Wee Oliver and I, along with friend Gary, made in to Halifax on Friday night, and we are now happily ensconced in the Holiday Inn Harbourview. Oliver is watching Treehouse (and trying very, very hard to open a package of Jello chocolate pudding), and I’m checking my email.

Today was our culinary tour of the Halifax region. Using Alan Macleod’s essay as a map, we loaded up the car with dried chilis, frozen Naan, bottles of Brio and cans of British beer.

We ate lunch at the fabulous Pete’s Frootique in Bedford (it’s exactly what downtown Charlottetown needs) and dinner at a very nice, simple sushi place on Blowers Street next to the Paper Chase (which, sadly, has faded as the best place to get magazines; we fell back on Atlantic News, which is antiseptic by useful).

I avoided Halifax for a decade; I’m only just starting to uncover its riches. If nothing else, we will eat very well for the next couple of weeks. And, of course, Catherine is getting her first time alone in 2 years, which she is enjoying very much.

Wee Oliver and I are off to Halifax for the weekend to see what we can see. Partly inspired by Alan Macleod’s helpful article on where to buy food, partly to give Catherine her first time alone in 3 years now that Oliver is almost weaned, partly because it’s time that Father and Son explored the Big City together, and partly because the travel bug hasn’t been completely flushed from my system. And, of course, there’s the fact that the Jetta doesn’t truly excel until you get it out on the highway. Stay tuned for news.

I’ve written here before about my experiences with Amazon.com. I remember when I first ordered from them, I could expect products to arrive, with regular shipping, in 3 or 4 weeks. It wasn’t immediate gratification. And since Indigo (nee Chapters) came on the scene, I’ve shifted most of my online purchases to them because, although their website is much inferior, they do ship quickly, and I often get books in 2 or 3 days.

Well, earlier this week I placed an order at Amazon.com for some books that I couldn’t find elsewhere. I placed the order on Sunday morning and the books arrived today, 5 days later. This was with the medium shipping charge — not “slow boat”, but not “super express” either.

That’s close enough to instant gratification for me that I might consider moving back to Amazon.com for my book orders, especially given Indigo’s attitude towards censorship.

One caveat: my sister-in-law to be Jodi placed an order at Amazon.com for text books that she needed in a hurry, and sprang for the super express shipping. She didn’t get her textbooks in time. So they’re not batting 100%.

By the way, the books I ordered were Understanding Children and Diagnostic Tests for Men (both by Richard Saul Wurman, famous for TED and his series of travel guides; the later I got simply for interest, not due to medical need), as well as Traditional Boatbuilding Made Easy : A 12 Foot Skiff for Oar and Sail because, well, sometimes you have to build a boat.

An email from Dave arrived this morning with no body, just a subject:

I’ve just come from a board meeting of the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust. The Trust has a very diverse board of directors: former politicians, businesspeople, artists, photographers, farmers, lawyers, accountants. Without exception (leaving out the fact that I’m an exception) they were all excited about Canada’s dual gold-medal performances in hockey at the Olympics. While I still can’t fathom why, nor muster anything but a veneer of interest in such discussions, I must say I was amazed at how the discussion cut across class, income, home town and so on.

Maybe that’s the key: hockey is stupid, but at least it’s something that we all have in common. Even me.

Here’s a guest article from Alan Macleod in response to my request for more information on where to buy “ethnic” (for lack of a better word) food in Halifax:

Iqbal’s on Windsor near Almon (up from Lion’s Head) has good Indian supplies and will bus them over - brown basmati and Lalah’s madras curry powder are a favorite. They also give or at least used to give cooking classes.

The Asian shop at Queen and Victoria has Chinese, Japanese, and Thai supplies. Every summer I buy 20 kg of sushi rice from them which lasts me a year. They have stuff that I would have seen in Canada only in the Preston Street area of Ottawa. [I remember seeing canned gourami which you may recall as a fish in childhood aqauriums (shivers)]. A bit of a mess but a good Asian market usually is.

The Italian Market near the Port of Wines off of Spring Garden has cheese and dry pastas that you cannot find here. Though the JC Superstore has introduced a lot of better forms of pasta and usually the Root Cellar has ok cheese, though perhaps a bit less lately.

Pete’s Fruitique in Bedford has everything a immigrant family from Scotland could want - penguin bars, Typhoo tea, Iron Brew. They also have the best fresh fruit and vegetables in the Maritimes as well as airshipped in (possibly in fact by zeppelin) real Montreal Bagels! Many other things there, too, including Liberty dairy products: plum and walnut yogurt!

On the corner of the road up from the old bridge and Agricola there is a middle eastern supply shop whose name escapes me but where you can find anything. I have yet figured out where the local Lebanese community here on the island supplies itself. Much broader selection than here. If you get the Flatbreads book I mentioned, there are ingredients there you can use.

If you are at all interested in homebrewing, go to one of the three Brewing Centres in Metro. I go to the Burnside one on Akerly up from the big Leons. Ask Ogg whether you can make good ale from their supplies. Again, they will bus and have a good website at www.betterbrews.com.

And - perhaps most importantly for the idle islander - the best place to buy wine and imported beer on the way home to PEI… the Sackville NBLC. Due to the university, they have a special wine corner, good cheap Ontario reds and a wider (and in fact different) range of UK ales than the best NS shop. The best and handiest NSLC is at Elmsdale in that strip mall right off the highway - they are used to seeing PEI customers on a regular basis.

If you are going through Maine, a mere eight hours from here is RSVP Liquors which has the best selection I have ever seen in one place and the best prices. Near the University in Portland. They will pack ahead if you call or if (as I am most lucky to have for many reasons) your good pal in Portland is visiting. Fullers ESB!

Thank you Alan. We’ll have to head to Halifax soon. Additional suggestions welcome.

Kevin O’Brien talks about national pride in discussion surrounding my comments about the Olympics.

While I’m loathe to dip into the religious well to counter, consider this description of pride as one of the Seven Deadly Sins:

Seeing ourselves as we are and not comparing ourselves to others is humility. Pride and vanity are competitive. If someone else’s pride really bothers you, you have a lot of pride.

That all said, I continue to fail to see how success in athletic competition equates with goodness as a country. If my country has a lower child poverty rate, or a higher literacy rate, or contributes to global understanding in some meaningful way, I’m happy to be prideful.

If a bunch of my neighbours succeed at sliding a piece of rubber around a piece of ice better than people across an invisible border, well, I suppose I can laud them for their prowess. But perhaps we should be embarassed that we’re so distracted by the irrelevance rather than taking pride at something to which our personal connection is so tenuous.

Googlewhack: Rukavina Craziness. Redux: From the Guest Book comes this pleasant note:

you friggin moron rukavina isn’t an english word; not underlined by google, not in dictionary.com why don’t you read the damn before you make an ass of yourself

I’m off to read the damn. Wish me luck.

One of the days we spent in Chiang Mai we took a tour of the Sankamphaeng Road, which runs west of the city and is home to a wide variety of factories producing crafts from silverwork to teak furniture to paper umbrellas to jewellery.

Our tour guide took it upon herself to take over care of Oliver for the duration of the tour — which he loved — leaving us free to browse in peace. Pictured above is our image of Oliver when we emerged from the lacquer ware shop: Oliver sitting on top of an ice cream stand waving to us.

For some freaky reason Oliver, who is in the habit recently of starting to cry if Catherine gets more than 4 feet from him, thought this an entirely normal exercise, and didn’t complain at all. Except when we had to leave the tour guide at the end of the tour, of course.

Oliver sitting between the anonymous mother and 5 year-old daughter that we met on the bus from Phitsanulok to Bangkok. It was a wonderful trip. The small finger-puppet that the young girl is wearing (it sort of blends in with Oliver’s frock) was our gift to her; she gave Oliver a bracelet, and an odd assortment of Thai snack foods for kids.