Category Archives: Yellowknife

Bastille Day at Le Frolic in Yellowknife

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Array of Amuses at Le Frolic on Bastille Day

We ARE amused! Array of Amuses at Le Frolic on Bastille Day

Welcome to Yellowknife! Hope you brought a fork!

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It’s not all musk ox bones and walrus blubber up here, ya know! Although some of it is. Some of it is even whale:

Bowhead Whale Hunt by Glenn Williams. Didja bring yer fork?

Bowhead Whale Hunt by Glenn Williams. Didja bring yer fork?

Wanna see the Food Chart the government distributes? Well, you will just have to wait till I’ve figured out how to convert PDFs to PNGs on this damn computer!

Oh, wait! GIMP to the rescue:

Om to the nom nom! The NWT Food Guide!

Om to the nom nom! The NWT Food Guide!

BACK to the future. It looks post-apocalyptic on the NWT Food Guide

BACK to the future. It looks post-apocalyptic on the NWT Food Guide

Yes, that is a rat on the food chart. And seaweed. And fish bones. And a Beluga Whale. And yes, they are endangered.

I heard they had to take the chicken leg in the grocery store packaging out of the new edition, because nobody knew what it was. They eat a lot of what is called “country foods” up here: outside of Yellowknife, something like 45% of families get 40% or more of their food off the land or from the sea. You don’t have to go to the Amazon to find hunter-gatherers, and frankly having sussed out the grocery stores here I’m thinking of trying it myself.

Anyway, not all food comes off the land or the endangered species list. Some of it comes off quite elegant presentations, as you can see from the image at the top of the post. Here`s how it all happened…

So there I was back a few months ago, minding everyone else`s business on social media, as one does (if one is this one), and I found out there was an actual, honest-to-god French chef in Yellowknife. Well, naturally I thought someone was pulling my leg; as far as I know not even Julia Child would have attempted to Frenchify a hunk o’ musk ox.

Boy, was I wrong.

Le Chef Pierre doesn`t mess around. You should see what happened to the last Top Chef in Yellowknife.

Le Chef Pierre doesn`t mess around. You should see what happened to the last Top Chef in Yellowknife.

Le Chef Pierre does exist, and not only does he exist, but he Follows me on Twitter, which as far as I`m concerned is truly the only authoritative signifier of meaningful existence. Naturellement. And once I`d moved up here and he found out I`d been born in France, he went ahead and invited me and my friend MoneyCoach to the Bastille Day celebration at his very civilized French restaurant, Le Frolic.

Now, as we`ve firmly established around these parts, a lot of my favorite words start with F; I don`t need to list them, do I? But the greatest of these is “Free.” Somehow, the psychic Chef Pierre sussed this out (what are the odds, eh?) and that is how I, my camera, and my best YK pal ended up freeloading our own bodyweight in steak tartare and cab sauv under the shadow of a three-story-tall red-white-and-blue model of the Eiffel Tower (where do they keep it the rest of the year?) or maybe that was just me.

Yeah, that was just me. Nancy’s a light eater, and I’m a lifelong believer in the calorie-free nature of food which you didn’t pay for.

In related news: food is also zero calorie if eaten standing up, by the light of the fridge. Very few people know that.

Well, if you flick through the Flickr pix you can see many things: bruschetta, amuse-gueules on a very snazzy steel presentation stand, a assortment of wines the list of which I had in my backpack until it rained, so sorry wine sponsors, no names in the post! and a trayfull of desserts, of which I only tried the butter tart, being a butter tart snob of the old school. Those of you who are Canuck Foodie Purists will be relieved to know that Chef Pierre is solidly of the “no nuts in the butter tarts” school. I’m glad I could take your mind off that worry. I was equally fascinated by the butter tart, as you can tell from the what, six pictures I took of it? Well, it was an uncooperative model, so I did my best. “Look up, baby! Work it! That’s it, that’s it, gorgeous, now more animalistic!” Oh, I tried my best, but the damn tart just wasn’t having it; I felt like David Bailey before he found his mojo (I understand he found it in his other pants).

Shortly after the butter tart posing session, I decided to stumble home, sated, but not before someone took me aside and whispered, “You better eat and drink your fill before the French get here. They bring big handbags, and they leave weighted down!”

Noted.

The Strange Range Tweetup!

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The Gold Range from Celebrate Canada

The Gold Range from Celebrate Canada

Attention, Yellowknife! In particular those parts of Yellowknife with a vested interest in the survival (or otherwise) of the most infamous dive bar in the North! In furtherance of Week Five of my Infinite Week Plan, and because we don’t have much time left, we present: The inaugural Tweetup at the Range!

So, you may have heard (in fact, you almost certainly heard it, and well before me, in fact) that the future of the Strange Range is in doubt.

  1. It may cease to exist.
  2. It may get a moderate upgrade and a handout and stagger on as before.
  3. It make get a facelift and some lipo and run around trying to pass itself off as a thirtysomething hookah lounge. God only knows, really. Once they start with a nip and tuck, there’s no telling where they’ll end up.

Sooooo, I got to thinking. I’ve only been there once, but it seems to me that Yellowknife without a dive bar (and a famous one at that: it has a Wikipedia page! Can the same be said of any of the people wanting to close it down?) isn’t quite as…Yellowknifey, if you know what I mean. When Devin and the others from Kellett took me there in the Springtime, whispering blood-curdling warnings all the way, the tense atmosphere lasted exactly long enough for my eyes to focus in the gloaming and me to realize it was WAY UPSCALE from what I was used to on the Downtown Eastside. Not even any glass shard embedded on the tables!

And then an Elder walked over and said, “I just want to thank you young people for coming in. It’s good to see you here” and that was it, I melted. And then I told everybody about the time I went for coffee with Willy Pickton, just to restore the goosebump factor.

Which is neither here nor there. So here:

Who? You, me, and whoever else dares!

What? A Tweetup: meaning a casual gathering around a loose purpose, in this case to discuss/experience the Strange Range for what might be the last time. Tweetups are called via social media, that’s where they get their name, but you don’t have to be geeky to attend. Pay your own bill, order what you like. What, you think I’m your liver doctor?

When? 6pm Thursday, August 18th, 2011.

Where? The Gold Range Tavern. Don’t worry, you’ll recognize me. I’ll be the chubby, short blonde one with the black laptop with the sticker that says “SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER“.

Why? To tell stories, to hear stories, to become part of the legend of the Strange Range before it’s too late.

Yea though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I shall fear no evil.

For I’m the meanest Sonofabitch in the Valley.

The Strange Range EVERYBODY DANCE NOW

The Strange Range EVERYBODY DANCE NOW

Scotch that!

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It's bad news when the Bartender cries

It's bad news when the Bartender cries

So yesterday I decided I’d been good (god knows why I decided that, but I can be somewhat arbitrary at times) and deserved a treat, and so I took myself to the local filling station, an agreeably-but-not-intimidatingly casual place named after a species of plant which did not, in fact, exist on the premises.

Unless it was hiding, and after what happened, who could blame it?

The waitress was attentive, and sweet, and barely old enough to be out that late on a school night. She asked me what I would like to drink, and I thought about what not-too-exotic-but-still-tasty items might be available in the subarctic regions and said, “Do you have Johnny Walker Black?”

She looked at me with alarm.

“Rum?” she asked.

“…Scotch,” I replied, probably just as startled as she had been. She’d apparently never heard of this exotic tipple. I might as well have asked for a Connecticut Bullfrog, Andover style.

She toddled off to whisper to the bartender. No doubt she thought it was something that was kept under the bar, in case of the po-po.

She came back smiling, and saying Yes, Yes, we have this ‘Johnny Walker Black’ stuff! or words to that effect. So I ordered a double.

“With Pepsi?”

And so concludes our Slice of Life in the Knife for this evening. The following I post here because it is perhaps the finest ten minutes of a bartending god as you will ever witness in your entire life, unless you buy the film The Sin of Harold Diddlebock and watch the whole thing repeatedly, as is your right. Or would be, if you hadn’t downloaded the damn thing from Bittorrent, eh?

and, for the complete opposite, here:

Did that guy actually get paid for this?

(via Whisky2.0)

Yellowknife Commute at Rush Hour

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Yeah, so this is what it looks like when you walk downtown at rush hour from Buttfuck Nowhere, AKA New Newfoundland, out by the Walmart.

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Not too bad, eh? Well, except for Arkham Asylum up on the hill there, overlooking the Plateau of Leng and the escaped loon in the foreground. Apparently we’re also not far from Kadath in the Cold Waste; Sarah Palin can see it from her house.

Particularly after the second mushroom.

Note also that the Warm Up Station closes when it gets really cold. I see bureaucrats the world over have the same logical handicaps.

The Not-So-Happy Wanderer

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Maria and I are in perfect agreement here

Maria and I are in perfect agreement here

Yodelei-oh-fuckit.

So. Yellowknife. So. Vancouver. I realize that the housing situation is tight up here, but is there really any excuse for what just happened to me?

I moved up here at the beginning of July and, thanks to a commenter on one of my blogs who lives in Yellowknife but was wanting to go South for the summer without paying $1300 a month in rent for a place she was not using, walked right into a sweet sublet three or four blocks from work and with lovely and copious light. The plan was, she’d stay down South till September at least, which was awesome for me, as by then it would be clear both to me and to The Boss whether or not this “employment” experiment (as opposed to the last decade and a bit of self-employment) had been a success.

Didn’t work out that way: the Southerly situation was untenable, I’d left my apartment in NO CONDITION for a swap (trust me, I’m sure the ravens on the patio were gossiping about the state of the living room), and she was coming back. So there I was, facing August with no place to stay and a VERY tight rental market, when I got an email from my Co-op back in Vancouver, where I had left all my stuff because moving it into storage wouldn’t have saved me anything at all, once you factor in the move itself.

They doubled my rent.

Imagine my joy.

Yep, I’m employed now (albeit in a temporary, probationary position which could terminate at any moment) and so the benevolent hippies decided that it was appropriate to increase my housing charges to the point where my monthly housing fees in Vancouver and Yellowknife actually exceed my net income. They may exceed my gross income, too, but I’m too nauseated even to contemplate the grosses, and who among you can blame me? Eh? I ask yez.

That situation lasted about a week when I found a friend-of-a-friend who had an extra bedroom in her house for $600 per month, which was awesome (though I half expected Vancouver to raise my rent AGAIN when they found out I was saving money!) and it even came with a washer and dryer. The house was toured, issues were discussed, and we left, to my recollection, with an agreement that unless something went really sideways and one of us contacted the other to say so, all was good for my moving in on the first of August.

Cut to the first of August. Today.

Picture a smiling icecoaster coming up the sidewalk, friend with carload of my things idling at the curb. Picture said friend-of-a-friend coming out to meet me with what can only be described as a shit-eating grin on her face (note: does not mean what you think it means. means this instead).

Oh, guess what. Sorry I didn’t get back to you. I’ve been offline. Camping, actually. So you couldn’t have gotten in touch with me but, anyway, when I didn’t hear from you I just, you know, sort of figured I’d just go ahead and change my mind. Sorryyyyyy. So, yeah.

So.

It’s a good thing I’ve been scouting out charities to volunteer for, because at least I am well-informed about homeless shelter options in Yellowknife.

When the snows set in I'll kill my Tauntaun.

When the snows set in I'll kill my Tauntaun.