helen-louise's journal

I am visiting Grant in the US!

My flight on Tuesday was one of the least unpleasant transatlantic flights I've ever taken. No turbulence at all until the final descent, enough spare seats that I didn't have someone immediately next to me, they fed me twice with food which was labelled as allergen-free, my own wheelchair got delivered directly to the plane (!) only a little more broken than it was before and easily fixable. I should probably emphasise the last point because it's really unusual for an electric wheelchair to make it directly to the gate. More usually they bring me a manual chair and a minion to push, and then I pick up my wheelchair either at the top of the ramp or down where you pick up cases.

We went for a meal at the wonderful Veggie Planet in Mississauga, about 10 minutes away from Toronto Airport. This place almost literally saved my life when my flight was delayed for 26 hours in April. I mean, I have enough body fat that I wouldn't have actually dropped dead of malnutrition, but you do not want to know how grumpy I get when I have low blood sugar - let alone when I've slept for an insufficient amount of time in my clothes in an overpriced hotel room.

Clearing both Canadian and American customs was super easy and friendly. The Canadians were just like "What are you doing in Canada?", I said, "Going to have lunch and then going to the US", and they waved me straight through. American customs are often highly suspicious when someone on an overseas passport crosses the land border, because they think I might have been living in the US and I've just crossed the border to "reset" the 6 months that a tourist is allowed to stay without a visa, but we've done it enough times now to know the "correct" answers. Plus I can prove exactly where I've been thanks to location stamps on my photos and Google Maps timeline. Rather than me moving to the US, what we really need is some way to move Grant to the UK, but that's... complicated.

So it was all good, but travelling for this distance with chronic fatigue syndrome and having been unwell immediately before (I really thought I was going down with a cold, but it evaporated), and having had no sleep for 30 hours is going to knock me out for several days. (To be fair, I did fall asleep on the plane 5 times, each time for less than a minute.) Yesterday was a fun day of... sleep. Today I woke up at noon and am currently contemplating some form of breakfast.

I am in Toronto with @Wicked_Shifty! Sorry for the lack of updates... the wifi in our hotel room is beyond terrible, so we've come down to the lobby to post sickening adorable pictures.





Shifty says, "Without internet, we have had to find other ways to amuse ourselves. Surprisingly, the TV hasn't been turned on yet." :D

So I finally have my trip to Canada booked. I'm flying to Toronto on Friday 28th August to meet Shifty. He's American, but lives close enough to the border that Toronto is pretty much the nearest major city.

Then Richard's flying over on Thursday 3rd September and all three of us are going to hang out until Sunday 6th September. Then Shifty's going home and Richard and I are going to Montréal until Thursday 10th September, whereupon we fly home.

Any potential burglars who are reading this and think that they can break into our house while we're away, please note that it will be guarded by a vicious Attack Mother. Which is worse than a dog, because a dog will only bite you... my mother will talk you to death!

Anyway, if you are located in Toronto or Montréal and might want to meet up with us while we're over, please read below the cut-tag. ( Details )

Today I am feeling depressed and panicky. The problem with sleeping in hotel rooms is the damned air conditioning. Firstly, it's impossible to control the temperature of the room the way we'd do it at home by throwing open a window, since the windows are sealed. The hotel room defaults to 22 deg C, which is too hot for comfortable sleeping - especially with the two duvets they've given us! I prefer the room somewhere around 17-18 deg C while I'm trying to fall asleep.

Secondly, a single heavy duvet (we removed the second one because it was ridiculous) is improper temperature control for me. At home, I sleep with a thin duvet and a selection of thin blankets, which I throw onto or off the bed depending on my body temperature. It is entirely normal for me to go to sleep in pyjamas and socks under four layers of bedding, and wake up half-naked under two. Here, with one big duvet, I only have the choice of "clothes on" or "clothes off", which is not enough gradation.

Thirdly, the air is too dry. So I have trouble getting to sleep in the first place because my mouth is too dry (three or four of my medications all have 'dry mouth' as a side-effect), leading to a cycle of drinking water and needing to pee which goes on for a while before sleep occurs. Then while I'm asleep my nose swells up inside, and I end up breathing through my mouth, which leads to bizarre, usually horrible dreams. I have a lot of nightmares anyway, but there's nothing quite like waking up having a full-blown anxiety attack simply because of not breaking properly. Blargh.

Saline spray is wonderful, but it only works to rehydrate my nose when I'm awake enough to do the spraying. In cheap hotels, you can lay wet towels across the air conditioner, and that helps to keep the air moist, but this is a fancy-ass hotel and the air conditioning is a vent high on the wall. I remember the time I shared a room at an alt.polycon - can't remember which one - with Cally Soukup, who brought a portable humidifier to combat the air conditioning, and it was the Best Thing Ever. I wonder how she's doing? She was one of my few alt.poly friends who didn't make it over to livejournal. Say hi to her from me if you see her at a convention.

Whine whine whine.

Apart from hotel air conditioning, Montréal continues to be amazing. If papersky ever invites you to the Jean-Talon Market, and you have any interest whatsoever in food, then go. Apparently it is only a quarter of its summer size right now, since the weather means that only the indoor parts were open, but we found vegan-friendly Turkish delight, and sorbet that tasted just like the fruit it was made from, and a tea shop with some very interesting blends. I could have bought many things there, since they had at least six varieties of white tea, which is my favourite, but settled for the Peach Blossom blend which smelled the best.

I had a buckwheat crêpe which was vegan, but rather boring since the stall owner only had butter as a possible fat to fry it in, so it was extremely dry. I should have opted for an apple crêpe with maple syrup, or cinnamon, sugar and lemon, rather than getting excited by the one labelled as "végétalienne". Well, you live and learn.

There was also an entire shop of sheep butter, cheese, lanolin, yarn etc (which nitoda would love); a chocolate shop whose dark chocolate was dairy-free; a spice shop which had more dried chillis than I've ever seen together in one place, as well as an insanely large collection of different types of peppercorn; an organic hippy nonsense shop with vegan chocolate chip cookies (and vegan onion crackers?!); a great deal of charcuterie and seafood; and fruit and vegetables sold by the actual farmers who produce it. That's something which is entirely missing from my most local market in Kingston-upon-Thames: traceability. Anonymous stalls sell barely-fresh fruit and vegetables which could be from anywhere in the world. At least when I go to the supermarket, everything British-produced has a label on to tell me the name and location of the farm it came from.

I have been jealous of mongoose_bite's tales of his local farmers' market for some months now, but having experienced a market like that in person, I now really need to find something like it in or near London. There must be one.

Might go out shopping for clothes or books later if I can face moving. A lot of shops here are oddly open until 9pm Monday to Friday, but only until 5 or 6pm on Saturdays (and Sundays). I understand closing early on Sundays, but it seems odd to be open until 9pm on slow nights like Monday and Tuesday, and then closing so early on a Saturday. It's not how central London works, anyway. I was wondering if it was because a lot of Catholics go to church on Saturday night ("to get it out the way") instead of Sunday morning, but I'm not sure how religious the city still is, despite all the churches around the place.

I've seen a couple of shops which claim to be for "sizes 14+", Addition-Elle and another one I've forgotten the name of which looked like mostly office wear. I wonder if either of them have jeans I can wear? Torrid in the US is great for finding me jeans, but they don't have branches here.

I should probably update you on what we've been doing in Montréal. Though it's not very exciting - Richard has been mostly working, and I feel as though I've done nothing other than sleeping and eating. That isn't completely true, though it certainly did take me a long time to recover from the flight and figure out how to pace myself properly. This is the first long trip I've taken since being diagnosed with chronic fatigue, and is the first holiday of any sort we've had since going to Zürich in August 2012 (and that was hardly relaxing since we were away with my mother who is exhausting!), so I didn't already have the skillset.

On Saturday we went out for our anniversary dinner (which was a bit rubbish) and for cake afterwards (which wasn't), and then to the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal. Most of the museum was closed for rearrangement, but we saw A Matter of Abstraction and On Abstraction III, both of which were utterly, hilariously awful. There were a few good paintings and/or sculptures - the ones which had had actual effort put into them (you can download the PDF brochure if you're interested - some of the pictures are really worth seeing). But we were extremely unconvinced by the sheet of aluminium, identical to any other sheet of aluminium from a mill, leaning against a wall and claiming to be a piece of art! At least Marcel Duchamp signed his urinal and turned it into art that way!

On Sunday, we went to the Biodôme. That was awesome, but then we like plants and animals so it was hardly surprising that we enjoyed it. The rainforest and maple forest areas were particularly interesting, and we're looking forward to going to the Jardin Botanique this weekend. papersky said there is a lot to see there even in winter because there are greenhouses. I am sad that we can't go up the Olympic Tower because it is closed for annual maintenance, given that it has a FUNICULAR. (I managed to annoy my family immensely in Zürich by dragging them onto the funicular and rack railway and aerial tramway - what can I say, I'm a geek for weird forms of public transport. Apparently I wrote absolutely nothing about that trip on livejournal, which saddens me now, but I assume I was just too exhausted).

We are currently unsure when we are leaving Montréal because we are currently uncertain when Richard's job here will be finished. Going to Toronto by myself just isn't at all practical when I can't lift my own case or get into anyone's house due to stairs, so I might have to go home instead. Unknown. Ask me later.

Survived flight and customs/immigration and am currently located in hotel room in Montréal. The hotel is literally next to Richard's workplace - so much so that he can walk from the hotel to his office without even going outside! We have a ridiculously large bed, although Richard claims it's only the same size as our two beds at home - which further emphasises what I keep telling him about how we should make them up as one big bed instead of two small ones!

I have no brain. Somehow the 12 hours of sleep I got were nowhere near enough to make up for the less than 4 hours sleep the night before plus the 8 hour flight. Will write more when I have regained the ability to be coherent.

Oh dear. I have made Richard unhappy. I didn't quite realise that he was talking about going back to Canada THIS TUESDAY i.e. 28th January i.e.in a week. I was focused too hard on the being in Toronto around the middle of February part and not really thinking about the beginning of the trip.

I know nothing about Montreal other than that they speak weird Quebec French, the Biodome is really good, and anything I have picked up from the Kathy Reichs books which are set there. I shall have to search papersky and redbird's past lj entries about things to do in Montreal. And I need to find out how accessible the city is, especially in winter weather conditions.

I am now very stressed because I need to get enough meds and clothes for the trip, as well as sorting out enough work to take with me. I'm planning to work for half the time and look at museums, zoos etc for the rest of the time. (Probably one day of work followed by a day of sightseeing). A week doesn't seem like long enough to sort everything out. Argh!

Every time I visit North America, I get reminded how impractical European ideas about slowing down global warming are. We think the North Americans should just stop using their cars to drive everywhere, and forget how spread out North American cities are. Because they are not short of space, things there are far, far more spread out than at home. For example, the strip mall - a collection of five or six shops in a single-storey, flat building with a huge amount of parking at the front - that simply does not exist in Europe, as we don't have the room. I made rmjwell fall over laughing when I admitted at alt.polycon 11 that I'd thought a strip mall was a place you went to see strippers.

What really brought this home to me was going to the drive-in with futabachan & Amanda. This North American custom does not exist in the UK, or in any part of Europe I've visited. Of course we have cinemas, but never outdoor ones, except occasionally during summer music festivals. It was cool to be there, but weird - it seemed very wasteful to have each individual car blasting its own sound system rather than the cinema using a single one. And drivers were advised to switch on their cars occasionally to prevent their batteries running out. Because electricity generated by non-hybrid cars' petrol engines is so energy-efficient...

Anyway, the movie, Ratatouille, was cool. And seeing it in Canada means that I can go home & see it with Richard, and thus fulfill my desire to see a Pixar film twice within a few weeks. (I always come out & want to see the film again). Nonetheless, it was a surreal experience for me.

On 5th July I hit downtown Toronto for some serious shopping. First I went to Whole Foods to pick up lunch and vegan chocolate-chip cookies (soya free!). Then I wandered down Yonge Street. When I was out with BC & Siobhan last Friday night, we went past a gift shop that was closing down. In the window were some utterly beautiful wolf bookends, along with signs claiming the shop would be closing on June 30th and there was 90% off everything. Well, in the end we got up too late on Saturday to go there, and I had been sad about this. Walking past the shop randomly, I saw it was still open, and now claiming to be closing on July 8th. So I went in to enquire about the bookends. This is where the owner & I had a communication difficulty.

She told me the price was $149 for the two. Now, that didn't sound much like 90% off (did they really start at over $1000?!), but I liked them enough to let that slide. £80 seemed reasonable for something that nice. But then she claimed that someone else - a "collector" - wanted to buy the bookends & had placed a $10 deposit. However, she could ring them to cancel the order if I was ready to buy today. She didn't have another set, that was the only one. I believe this was supposed to be some sort of emotional blackmail - buy now or forever lose your chance! But to me, with only two bookends available, the fair idea was to split them up - I could have one and the other person could have the other. I suggested she rang the other person to ask if that would be ok, and offered her $100 for one. She wouldn't even consider it. This made it clear that she was messing me around - the fact she wouldn't ring the other person in front of me. So I bought a couple of much cheaper things and walked out.

The extortionate prices were confirmed when I went into a tacky tourist shop a few doors down and found items of similar artistic talent for much less - two wolves engraved into a piece of rock for $21.99. Maybe it wasn't an omg limited edition by some expensive collectables company, but I don't really care about that.

Then I went to a gaming & comic shop called Hairy Tarantula. Here, I could have spent several hundred pounds & bought half the store, but instead limited my purchases to another copy of Eco Fluxx for otterylexa, a card game called Attack of the Killer Bunnies which has judiff written all over it, & a present for Peter (gerwinium).

Then I visited the American Apparel shop and bought some pairs of very shiny leggings. (I bought pink and purple plain jersey leggings, black satin,
these shiny silver leggings, and these ones in purple, which isn't available on the UK site.) They didn't have everything I wanted in my size, but now that I know how the sizing works I can order the rest from their website.

Finally I went in the H&M in the Eaton Centre, but there was a humungous queue for the changing room and by that stage, I was all shopped out. So I got the streetcar a few stops east so I could meet futabachan & Amanda for dinner at Spring Rolls - a restaurant I'd chosen based on the fact it was advertising a "new vegan menu" in the Toronto Vegetarian guide while still offering lots of meaty & fishy dishes for omnivores. The beancurd and asparagus was exquisite (an interesting blend of flavours - spicy and tasty without being chilli burny hot), and apparently the others' food was excellent too.

On Tuesday, I went to see the new nurse practitioner at my GP's surgery for an asthma check. I obtained a new prescription, took it to the pharmacy, and exchanged it for three inhalers. This is very important in the story which is to follow.

On Wednesday, as I was packing my bag, I found myself entirely too low in spoons to estimate how many of each particular drug I should pack for a 10 day trip. (Some of my pills are once a day, some twice a day, some three times a day, some as and when required - way too many different variables to work out on not enough sleep.) So I overpacked everything - if I thought I'd need two strips of tablets, I packed three. In particular, I thought it was likely that my sodium cromoglicate nasal spray would run out halfway through the trip so threw another one into the bag, and I knew that my Flixotide inhaler was going to run out, as I take 4 puffs a day and it was reading "15". To put my mind at ease, I grabbed one of the new inhalers and packed it in my other bag, so that I'd have a Flixotide in each one in case one of the bags went missing. This is also very important to understand.

Last night I got back from the wedding and noticed the Flixotide I'd been taking was reading "3". By the time I'd actually taken it, it was down to "1". I was too exhausted and brainfried to figure out where the other inhaler was, but I told Richard to remind me I'd need it in the morning. Then I went to bed. For some reason, the room was hard to breathe in, despite it being supposedly a non-smoking room. We figured the airconditioning unit was dirty and/or blowing air from the smoking rooms into the non-smoking rooms, and opened the window instead.

This morning I woke up with my nose, ears and sinuses completely blocked, and head all foggy from not breathing properly. I spent 15 minutes clearing my nasal passages out with Olbas oil and saline and rebreathed my own exhaled air to get my carbon dioxide levels up. It was really important that I got all my allergy and asthma medication in correctly. Well, you can guess what happened. Couldn't find the new inhaler in any of the damn bags, and it's prescription-only, and I didn't even know for certain if the drug was available in Canada. Argh.

Cue the expertise of zedrikcayne's cousin Lorenzo, who is a local, who drove me first to a 24-hour pharmacy, and then to a walk-in clinic. It turned out to be the work of minutes to actually obtain a prescription for the inhaler (called Flovent in Canada) from a Canadian doctor. However, vast amounts of waiting around were necessary to get to that stage. It cost me CAN $50 for the doctor's time, and $41.06 for the inhaler, none of which I can claim back on my travel insurance, as it doesn't cover pre-existing conditions. And I was so lucky to have had access to a local with a car, because I'm not sure the hotel staff would have been able to help much at all. But we missed hanging out with nooks, annb and Henry, and caused inconvenience to geminigirl and zedrikcayne, and all kinds of inconvenience to Cayne's cousin, who was a total stranger.

I am eagerly awaiting getting home, so I can find out whether that spare inhaler is in fact sitting proudly in the middle of the living room floor, or if it did go missing in transit. Because if it's the former, I can kick myself, but if the latter, it's really not my fault.