The articles are still great and interesting, the subjects just happen to make me queasy and unhappy to think about.
10 Most Exotic Asian Foods
via Nellie at Wild Junket
I should mention here that the chicken feet actually look somewhat good…but the rest of it isn’t about to be consumed by me anytime soon.
This video!!!
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMfZRztNrbk%5D
This video is insane and I cannot believe people stand there!!
Most Dangerous Roads in the World
I hate driving in Calgary Alberta, I doubt I would survive these unscathed.
North Korea
This blog entry is surprisingly beautiful and has some wonderful photography. It actually kind of made me want to go to North Korea, but I think it might still be a little bit too out there for me. The forced participation in musicals is what does it for me.
Thanks But No Thanks: The Calgary Stampede
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.
Monday’s Picture of the Week
One of the many anti-meth photos I collected when I went to Montana a year ago.
Relevant Reading – The Unemployed Edition
My weekly roundup of interesting and relevant articles I’ve found on the wide and vast interwebs. This week it’s all about being unemployed!
The JET Programme
via Matador
Immediately after reading this article I messaged my boyfriend Adam and said “you can find work in Japan with your job skills, right?” This excited me. A year of living in Japan AND a job after I graduate in December? Yes please! Check for official info here
How to Make Travel Look Good on a Resume
via Traveler’s Notebook
Great suggestions for making all of your time spent wandering around work for you in your job search
Save the Economy
This entire site makes me pee myself laughing, and I figure since it has to do with this “tanking” economy of ours it is relevant to my sad state of joblessness. Installing toilets in all the rooms of my house? Yes!
Earn Money on the Road
via Brave New Traveler
This isn’t particularly relevant to my current state of financial affairs, but it could come in handy to other people! I’d rather be broke and living with my parents than broke on the road.
Save Money, Travel Later
via Vagabonish
A great and simple piece about four ways you can easily save money now so you can travel later.
1002 Things Before I Kick the Bucket 