So my old school chums at UQAM and I had this joke, that was probably funny only to us, where we would speak of our fabulous future art careers and rhyme off a list of cities that we’d travel to, and the cities would get smaller and smaller as the list wore on. We thought this was tremendously funny and would of course throw in our own home towns and other small places that we knew, alongside behemoths like New York and London.
The past month has looked something like this joke list, where I can’t seem to sit still and am traveling to cities big and small for business, pleasure, or a mixture of both. I am becoming really excellent at sniffing out not only Wi-Fi, but a socket for me to plug my laptop into, my battery charge nearly always precariously hovering near 0%. I now reflexively scam hotel toiletries (when I get to stay in a hotel or something hotel-like, which is not always the case. My current location is an anarchist squat in London, where they have some kind of open-clothing exchange that I might dig through, it looks like it has the same promise of your usual Value Village rack – a dozen or more bad pieces for each hidden gem sort of ratio).
Mir says I am one of the best scammers she knows, and I guess this is true. I prefer to think of it as finding loopholes and taking full advantage of free stuff. How else to I get to go to New York, London, Toronto, Houston, etc etc etc? You gotta take all that hotel shampoo, and not only buy as many duty free smokes as you can carry, but get all your non-smoking friends to do the same. If you’re a hardened partier you probably already know the one about drinking abandoned drinks at the bar. I try to steer clear of particularly old looking beers, but when it’s after last call, sometimes even that flat-looking Budweiser looks OK. (There’s a headache in your future if you venture here, but you’ll be a bit happier at the time and horrify/delight your friends).
If I can come up with good list of tips, maybe I will make a list. In the meantime, I’m off to see if there’s an unattended coffee pot around…
5 replies on “New York, London, Toronto, Houston…”
I think it speaks volumes about how different our conferences have been so far. At mine I was asked to donat my hotel sopa shampoo etc,, to a womens shelter n vernon bc.
ps not be bitchy or anything, but dude where’s my frickin comment ?
I name dropped you and everything, throw me a bone.
god that sounds so whiny.
I just spoke with ned on the phone and he sounds liek he doesn’t wanna give the dog back
Bone has been thrown.
That’s a nice idea re. donating the hotel stuff to women’s shelters… I think I’ve accumulated a good enough collection and can do the same, though none were collected on this trip. In Edinburgh there seems to be lots of stores that sell good second-hand stuff for causes, too, which is nice… In Montreal they seem to be mostly for-profit friperies.
Sorry I had just arrived home and hadn’t eaten lunch or dinner and wanted my doggie back and was a big whiner on your blog…
thanks for commenting on my post…
j’t’embrace ma petite choux
The flat beer though? Nooooo. That’s gross.
I went to NYC in May 2004 for the Psy.Geo.Conflux that you were at too, MK. I stayed at some horrible but probably average hostel in Chelsea. I vowed never to go to NYC unless there is a hotel involved — or somebody nice to stay with (which I think is the case now).
It’s good to have standards and keep to them. Never become undecorous, but give stuff to women’s shelters.
you should write some sort of how-to manual for the rest of us.