ludicrousity

May 9-12, 2006.
So this is Calgary, home of the Olympics back in the 1980s. It's a beautiful city with tons of stuff to do! Just beware of all the wierdos. There are random people that will come up to you smelling of booze and shout "Hello" into your face and run away laughing. There are "Needle disposal units" which are yellow boxes attached to random telephone poles, and the city is referred to as "Crack Town" by several of the other hostellers. And there are a whole lot of bums on the street... more than Toronto! But they were all cheering on Edmonton, at least!
The road layout is really weird in that it's so logical. The big road running N/S that keeps going away from the city is called Center street. On either side of that is First Street. You have to specify which side with E and W. And the numbers rise with each block away. Then, at the Bow River (which runs along the N side of the downtown area), the crossing road is called First Avenue, and the numbers get higher the further they get from that. Logical, but so confusing. I can't believe how easy it is to switch up E and W, and to mix up street and avenue. And even some locals gave us messed up directions!
They have a train (the C-Train), and it's free through the down town area. Oddly enough, the stops in one direction are NOT the same as the stops in the other direction. One will stop at all the even number streets, and the other direction all the odd number streets.
The area along the Bow River is all beautiful trails. Prince Island is in the middle of the river with lots of bridges, and it's a big park with playgrounds and educational trails. There's a huge "water conservation" theme just about everywhere. There's other river in the city and it's called the "Elbow River". I think it's a bad joke because it's just a small river that comes straight out of the much larger Bow River.
Sabeen and I walked around the downtown area so many times, though we didn't get out into the rest of the city much. We tried to go to several places to eat, and while the doors were open, they wouldn't let us in! One place siad "We're not open Wednesdays, but tomorrow nights the big night", and they gave us a business card. Another place let us go in and look around, but they were having a staff party before the grand opening the next day or something, and they sent us away with the invitation to come back the next day dressed nicely. (I guess jeans doesn't cut it, even in Cowboy land.) And then there was another place that wouldn't serve us food between 3 and 5! They gave us a takeout menu and told us to come back at 5, even though it was 3:20. While that would seem weird, there were a bunch of other places with locked doors with the same odd hours. Umm... yeah.
I think 3rd St W was all shopping center. Actually, a whole bunch of the downtown, at least the parts which weren't park, was shopping center. Sabeen still has all the downtown maps we kept taking from travel places, so I don't remember names.
Actually, less than a block away from the hostel was the Olympic Plaza. (That's what some of those pictures are of.) It's just a big open square with fancy olympic style walls on the sides. It looks like there should be plants in little gardens, but we probably got there too early in the season for them to be planted. Oh, well! There was an Olympic Stadium, but we didn't end up having time to go there. I hear they had indoor bobsledding we could have tried, though!
Calgary also has a giant skate park. We passed through it on the last afternoon in the city on the way to pick up my luggage, which had finally been found and shipped, and had only just arrived. (Dirty underwear sucks, and so does borrowing clothes, but at least I had my tooth brush! Anyways, bitterness aside...) This park was built after the Olympics. It was a millenium gift to the city, from the city. The people may all be bums, but the city&province are super rich! (No PST, and all the Albertians got $400 once because the province was so rich one year. Darned oil!)