Sleeping Around (17 page)

I had my own private bus on the way back to Kitchener. I was the only passenger, but that didn't stop the bus driver stopping for long spells in deserted bus stations along the way. It was 9.30 by the time we crawled into a wet and windy Kitchener and I put my electric-blue Maids of the Mist poncho on to walk back to Jeremy's. As I was trudging through the rain, someone honked their car horn at me. ‘Yeah, yeah, very funny,' I mumbled to myself. ‘I know I look like a giant blue jellybean.' They honked again. I turned around and was just about to abuse them when I saw that it was Jeremy. What a lovely fellow. He'd looked up the bus timetable on the net at work and had come to pick me up.

‘I thought I'd take you to see some real culture,' he said as I hopped in.

We drove out into the suburbs and pulled into the car park of a large and somewhat unremarkable building called RoXXanes.

‘What's this?' I joked. ‘A strip joint?'

‘Yep,' Jeremy said matter-of-factly. ‘And tonight's amateur night.'

The place was jumping (or rather sliding up and down) as men, including two fellows in lederhosen, ate their dinners while girls flashed their fannies in their faces.

‘The winner gets fifteen hundred dollars,' Jeremy explained. ‘Anyone can enter, but it's mostly uni students and a few tellers from the bank.'

As we sat down with our ludicrously priced beers, a girl in skin-tight jeans jumped up on the stage and began her striptease act. Except there was a lot more teasing than stripping as she clumsily squirmed and squeezed her way out of her tight jeans. While she was finally frolicking naked across the stage, Jeremy casually said, ‘I used to date a stripper'.

‘What was that like?' I said, staring at bouncing breasts.

‘She was nice, but my mates used to go to her club and watch her spread her legs and play with her clitoris. I couldn't handle it.'

As Tight Jeans Girl struggled to get her pants back on I said, ‘There must be a few drunk girls who wake up in the morning and say “Gee, I had this weird dream last night that I danced naked in front of a hundred men.”'

We didn't stay to see who won. I couldn't afford to buy another beer.

I lost a few years off my life in the middle of the night. While I was slumbering away peacefully, Bentley (the cat) leapt from
the top of the bookshelf onto my chest. I jumped so high out of bed that I sent Bentley bouncing off the ceiling and onto the television. And just when I had been about to give
Jeremy's couch the highest rating so far. Instead, he got:

Couch rating: 8/10
Pro: Comfortable and cosy couch
Con: Confounded and crazy cat

Bentley was giving me a wide berth at breakfast while Jeremy got ready for work. When I asked Jeremy what I could do with my last day in Kitchener, he suggested I could go gawk at some god-fearing Mennonites, who Jeremy described as a bit like the Amish but without the pointy beards. Five miles out of town in the village of St Jacobs is Canada's largest Mennonite community.

I started the day at the Kitchener farmers' market, which, although it had been operating since 1839, had moved recently to a modern building in the centre of town. Jeremy said that I would find Mennonites there selling homemade bread, jams, cheese, sausages and vegetables. Unless Mennonite farmers grow junk jewellery, Miss Loo's Scottish soaps, cheap shoes or emu oil, there wasn't much produce for sale. Admittedly, only about a third of the market was open, but the only Mennonite I found was a skinny fellow with a table full of turnips.

When I arrived at the market, the heavens opened and the torrential rain hitting the market's roof sounded just like Niagara Falls. I grabbed a cup of tea from one of the food stalls and picked up a copy of
The Echo
, the local weekly newspaper. The lead story was headlined ‘Welcome to Dullsville', and the first line of copy read ‘Was this the most boring week in the history of Kitchener?' They were so short on news that on the second page they had rehashed a story that happened twelve months previously. It was a good one, though, in a very ghoulish way. A local man who had committed suicide by hanging himself from a tree in his front yard was left hanging in the breeze for four days because passers-by thought the corpse was a Halloween decoration.

When the rain subsided, I wandered through town to the bus station. The folk of Kitchener sure did love their Oktoberfest. There were people doing normal daily errands like going to the bank and picking up dry cleaning dressed in lederhosen and dirndls. There was also a dizzying array of lederhosen for sale at the Hans Haus Oktoberfest shop— which was open all year in case you had a pressing need for novelty beer mugs. Oktoberfest was being celebrated in other shops as well, with German-inspired displays in butchers, clothes shops, banks and, my favourite, the Stag S&M leather shop. The mannequins in the window had huge breasts and were wearing ‘mini-skirt' leather dirndls. A sign underneath read: ‘Whose pretzel will you straighten this Oktoberfest in your dirndl of desire?'

There were no buses to St Jacobs. Of course there wouldn't be. No need really. Not when everyone plods around in horse-drawn buggies. I caught a bus to a mall at the edge of town and went the rest of the way in a taxi.

I'm guessing the traditional Mennonites must live out of St Jacobs, because most of the houses in town had a truck in the driveway instead of a buggy. The main street was mostly Ye Olde Arts-and-Crafts Shops selling quilts and maple syrup. In the centre of town was the Mennonite Museum & Information Centre. The curator seemed surprised to see me. Actually, I think he was surprised to see anyone at all and he had to turn off the lights and plug in the projector in the theatrette so I could watch the ‘Mennonite Story'.

The start of the film showed gawping tourists taking photos of Mennonites in their old-world attire. Personally, I think the Mennonites were at least equally entitled to gawp at the tourists' attire. The film was shot in the 1970s and the camera-wielding cats were all wearing outrageously flared pants, platform shoes, body-fitting floral shirts and boofy haircuts that made the Mennonites' bowl cuts look stylish.

The film described the Old Order Mennonites' way of life. They don't date and only meet the opposite sex at Sunday evening sing-alongs; weddings only take place on Tuesdays and the entire wedding meal is prepared by the bride; phones must be black (with no accessories or call waiting); they don't use hairdressers and the ‘young men' have ‘haircut parties'.

Sadly, the Maple Syrup Museum was closed, so I dropped into a Mennonite bakery for lunch where girls in traditional handmade outfits and bonnets were selling homemade bread from wicker baskets. The bakery also had a bar and a large plasma TV playing MTV pop videos.

There were no taxis in town, so I decided to hitchhike back to Kitchener. I didn't have much luck, though. Cars zoomed by without even looking like slowing down. When a fellow in a horse and buggy plodded past me, I smiled at him and stuck out my thumb in jest. He pulled over.

My new Mennonite friend was Matthias Brubacher and he was on his way to the mall. He explained that there's a ‘high-rise' horse-and-buggy park at the mall for the convenience of low-tech shoppers like him. It's a barn. Matthias, who was in his early twenties, lived with his parents and his seven brothers and sisters on a farm where they made and sold butter, apple butter and maple syrup.

‘We go to bed at eight and get up at five-thirty,' he told me proudly.

I was tempted to ask him if he had a spare couch. An early night was just what I needed.

‘Is there a traditional Canadian restaurant?' I asked Jeremy as we drove around later looking for somewhere to eat. It was my last night in Canada and I wanted to go somewhere truly Canadian.

‘Chains,' Jeremy said. ‘Canadians love restaurant chains more than anyone in the world.'

‘Really?' I said.

‘They like to be able to go to another town and eat somewhere familiar, ordering off the same menu.'

‘What about that one?' I asked, pointing to the Swiss Chalet Restaurant.

‘Yep, all over Canada,' Jeremy said. ‘Whatever cuisine you can think of, we have a chain of them.'

The largest chain in Canada is truly Canadian, but I didn't fancy it for dinner. When ice hockey star Tim Horton retired in 1964, he decided to open up a doughnut and coffee shop and called it, wait for it, Tim Hortons. There are now more than 3000 Tim Hortons outlets around Canada.

‘Do you like Indonesian?' Jeremy asked as we passed Bhima's restaurant.

‘Is it part of a chain?'

‘Probably,' he shrugged.

It was Indonesian, but with a Canadian twist. I ordered bison gado gado.

We dropped into the Concordia club, the largest Oktoberfest venue, on the way home, but my heart just wasn't in it. I could feel a cold coming on and, to make things worse, it was Country & Western night. The menfolk were wearing lederhosen and cowboy hats, while Canada's second most popular female country singer (after Shania Twain) was ‘yee-haa-ing' and twangin' her gee-tar.

The venue, which was basically a big circus tent, seemed quite busy for a Wednesday night. Or maybe it just looked that way because there were so many security personnel inflating the numbers.

‘My mom's here,' the singer announced towards the end of her set. ‘But watch out, cause she loves country and she loves to dance like crazy.'

The security goons were immediately on their toes looking into the crowd for a crazy old lady dancing in a cowboy hat.

It was a crisp and perfectly clear morning as I made my way to the train station. As I tramped through a carpet of gold maple leaves past tidy houses, I thought this is a nice town. Quiet, but nice. A well-dressed middle-aged woman stopped with me at the traffic lights. ‘Oh, where are you going with that big bag?' she asked politely.

‘To the airport,' I said.

‘I wish the fuck I was getting out of here,' she muttered as she shuffled away.

ICELAND