If you are anything like me, the question “I wonder where the secret Korean grocery store in North River is” has never occurred to you. This is likely because the notion of their actually being a secret Korean grocery store in North River never occurred to you.

If this is the case, then prepare to be amazed and delighted as I lead you to the door: from Charlottetown drive as if you were going to Cornwall on the Trans-Canada Highway. Head over the North River Causeway and before you get to the PetroCan gasoline station on your right you’ll see, on the left, a white plaster horse with it’s right leg raised. Turn left at the horse and into the parking lot for Winfield Motel. On the left-hand side of the parking lot you’ll see a new building that looks like it’s not yet in use. Drive to the end of the building and park. Go to the last door on the building, the one with the Post-It note with Korean writing. If the door is locked, go around to the office of Winfield Motel and ask the woman behind the desk about for help (warning: she does not speak English) and help will appear.

Once you are admitted you will find a bright, modern grocery filled to the brim with the culinary wonders of Korea, everything from silkworm pupae to kimchi to dumplings to bottled squid to tiny table-top gas-fired grills for making bulgogi.

If there was any doubt as to Charlottetown becoming a culturally more diverse place of late, surely this all the evidence needed to prove the case. It’s not an exaggeration to say that when we arrived in Charlottetown 16 years ago if you’d told me the city would boast a Korean grocery I would have laughed you out of town: back then, outside of the always rich Lebanese menu, and with the notable exception of The Noodle House, “pizza” was about as “international” as food got in the city.

We live in exciting times.

From the Flickr stream of Nova (see Charlottetown councillor, graffiti artist seek compromise):

When people speak about “graffiti as art,” I think this is the kind of thing they’re talking about.

• The early bus up University Avenue leaves at 8:08 a.m., not at 8:00 a.m. It doesn’t stop at the Farmers’ Market, but it will stop in front of the Subway, which is almost the Farmers’ Market.
• Today is the last day that Garth and Peggy will be operating the Taylor’s Taters stall at the Market until the fall. Stop by and stock up on carrots and potatoes while you still can.
• You can still walk from the Farmers’ Market through the UPEI campus, across the creek and up beside the bestofpei store, but just barely: the new Canada Games track has made it hard to navigate and you need to walk around the track and down a precarious hill to get to the bridge over the creek (the bridge is leaning at a 15 degree angle and is perhaps not long for this world). It would be nice if UPEI would recreate this path — not only is it a shortcut to the mall, but it’s the only bit of “natural area” on the campus. Here’s the route we took.
• Basketball nets only cost $2.99. We bought two, to install on the Prince Street School court.
• Canadian Tire sells plug-in battery packs for Motorola and Nokia phones that will give you an additional 60 minutes of talk time and 60 hours of standby time for only $2.99. Seems like a good thing to keep in the glove box.
• You can now buy a 1 terabyte external disk drive at Future Shop for $169.00. The mind boggles.
• Future Shop is also selling heavily-discounted Nintendo DS games: we picked up a Go Diego Go for $8.00. They’re on a table at the front right by the door.
• Some people refer to a bus that is going from the Charlottetown Mall to the Confederation Centre as “going uptown.” I find this confusing, as I would call this “going downtown,” mostly because the Uptown Theatre in Toronto was at Yonge and Bloor, not Yonge and Front. As an aside, the first time I was ever asked for ID at a movie theatre was at a matinee screening of Beverly Hills Cop at the Uptown in 1984. It was rated ‘R’ and I was 18. I’ve never been asked for ID again.
• Despite being technically “open to traffic,” most Charlottetown Transit buses seem to have given up trying to navigate Fitzroy Street, as it’s often clogged with construction trucks and parked cars. So much for the 6 to 8 weeks closing predicted in January.
• One of the Charlottetown Transit buses has an internal code-name of “Little Junior.” Other buses are referred to by their colour scheme (“yellow over blue”, “green over burgundy,” etc.), or their destination (“Stratford One”). The Talking Bus is referred to internally as “The Talking Bus.”

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian opens tonight at the Brackley Drive-in. Show starts at 8:45. Pack the kids and the pillows in the car.

Here’s what the building on the corner of University and Fitzroy in downtown Charlottetown looked like on May 4:

Here’s what it looks like today:

They’ve done a lovely job renovating the outside of this building (rumours are that it’s even nicer inside). It’s nice to see life being breathed back into appropriately-scaled downtown buildings; too bad about the hulking yellow monolith that’s taking shape behind it.

The Old Triangle is open for business tonight.

For reference, here’s how my desk looked on the day I moved into the office six years ago:

Cleaned up my desk today and resolved that everything not required for day-to-day work would get removed to alternative storage. I found a lot of eligible things. Here’s an annotated collection of some of them.

Oliver and Catherine and I drove out to the north shore on Saturday, taking advantage of the wonderful weather, for some holiday-weekend diversions. We had supper at the revitalized Ship to Shore in Darnley, and then doubled back to Sea View Hall for the “Jamboree” advertised out front on a sandwich board.

Truth be told I had no idea what a “jamboree” was. And so my first question on entering the hall was “I have no idea what a jamboree is,” to which the kindly ticket-taker simply replied “music.” So we bought our tickets — $5.00 each, free for Oliver — and joined a crowd of about 50 packed into the hall and waited to see what that meant in practice.

While you might expect Oliver to be the youngest person at such an event, we were somewhat surprised to find the Catherine and I were likely the next-youngest: the crowed skewed older and, while they were welcoming, we did feel somewhat like fish out of water.

At 8:00 p.m. the master of ceremonies took the stage and the proceedings began.

So here’s what a jamboree is: people with instruments show up, put their name on a list, and get to play two songs. As near as I could tell they’ll take anyone, playing in any musical style, and will keep going until everyone’s had their chance.

I’d say it was an “open mic night,” but it’s clear that these are not aspiring professional musicians, just regular everyday people with a song in their heart. They mostly played country songs, sometimes ones with a strong religious line running through them. They played guitars, mandolins, piano, drums and fiddle. Or just sang. And they did so with conviction.

The line between “audience” and “performer” wasn’t really all that clear: Catherine was talking to a nice older woman — the kind of person that could have been your mother or your grandmother — when suddenly she was called up on stage to play guitar.

In the hipster intelligentsia there’s a lot of talk about “maker culture” and about how everything’s gone all “participatory” of late. As if we needed digital tools to allow we amateurs to make and distribute stuff. A night in the audience at Reuben’s Jamboree reminded me that this isn’t a new invention at all, and that regular everyday people have been making their own culture for as long as there have been regular everyday people.

Reuben’s Jamboree takes place on the third Saturday of every month at 8:00 p.m. at the Sea View Hall (about an hour’s drive northwest of Charlottetown). If you show up with a guitar or mandolin I’m sure they’ll welcome you up to the stage; if you’re content to sit in the audience admission is $5.00 for adults and free for kids, which includes a lunch half-way through.

AOL reports that the Charlottetown Dairy Queen is the busiest Dairy Queen in the world. They don’t provide a source for this (old media!), so I’m wondering where they got their information and what measure they use to rank “busyness.” Thanks to A. for the pointer.

I’m not a customer of the National Bank, but they have an arrangement with the Credit Union that lets me use their ATMs without paying a service charge. So I was unduly excited when they got a replacement ATM this week. Here’s the before and after:

The new machine is a big improvement.