The big day is here. C + I rip up to Ciro Marina from Tronca, early morning Friday, with our private driver. We’re booked for a single night in a B+B, and it could all be a bit rushed, but we aren’t due at the wedding until 5pm, and it’s only an hour drive, so we should be safe enough.
Ciro Marina is, as the name implies, another coastal city, but it’s a bit more populated than Tronca was. The marina itself isn’t gigantic, but it’s a decent size, docking somewhere in the range of 20 to 50 nice looking boats.
After a light lunch, and plenty of time to kill, C and I settle down with the chessboard outside a little gelato shop and start messing around a bit (she’s hooked on the game). I’ve been doing a combination of playing seriously against her, as well as teaching her some opening concepts / traps (Fried Liver Attack!).
I notice the ice cream shop owner (Ice Cream Man) is watching our game fairly intently from the side, and I invite him to play a game against C. He’s super happy to jump in, and I play the role of the nervous coach, pretending not to watch too intently from the side or let my face give away any clues, while secretly hoping C destroys him.
He’s not particularly good, but it’s C’s first live over the board game against anyone who isn’t me, and she’s definitely super shy / nervous. She capitalizes on a few of his mistakes, but she makes a few bigger ones, a bit too big to survive, even at their relatively novice level, and Ice Cream Man takes the W. Tragic.
He asks to play me a follow up game, and I quickly wipe him off the board. Someone had to redeem C’s honor. We chat a bit with Ice Cream Man, while I sip a few beers and C munches on something sweet, and kill the extra hour or two we have before the wedding. We promise to come back for more games soon, and then roll back to the B+B to get dressed up.
I clean up pretty well when I have to, and I daresay K-dawg’s suit looks sharp on me, though the pants are a little tight round my gigantic hockey ass. C’s also fairly easy on the eyes in her summer dress and heels.
The Italian boys from Albania have just gotten in last night from Milan to a different neighboring town, and are a little hungover, but sans the bachelor, are more than happy to scoop us up and gift us a lift to the wedding venue. The kids are absolute beauties. We nip back to their hotel to pick up their plus-ones, and then rip to wedding venue in two cars.
And what a venue it is. The wedding itself is taking place several miles inland on some gorgeous farmland. Ancient Italian stone buildings meet with a beautiful expanse of crops (olive trees and grape vines are prominent) spread out over low lying hills that seem to roll forever into the distance.
Small meet and greet, where I get to catch up with some of the lads, but priority number one is the ceremony, which kicks off almost right away. Some music, some churchy songs, and a long winded speech by the minister (it seemed beautiful, but of course, it was in Italian, so I was mostly guessing what was being said based on the context). It’s possible I tear up a bit. I resist the urge to pelt Danvinci and Wifey with the ceremonial rice as they walk down the aisle, and chuck it at some of the boys instead. Seems like a safer bet.
Just like that, the beautiful couple are officially locked in as life partners. I feel a little out of place, but it’s actually super cool to be invited to be a part of something this momentous, and I’m looking forward to the festivities with the boys + C.
Tons of people have heard about me and are interested in meeting me (degenerate, Asian, Canadian who just got invited last minute), and we start to put down some prosecco as we make our rounds.
The boys and their plus ones have great energy, and we also meet this South American woman around our age, Isabella, who speaks perfect English and is definitely looking to get rowdy.
More prosecco and mingling give way to the first dinner service. I mean, it could have easily been the only dinner service, one of the most ridiculously large buffets I’ve ever been a part of. Steak, burgers, pasta, seafood, cheese, salads, and a bunch of shit I can’t identify. There’s way too much food.
Collectively as a group we stuff our faces, and we don’t even make a dent in the offerings available. I assumed this WAS dinner, but after an hour or so of this (which includes a bunch of red and white wine), we’re ushered off to another section, a stone courtyard, where the official dinner tables are set and waiting for us. Apparently now, we chase down the food and wine, with more food, and more wine.
We’re sat at a table with Isabella and her BF, plus The Sheik from the original crew (sans a plus one) and a few others. Three course meal follows, interrupted between every course by dancing, games, and general festivities. Conga line, groomsman throwdown, giant dance circles, you name it, it’s a hell of a time.
Slight dampener in that C isn’t feeling well around 11 or midnight. She seems pretty intent on walking back to the BnB on her own, which is not something I’m going to allow, for safety reasons… the walk is at least 45 mins and it’s well after sunset. I manage to recruit one of the boys to ferry us back for a quick 10 minute ride, drop off C with a kiss, and then roll back to continue sending with the lads for the one proper night we’ll have together.
Everyone’s fucking trashed and exuberant, it’s glorious. More dancing. Isabella is getting a little bit handsy, trying to pull me onto the dance floor with her… maybe a bit overly so. I end up shutting it down quickly but politely, no hard feelings there at all. Probably not badly intentioned, but was a bit weird considering we both rolled in with plus ones.
Party has moved poolside where dessert is served, and I make sure to stash some to bring back to C who has a crazy sweet tooth. A final ceremony where the newly married couple stands with a bunch of towering sparklers shooting fire into the night sky behind them, followed up by more drinks and dancing late into the night, but before you know it, it’s over, and we’re on on our way back to the BnB.
Part ways with the lads, with a quick discussion about some brunch plans the next day, and I tuck C in (she scarfs down the dessert I’ve brought back for her) before we drift off to sleep.
Beautiful ceremony, and I’m truly honored to have been a part of it all. Way more fun with C in tow, would have been a disaster being stranded by myself out there. Most of the lads are up in Milan for work; I’ll have to make sure that I pop by and visit at some point in the future. They’re also definitely invited to my future wedding; the Italians really know how to do it right, and these lads are awesome.
So here C + I are in the renowned Italian “city” of Tronca. Journey’s been hectic, but we’ve arrived in one piece. AirBnB is nothing special, it’s clean, spacious, and the internet works as advertised. Chalk that one up in the win column.
AirBnB host is quite responsive via What’s App, and recommends us a restaurant a few blocks away. Also mentions that he’ll call in ahead and inform them that we are coming, which is a little strange. But we’re famished from the journey, and I’m ready to try my first Italian pizza after the whole hamburger mishap this morning (which seems like a lifetime ago).
Step out our front door near sunset and take in our surroundings properly. To our right, a hundred feet out, is the highway we came in on, followed by a slow gentle incline of rolling, grassy hills. Long stretches of clouds, illuminated a cotton candy pink by the suns remaining rays, drift lazily across a still bright-blue sky. Plus, a bunch of electrical towers, phone poles, and wires, beautiful stuff really.
In front of us, there’s a chain fence separating us from tall grass and a bunch of stubborn little shrubs / trees that look like they came off the set of Gladiator. Maybe olive trees if I had to hazard a guess, but most likely some sort of random flora that’s been struggling to survive neglected in nature for decades. We also get a decent view of the buildings beyond, which are cookie cutter apartment blocks, each with the exact same color palette applied, white paint with a rustic red roofing.
To our left is the main, double lane roadway that runs through the town, and just a few steps past that, the soft, sandy beach (well, mostly soft and sandy, complemented by patches of small rocks just big enough to hurt your feet if you step on one just the right way) against the deep blue of the Ionian sea.
Don’t worry, no more lengthy environmental descriptions, because that pretty much describes the entire area we’ll be in for the next four days.
We rip over to the restaurant, about a five minute walk, and roll in like we own the place. Turns out, we sort of do own the place; there are zero other customers in the entire restaurant.The four or five staff on hand look a little confused about us popping in, and speak little to no English, but we managed to gesture our way to an outdoor table on the beachside.
The sea looks glorious in the sun’s dying rays, but as the sun goes, the sand flies emerge. For some fuckin’ reason, mosquitoes and flies just love me; I’m pretty sure I get bitten about forty times over dinner, while C escapes completely unscathed.
Pizza and a seaside beerski is on the menu, and maybe my expectations are a bit high, because the pizza is decidedly average. The crust is light and fluffy where it’s cooked properly, but it’s burnt in a half dozen places, and the toppings don’t seem particularly fresh. Maybe that’s why the restaurant is empty. But hey, company is good, and the view is nice.
It’s dark by the time we wrap up, and I’m too lazy to complain about the 2.50 extra we’re charged for “outdoor gazebo” seating. I will bitch about it to you though; the audacity of these motherfuckers. Literally zero customers also looking to sit outside, get the fuck outta here. Sorry your waiter had to walk an extra six steps. Might as well charge me per sandfly bite while you’re at it.
But to be honest, I’m just happy to be here. I’m excited for the wedding, and ecstatic that C finally decided to come last minute even if she may be partiallllllly to blame for our botched travel plans. We enjoy the stroll back to our place and get cozy for the night.
Wake up the next morning and lazily start planning our day. We decide to get errands out of the way first, and hit the beach afterwards. Almost like we’re responsible adults.
We kick off with a short stroll down the town road, looking to pick up some groceries. C loves my cooking, and it’s a lot more fun cooking for two than it is for one. Google maps has a bunch of local markets a block or two away, but each and every single one of them is shuttered up. Windows are dusty, and it looks like they’ve been closed for years.
Tronca is starting to look suspiciously like a ghost town. We haven’t seen a single person so far other than the restaurant staff and the guy who dropped us off; it’s more than a little bit unnerving. Reminiscent of Leo and his wife’s dream world in Inception, where they have an entire world all to themselves.
We hear the crunch of rubber on dirt and gravel, and step off the road out of the way, but the silver truck pulls up to a stop right next to us, and a large man rolls the window down.
His English isn’t great, but we manage to explain to him that we are trying to find a grocery store or a restaurant. He tells us that there’s only one in town right now, and that most of the village is empty until beach season starts and on weekends. Offers to give us a lift to the only open grocery store a kilometer or two down the road. Two hitch hikes in two days seems a little risky, but the man seems friendly enough and we hop in without much reservation.
We’re dropped off without issues, grab our stuff, and make the trek back to our place. After throwing some lunch together (I kick us off with a greek salad and some carbonara), we grab our towels, and hit the beach.
What a beach it is. Maybe it’s not the pearly white soft sand of Tulum, when you find the right spot, the grains are fine enough that you don’t really notice the difference. C’s rocking a turquoise bikini that looks pretty great on her, we have a couple of Corona’s in play, and to top it all off, there’s not a single soul within sight. Beach is entirely ours.
I don’t think I’ll ever forget that first day. Just two people smiling and rekindling, stresses of the day before and the past years evaporating as we bask in the sun and each other’s presence. A hot day but not unbearably so, relaxing in the sand together, taking short dips in the cleansing salt water whenever we feel like cooling down a bit. Some conversation, some chess, and a deep sense of peace and calm that I haven’t felt in years. I think I needed this one; might have just been a perfect day.
It’s still not a total vacation. I do end up putting in a few hours of streaming. But all responsibilities are tasks, that, for the most part, I enjoy. I work the hours I feel like working, cooking for someone I care about never been a chore, and it’s just excellent company in a zero stress environment.
This routine carries us through the entire week. Stroll to the grocery store, marvel at all the options available, pick out whatever we feel like eating that night (although for lemons, we were having fun just picking them off the bountiful lemon trees kicking around literally everywhere), whip up some lunch, hit the beach, munch some dinner, hang out, and stream.
I did propose a little hike up the big hill across the highway, but we ended up opting to stick to a lazy, peaceful routine. Not like it would have been an incredible view anyways. I’m sure eventually the routine and lack of other people to interact with could get boring, but for a lad raised in Calgary, beaches and the sea are something I haven’t seen nearly enough of, and with C, it really feels like sometimes happiness isn’t that hard to find; you just have to take a few risks, be open to new friendships, and actively seek it out.
Alrighty, so we’re finally off to Italy! After some hemming and hawing, C has agreed to accompany me to Italy to be my plus one for this joyous matrimony between my dear, longtime, friend Davinci, and his lovely wife, ummm, wifey. Yep, totally know her name at this point. Our rich and storied friendship, which consists of getting fucked up with his boys two nights in Albania, is sure to endear me to all of the bride’s side of the family.
The wedding is on Saturday, near the cozy eastern seaside town where Davinci grew up in, Ciro Marina. CHIRO, Maaaareeeeena. Really fun to say the town name, it just rolls off the tongue in a pleasing way. But we aren’t there yet, it’s only Tuesday. Since I’ve never been to Italy, I decide early on that it would make the most sense to try and spend at least a week there. The whole planning process is a is bit of a mess.
C, who has onboarded herself rather late, has certain accommodation standards, and has taken it on herself to organize the Airbnb and train tickets. In exchange, I am handling wedding gifts for both of us, plus food and drink for the week. However, there are a few hiccups right off the bat.
For starters, we are struggling to find a ton of places that seem reasonably priced in Ciro Marina. Additionally, I 100% need to have a good internet connection so that I can continue streaming / coaching throughout the week so I don’t go broke. As a kicker, there are no direct flights into Ciro Marina; the nearest airports are in Lamezia Terme or Crotone. Have you heard of any of these famous locales? Me neither.
Seaside towns are notorious for having dog shit internet connections, and for some fucking reason, a lot of Airbnb / Booking.com hosts refuse to post explicit details on their download / upload speeds. So there’s a lot of back and forth between myself, C, and various hosts, trying to get these luddites to run an internet speed test. Plus an additional back and forth between C and I as we tried to find a compromise between a guaranteed internet connection and her standards.
In case you were unaware, I absolutely detest planning. I don’t amble around aimlessly, I walk with intent to a destination. I don’t browse around in a store. If I’m in one, it’s because I know exactly what I want, I go in, I buy it, and I get the fuck outta there. It’s not the initial organizing part of planning that bothers me, but the inevitable tedious feedback loop that follows as soon as there’s any additional input involved. Maybe I need to take a meditation class or some hippy bullshit. I have infinite patience in some ways, but in others, I have an incredibly short fuse.
So in the end, it makes a lot more sense to just give my single requirement of fast internet to C, and then let her handle that. Or at least, it should have. She picks a spot on Airbnb, but her card doesn’t work, and instead of checking the booking, I end up just shipping her my credit card info to throw down for the place. Without double checking what she’s booked. Like a god damn fool.
We end up with a nice place in a “neighboring” town on the east coast called Tronca for the first six days, 2 flights into Lamezia Terme on the west coast from Paris and Tirana, 2 flights back to our respective cities from the same airport at the end of the week, one night in LT before our flights out, and train tickets between LT and Tronca. Surely, there won’t be any issues getting to the actual wedding destination. Surely, there will be Ubers, cabs, or car rental and we’ll be able to hop around as we please. Surely.
But hey, we have a really nice romantic getaway planned in Italy. The C saga continues! We’re going to a random Italian wedding with some cool new friends, and we’re going to get to spend a bunch of time beachside, together. Planning has been a shitshow, but excitement is running high.
I take a lift to Tirana airport with Big Will, and we roll up in record time. He’s swerving back and forth like a maniac, we’re both hacking darts inside the cab, and the music is pumping. Dude’s just an absolute beauty.
As an added bonus, K-dawg and Bobo are both at the airport the same time as me. They are flying out to Japan for a couple of weeks, and our flights are only an hour apart. So instead of my traditional solo airport lager, we are able to grab a morning drink together and have a little chitchat over a smoke or two before they have to hop on their plane.
My flight takes off soon after without issues. I’m in an emergency row, so I can stretch my legs out and have a chuckle over the fact my one way flight cost me all of 37 Euros. Man, travelling in Europe is crazy. (As an aside: I didn’t exactly roll to Europe with a suit, but K-dawg is an absolutely beauty and has hooked me up with a couple of pieces from his personal collection. I’ll be looking sharp at this thing!)
Touch down and breeze through security like I’m an Italian national. Canadian passport strikes again! Couple of drug sniffing dogs give me a once over, but I’m clean as a whistle baby. Now I’m chilling in the terminal and have two hours to kill until C lands in from Paris. The town itself isn’t that far from the terminal, and I’m feeling pretty peckish, so I figure it can’t hurt to go grab some pizza in Italy and see what the hype is all about.
It’s nine in the morning and there aren’t a ton of options available on Google Maps, but I do find a restaurant about a 5 minute drive into town. So I flag down a cabby, hop in, show him the restaurant on google maps, and tell him that I’m going to grab some pizza. He doesn’t speak a lick of English, but I figure the Google Map location I show him on my phone leaves no room for error. Turns out, once again, I’m dead wrong.
We have taken a few overpasses to get from the terminal to the restaurant, and all seems good, until all of a sudden, we make a right when the map wants us to go left. I’m telling him in a pretty calm voice that he’s going the wrong way, and that I’m trying to go to the restaurant on the map, to get some pizza. He repeats loudly, “pizza, yes, pizza”, and continues driving the wrong fucking way.
I’m starting to get pretty damn frustrated at this point. I raise my voice, and am frantically gesturing at the phone, repeating, “restaurant. pizza. We’re going the wrong way!”. We’re already on a one way highway that’s headed completely the wrong direction towards the south somewhere. I zoom out on google maps, and finally realize what’s happening… there’s literally a town 30 miles to the south called “Piazza”. Pronounced “Pizza” obviously. For fuck sakes.
The driver can tell at this point that he’s doing something wrong, based on how agitated I am. It finally dawns on him that maybe, I want to eat pizza, at the restaurant, in town, at the location I have marked on my GPS in front of his face, while miming myself eating a pizza. But it’s too late. This is literally a one way highway that goes all the way south to the town of Piazza, with zero turnoffs, and a metal railing separating us from the road back. This is going to be at least an hour long detour. There’s not much that can be done at this point; he’s still running the meter, but I tell him that he’s not getting more than 20 Euros, not that he understands a damn thing. Probably for the best or else he’d probably try to drop me off in the middle of buttfuck nowhere.
The drive south is scenic at least, but I’m a little too steamed up to really enjoy it at first. We both calm down about five mins into the drive, trauma bonded by our shared taxi prison and this hour long waste of both of our times, and he hands me a mint as a peace offering. I apologize for getting heated, and I think he understands, solely based on my conciliatory tone. We settle into the rest of the drive, and he finally gets me to the destination five minutes away from the terminal, an hour later. Here’s your 20 bucks, now fuck off.
Lamezia Terme isn’t particularly pretty. Ghost town with a few scattered old people, rusty orange / red dirt color and buildings that look like they are slowly falling apart. Including the restaurant. I get the impression that it’s an aging community / a flight hub at best, and there’s not a lot of new blood coming through.
I’m still excited to try an Italian pizza though. So I’m more than a little bit miffed when I try to order one and they tell me they won’t fire up the pizza ovens for another 3 hours. I swear to god, Europeans are more allergic to work than I am. Basically nothing on the menu is available, so for the first meal I’ve ever had in Italy, I order… a hamburger.
A fucking hamburger. In Italy. Ridiculous, but one of about three lunch items that were available. Of course, it’s Italy, so they have no idea what a hamburger is. There’s no bun, there’s no lettuce, there’s no ketchup, there’s no cheese. I literally receive a plate with a single beef patty, a slice of tomato, and some fries. No condiments at all in fact. “Ohhhh, but Brando, it’s a deconstructed hamburger, the condiments would just detract from the authentic flavors”. Shut the fuck up and give me my ketchup.
Anyways, C pulls up, we slam a coffee, and make our way to the train station. We get our ID’s checked by some cops on the way, probably haven’t seen an Asian in town since WW2. We are a healthy 4-5 hours ahead of our train, and figure we have more than enough time to pop over to the beach on the west side of town. She’s fairly insistent that we hop on a bus, but I have my doubts about public transportation here, and end the argument by just whipping my phone out and grabbing us an Uber.
The beach is about a twenty minute drive out west. A nice, rocky beach. Small rocks, so not super painful on the feet, but not exactly the pristine white sand of Tulum. But to be fair, the view is pretty beautiful. And hey, we have each other.
Throw down our towels on the rocks, cuddle and embrace a bit. I throw on my swim drunks and hop in for a dip, while C sets up the chessboard and tries to entice me into another game. She really is hooked on chess, it’s great. Altogether, a pretty nice time.
But we don’t have a whole lot of time. We def aren’t missing our train. So we pack up with about 2h to spare, and roll back to the main junction where the road links up with a small forest area adjacent to the beach.
Check my phone, and I’m at 2% battery. Uh oh. It turns out that if my laptop isn’t plugged in, it doesn’t charge my phone. I’ve put out an Uber request, but we’ve seen maybe four people out here the entire hour and a half we chilled on the beach, and the Uber ride search is coming up completely dry.
I’m suggesting to C that she install Uber on her phone, and that we start walking back more towards civilization at the same time as we try to order one so we hedge our bets. But despite being only a twenty minute drive back to the train station, the entire journey is essentially highway; walking back MIGHT get us back in 2h. I just figure that if we start walking closer we’re more likely to get one of the 2 Uber drivers in the whole town to pick us up.
But C “doesn’t have enough data” to install Uber. Which may or may not be true. I’m casting some doubt here, because if you recall, we’re only an hour or two out from a disagreement about taking Uber or bus to get to the beach. We may also both have a bit of a stubborn streak. Hmmmm, interesting coincidence that what she wants to do is roll over to this “bus station” and take a bus back. And that there’s no way she can acquire enough data to install Uber. I’m still trying to charge my phone via laptop on a picnic table, but before I can plead my case any further, she’s off and walking away from the main road down a dirt path. Towards this “bus station”.
Well, fuck me boys. I guess that’s the end of the discussion. We walk twenty minutes down a dirt path with stress levels through the roof, take a left onto a super quiet street, and are now in an abandoned neighborhood with some decrepit houses on the one side, and a field on the other side between the road and yet another highway. We arrive at the “bus station” which is literally a gravel square cut out of the adjacent field with a faded sign that’s illegible.
My phone is now dead, and we have an hour and a half to get back to the train station, or we’re going to be stranded in this town for at least another day. Plan going swimmingly so far. I ask her to at least try to hook onto one of the houses wifi connections, but they are all secured. It’s not like she can admit now that she can add more data so we can try to cover all our options and put out an Uber request. So, we’re fucked basically.
No easy access to the houses either, no visible paths to the front doors, and it’s a long shot anyone is home right now anyways. Don’t really want to be hopping fences in the Italian countryside, I have a feeling all small towns in the world are all sort of the same. They probably don’t take kindly to outsiders, and with a massive language barrier, the last thing I want to do is get attacked by some kind of Italian redneck who thinks an obvious foreigner is attempting a break and enter. We could walk, but we have all our luggage, and there’s no way we’re going to make it to the train station in time.
I’m still trying to charge my stupid phone with my laptop, and then, out of nowhere, a car rolls up onto our abandoned road. Female driver, about 40 years old. C makes the approach, asks if there’s a bus coming. No bus. Maybe there never was a bus. Never saw that one coming. C asks if we can borrow her phone. Nope. Female driver clearly looking to get out of here, basically rolls up her window and fucks right off. Friendly.
Ok, part of it is clearly the language barrier. But still, come on. Take a look at me. I obviously don’t belong here, we’re lost tourists, a little help would be great. I’ve basically come to terms with the fact we’re going to miss the train at this point. I’m more or less ready to just start walking; it’s going to be a miserable walk, but there’s not much else to do but suck it up.
Miracle of miracles, a second car shows up. In the middle of nowhere, a second car. Husband and wife this time. Also in their forties. C flags them down once again (she’s petite and sweet looking, not to mention white and female, definitely the play here). They speak a tiny bit more English than the first driver, realize that we are completely fucked, and offer to lift us back into town. There is a god! Or at least, nice people still exist.
We pile our stuff in with us into the backseat of their car, and hitchhike back into town with the couple. It’s going to be tight, but it looks like we’re going to make it. They drop us off a few blocks from the train station, and I offer them twenty euros, but they just smile and wave it off. “Have a nice trip, get the fuck outta our car”. But for real, those guys were a lifesaver, this could have been a wholeeee different trip if the day 1 fiasco went just a little bit differently.
We rush into the train station, manage to figure out the platform we need to be on, board the train, transfer halfway along the journey to a bus, and make it to a bus station just south of Tronca. We’ve reached out to our AirBnB host, and he’s arranged for his buddy to pick us up and drive us to the apartment. Ride goes smoothly for 10 Euros, and we make it there without any further hiccups.
C and I could have been a little bit more salty with each other, but neither of us holds a grudge long, and the second we made it onto the train, I think the overwhelming feeling on both sides was relief. Crisis averted, time to enjoy Italy!
There’s not tooooo much left to wrap up prior to the Italy send. K-dawg did hook me up with a ticket to an electronic music show right smack in the middle of Skanderberg Square… rolled out in force with him and all his homies, Bobo, Iris, etc…
Actually there is a funny anecdote from that. We’ll have to push Italy to the next one. The show was absolutely bumping, I rolled in after a light pregame streaming, and K-dawg + Bobo managed to fast-track me through the line with their magic VIP wand. Honestly, these two have been killing it for me out here.
We pop in through, meet up with the whole group, including an openly gay friend of theirs (which is really fucking rare out here), who happens to be smoking some pot. Now, I’m not really a pot guy, it tends to make me tired / hungry / sleepy. But K-dawg is the ultimate peer pressure lad when it comes to drug consumption amongst the friend group, he hits it a few times, and tells me to hack a few puffs. I take one decent pull and say I’m good, but he twists my arm into taking a second one, and I go from zero to zonked pretty damn fast. Fuckin’ K-dawg.
Anyways, we are a crew of about 8 or 9. Some of us want to go more central, some people want to go up front. The music is great, the crowd is body to body, there are probably at least 5 or 10k people in the square easily. I end up rolling up front with another one of K-dawg’s friends, so we can get right up next to the speaker, and we jam out a little bit.
We’re dancing doing our thing, and at some point I make eye contact with a super cute lass, who looks like some sort of Eastern European. Petite, insane blue eyes, curves in all the right places, in full festival getup, def a good lookin’ lady. I mean scorching hot really. No real ambitions, C is still on the fence for Italy, and I’m fucking baked at this point barely clinging to consciousness. I’m somehow chatting her up a bit despite the music right in our ears, vibes seem alright. K-dawg’s buddy pulls me back at some point and says something about how she likes me and I should go for it. And in my head, that sort of pushes me to… ask her for her number??? In the middle of the concert??? Drink or a dance make a lot more sense, but I’m fucking zonked.
Ok. It’s a little awkward. Zero game while stoned out of my mind. But what stands out to me is the reaction. Her response is to ask “are you serious?”, and then burst out laughing. What a god damn savage. She starts laughing, grabs her friend, says something to her about it, who also starts laughing. And then K-dawg’s buddy leans in and they are talking in Albanian for a second, and he starts laughing. Fuckkkk haha. “The worst she can say is no”. We’ve now learned this ain’t true boys.
I mean shit, she’s really attractive, but I don’t think its like I’m the fuckin’ Hunchback of Notre Dame. If she’s playing in the Chel, I gotta at least be in major juniors, might be swinging above my league in the pure physical, but you gotta believe we’re at least playing the same sport. Tbh probably more related to my botched delivery / their own mental state / the fact I’m a weed zombie at this point, don’t think there was any malice there, but who knows. Who the fuck brings an Indica to a festival? Indica, in da couchhhhh.
Anyways, I’m probably tweaking a bit on the weed, it’s really not my going out drug of choice / puts me in my head a lot. Fuckin K-dawg. Funnily enough, this would not be the last we’d see of “Laughina”, but for the night, it was enough for me… I politely excuse myself, and slink off with what remains of my dignity.
I ended up making my way back through the crowd. Main crew is deep center in the mob, jamming out, and I consider re-linking with them. But the whole world is spinning and I’m feeling super tired / nauseous. End up leaving the concert venue to sit down on a bench for a few minutes to see if I can rally back. But I end up just feeling more sick, and after a few more minutes, I say fuck it. Funnily enough, I don’t go straight home… my ingenious plan is to hit the poker room, while I’m just absolutely cooked and obviously going to play the worst poker of my life.
I head down into Teddy KGB’s metal basement doorway, sip on a free water in the lounge area, and ask if there are any seats open. There are not. End up waiting thirty minutes, where by the grace of god, seats continue to remain at full capacity, which gives me time to sober up enough to realize what a terrible idea playing in this state would be. It’s Friday night, and only about midnight, but I’m still absolutely cooked… I chalk it all up in the L column, flag a taxi outside, rip home, eat a gigantic bowl of leftover Carbonara I cooked up the night before, and watch an episode of Rick and Morty, before conking the fuck out for the night.
Wake up the next morning and reflect on it all a bit. Sort of realize the whole thing is pretty funny. I’ve taken plenty of runs at women before, which of course, like for most men, involves a fair amount of rejection. But never in my whole life, has a woman just straight up laughed in my face at the idea of me taking her number. Especially with prior groundwork laid. You’d think it would be the stuff of nightmares.
But realistically. What were my intentions anyways? I was fried (Fuck you, K-Dawg!), I’m still figuring out last minute if C is actually coming with me to Italy as my plus 1 and our tentative rekindle arc might continue, my approach was terrible, and… awful rejection, sure, but it’s absolutely meaningless against the backdrop of all the bigger shit that I’m trying to figure out in my life.
Genuine heartbreak, death of a loved one, losing an important job, having a startup going under, letting down people you care about, not being able to feed your kids… holy shit, there’s so many more things that can happen in life that are actually worth getting bent out of shape for. Casual rejection doesn’t register anymore, it’s not even a blip on the radar. I’m not going to come out of this experience an entirely different person or anything dramatic like that, but I think what this whole trip about is that you need to be out there shooting your shot, every chance that you get. Not just with women obviously, but with every dream and opportunity, every goal and ambition, or else you’re going to be lying there on your deathbed in forty years wondering how you were such a pussy that you let the things you wanted in life just pass you by without even trying.
There’s nothing unique or novel about this realization. It’s been realized by billions before me, and it’ll be realized by billions afterwards. No one is bulletproof, and of course the slap of a rejection can sting a little, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s just a reminder to refine your efforts and try again. Fuckin’ get out there and get it boys! We aren’t getting any younger.
Week 2 is fairly uneventful in terms of crazy sends. This is largely in part due to some of the worst canker sores I’ve ever gotten in my whole life appearing along the side of my tongue. We’re not talking normal ones, we’re talking humongous pits of flesh chunked out of the tongue, with mountainous blisters so painful it’s not possible to eat, talk, drink, smoke… basically these fucking things deny all pleasure in life and you just want to die.
It actually blows my mind that modern medicine hasn’t found a cure for this shit yet, you’d make a god damn fortune. Come on bio nerds, get er fuckin’ done! So no ambitions for sends, eating out, socializing, or anything really.
Cash is starting to get a little tight. Not alarmingly tight, but definitely tight to the point that I decide I need to get my shit together a bit and figure out how I’m going to make this trip work. I really only planned two revenue streams while I was abroad; low stakes Pot Limit Omaha poker online, which is a massive grind, and streaming chess on Kick, which to this point, is also a massive grind. Grind is an understatement; realistically, I’m probably making about 10 bucks an hour tops with both up until this point. I do also have a couple of students for chess lessons, but at this point it’s really just a couple, and it’s nowhere close to consistent enough to support myself, even though the hourly is a lot better.
But hey, this is the price you pay to throw off the corporate shackles, and I have a bunch of friends who have found success with both. Kick has a much lower population than Twitch, and I’ve been fucking inchinggggg my way towards 1k followers, which will allow me to apply for the chess.com partner streaming program.
I’ve also been timing my streams strategically. GM Hikaru Nakamura streams once in a while on Kick, and one of his mods has taken a liking to me; I’m the lucky recipient of raids, as long as I’m streaming when he ends. It probably helps there aren’t many other chess streamers on Kick for them to send the raids to.
For context, a raid means sending all of your current viewers over to another channel that is streaming at the same time you want to end. Naka will typically have 2-8k people watching him. The goal is to get into the Kick incentive program, where they start paying you out themselves based on chat engagement (as opposed to relying purely on subscriptions and donations), and getting into this program could really make a difference to my bottom line.
The most difficult requirement to being eligible for the program, is to maintain an average viewer count of 75 or higher. By trying to only stream at popular hours, and limiting the frequency that I stream to primarily when Naka is about halfway done his own streams, I’ve been able to catch enough raids that I’m super close to hitting this average.
Naka generally streams Titled Tuesday, a chess.com event, on Kick, and I’m sitting at a count of around 66 average viewers; if I can get my shit together, and put together entertaining enough content that his viewers don’t mind they’re swapping from a top-5 player in the world to some 2500 chess.com rated bum chugging beers, then I have a very realistic chance of spiking over the required average, and becoming eligible to apply for the program.
Plan’s been in motion for the last month, the table is set, and it’s go time. I make sure I have beers stocked up, ping outside of my Discord channel on all my socials, for the first time ever, to let the gang know I could use a few extra eyeballs on my channel to help push me over the top… and then it’s time to throw on the character. Brando The Bully going live!
Maybe character is the wrong word. Blazing fast chess moves, crazy sacrifices that are doomed to fail a lot of the time, but can sometimes result in brilliant, sexy games. Shit talking opponents and chat alike in an exaggerated hockey accent, putting beers down like I’m back in my university days.
It’s spunky, it’s always fun to chirp and say dumb shit, and there’s a warmth and charisma I share with the friendships and community I’ve built up over the last couple of years. Primarily only one facet of me, and perhaps a bit of a caricature, but still, a lot of the “real” me in there for people to love, hate, or try to get piss drunk by throwing their dollars at me. Dance monkey, dance! It still tickles me to this day that people can make a living doing this.
But at the same time, maybe it’s not that strange. I spent a lot of time over at the Chessbrah house back when they were in Montreal and just getting started on their insanely successful chess streaming journey. But I was much more into the live events than anything online; chilling out, playing speed chess, and drinking with the boys. I didn’t really get into the online side until COVID and the 8pm curfews hit, and there was really fuck all else to do.
Then all of a sudden, I found myself hanging out in their Discord, making friends with people I’d never met online, splintering off into our own subgroups. We’d run crosswords, trivia, Jackbox… fuck, we were even solving online jigsaw puzzles together. Anything to do just to pass the time. We’d also watch the Chessbrah stream a bunch together, actively participate in chat, discuss who we liked, didn’t like, who was crazy, relevant drama…
Got to the point where some of these people became real friends. Couple of romantic relationships even formed. During COVID curfew lifts, I entertained a group of online friends live at a Toronto Airbnb, where one got drunk for the first time in his life and fell into the toilet, smashing both his head and the porcelain bowl. First and only AirBnB I’ve ever been able to rent.
Streamed a bit on Twitch myself, just to try it out, before eventually getting banned for getting blackout drunk one night on stream and forgetting that you can’t call an annoying buddy a “retarded faggot” in front of an online audience without severe consequences (lmao, who would have guessed). Something about playing games online really brings back those Halo 2 Xbox live days where people were just saying the nastiest things to each other, but cancel culture didn’t exist yet. Definitely need to be careful about that type of language… I do think the world has gotten a bit soft, but I don’t have any desire to be ignorant or hurtful to minorities either. That’s not the public face I really want to have, and there are plenty of ways to insult a buddy that are a bit more creative vocabulary-wise.
But the point of all of this, is that the streaming subculture really isn’t about the actual activity being streamed. It’s not even about the “star” of the show either (though it often can be, creeping into some fairly gross parasocial relationships that exist between streamers and viewers). To me, it’s about the community you build, the online family, the cast of characters, that get together and enjoy each others company. The friendships that are built. The socializing. Having drinks together in a discord call, shooting the shit about wives and families. It’s an online bar, social club, a place where people can kick their boots off, let their guard down, meet new people, and hang with the old ones.
Kind of ironic that the dude “indefinitely suspended for violent hate speech” (ok, comeeeee the fuck onnnn, that’s a stretch and a half, peak cancel culture) is talking about building a safe space to chill and be yourself online. But it really is that. Of course members in the community are going to be diverse; some will drop in for a few hours here and there to shoot the shit and see what’s going on amidst their busy lives full of friends and activities. For others, for whatever reason, these little communities might be close to their entire social lives. And that’s ok. Sometimes it’s easier to make friends online, to have some semblance of control over the pieces of yourself you reveal the world, to let your guard down one step at a time, carefully, because you’ve been burned so much by other people in the real world. And use it as a road to building trust and confidence so that you can be successful in forming real life relationships and friendships again one day.
I’ve thought long and hard about if streaming can actually be good for the people involved in it. I think a lot of the problems develop when a streamer gets so big that it becomes a tremendous effort to actively be a part of the community. You can manage a few hundred, or even a few thousand relationships, as long as you put the time and effort in. But when you get to say, fifty or a hundred or two hundred thousand people who can tune in, it must be fucking impossible to actively maintain any semblance of real friendships with the masses.
At that point, the streamer attains an almost demi-god status, and the parasocial / narcissist issues start creeping in. I’d like to think I won’t ever be like that… but it’s also a foreign / crazy concept to me ever becoming a streamer that big. Maybe if I was a 9/10 Russian bombshell with a giant rack, a 2600 FIDE, and about twice the charisma. But that sounds like a future problem not worth worrying about, because if it ever rolls around, then I guess I’ll have made it. See you all on my fuckin’ yacht!
Anyways, ramble on streaming in general aside. We catch the Naka raid. A ton of real life friends see the Facebook link and pop in for a few hours. The stream goes super well, and I manage to retain about 600 people from the Naka raid for several hours. And boom, just like that, we’ve done it! Average viewers for the month is sitting at 82, exceeding the requirement for the Kick Partner Program. Let’s fucking gooooooooo!
I celebrate a bit with chat, thank everyone on Facebook for popping in, crack a couple of brews with The Greek, and submit my application for partnership to Kick. I also manage to pick up another 40 or so followers, which pops me over 1k,so I submit a request to Chess.com for their partnership program.
I expect both to take about a week to get back to me, but within a couple of days, I’m accepted into both programs, and just absolutely ecstatic about it. The road ahead is going to be long and grindy, but at a bare minimum, I now have a couple of extra tools at my disposal to generate views and revenue. This extended Europe trip may actually end in some way other than me having to give handjobs in an Albanian alley to book my plane ticket back home to mom’s place in Calgary.
At the tail end of week 3 on Saturday, The Greek and I head out for drinks with Bobo and Iris. C’s visit has been short but sweet, and she’s already departed. K-dawg is out of town yet again for another business trip, so it’ll just be the 4 of us.
We peel out to a nice terrace in Blloku. Pretty standard fancy pants stuff, there’s no DJ playing yet, but we roll out some drinks and tapas. Couple beers, couple cocktails, nothing crazy. Bobo and Iris look great as per usual, there’s just some sort of aura of class that emanates from some of these European women. A certain care taken into their appearance… probably I should take some style notes from them. For sure explains why K-dawg always looks so sharp these days. But I’ve never had time for that shit… one day.
As per usual, the ladies have to go home relatively early. Being a mom is a full time job after all. The terrace has filled up, and The Greek and I debate taking a shot at some of the tables of women, but I’ve never had a ton of love for the fancier folk. Sit there looking bored and sip your drink, if you can’t entertain yourselves I’m not gonna do it for you.
We decide to send it to Juliette, the Karaoke bar we went on one of the first nights. Have talked to the bartender a few times prior and he’s claimed that on Saturday the place gets rowdy. It’s only a few blocks away so we mosey our way over there.
The bar is indeed hopping. Ground floor karaoke bar in the heart of Blloku, but instead of karaoke, tonight they have a live band strumming up a storm and rocking out to some good ole American tunes. “Dance floor” / “Mosh pit” is body to body, sweaty, with cigs inside, so you can imagine how it all smells, and I fucking guarantee more than a people got burned.
We manage to snake our way next to the bar, and snag a couple of brews, but we’re only half cut at best, the crowd is young, and it’s pretty much impossible to even make out the features of people jumping around in the crowd, let alone get the wheels rolling and slide in some convo.
So we strategically prop up at a table closer to the entrance, where sweat in the air is a bit less thick. Lot less talent out this way, but it was going to be a nightmare to hit on anyone in that most pit, and we’d probably need to be at least another six beers deep to send it.
Casually sipping and looking to socialize, I look over at the other table, and notice four lads around our age give or take a few years who look like they are down to get rowdy. Couple African-American types, a whitey, and a dude who just looks like he could be an Arab Sheikh.
Strike up a convo with the boys, and it turns out they are all visiting from Italy for the weekend, here on a bachelors, and are looking to tear it up a bit. I buy a round of shots to congratulate ’em, and we end up merging tables with the lads and swap war stories.
It turns out they are planning to go to Durres beach the next day and are hoping not to get tooo mangled tonight. I haven’t been to the beach yet since I’ve been here, so after a few brews, I ask if I can tag along. Pick up a couple of What’s-App numbers, and we lock in tentative plans to link up the next day. Bar itself ends up being a bit of a bust… it’s pretty hard to get any reliable service, and so when the boys (The Sheik, Davinci (white, future husband), Sanny, and Firo) bounce, The Greek and I decide it’s time to retire ourselves.
Wake up the next day, and for whatever reason, The Greek isn’t down to hit the beach. Crazy stuff, but I guess he’s used to the Med at this point and unimpressed. Fire out a few texts to the Italians, and they are still down, so I end up scarfing some pizza and meeting up with them at their brunch spot downtown.
There’s a cab line right outside the brunch spot, and after a little bit of haggling, we manage to secure 2 cabs for 20 Euros each. First hiccup pops up; the Italians don’t have any physical cash on ’em. I do happen to have a few bills on me after some good luck at the poker tables, and I end up making a deal where I’ll cover the cabs out as long as they cover cabs back. Fuckin’ most generous unemployed lad who ever existed right here (it does make sense though, because otherwise they’d just be rolling the 4 of them out in one cab).
We split 3-2, with me hopping into a cab with Firo and The Sheik, and just like that, we’re off. A slightly hungover bunch, but not bad considering we made it outta the bar at a reasonable time. The drive out to Durres is fairly beautiful, and we’re having a good time exchanging small talk, but at a certain point, we decide to get into beach mood, and ask the cab driver to pump some tunes for us.
Cabby (Big Will) is more than happy to oblige. He’s a fucking maniac. Cranks the tunes as loud as the speakers will play ’em, he’s swerving back and forth as he drives in tune with the music, while somehow we still feel perfectly safe in the car. Hacking a dart out the window, not a care in the world. We do get stuck in a rut where we listen to 3 versions of the same Shakira song, but it becomes an inside joke really fast and we make great time (1h) to the beach. I make sure to grab Big Will’s number; this is my cabby from now until forever.
We roll out as a 5-stack of lads onto the beach and survey our surroundings. View across the Adriatic sea is nice, no chance of making out Italy at this distance though. We hit the boardwalk and hike around the small patch of Golem Beach that has public access. Unfortunately, it’s a Sunday, and a few weeks ahead of major tourist season; the beach is a bit of a ghost town.
Boardwalk has the beach and some small bars on the seaside, with a few sparsely populated hotels, pools, and hotel bars on the other side. Plenty of big, empty hotels for peak season. Tourist attractions include a worn-down volleyball net, a bumper-cars setup that hasn’t been used in at least ten years, and a couple of ice cream stands. Really not the paradise we were hoping for, but hey, fuck it, at least we have each other, and we pretty much have the beach to ourselves.
We roll back to the first bar near the roundabout where our cabs dropped us off, slam a round of drinks, hack a few darts, and take our second round onto some beach chairs. This is the first proper beach I’ve seen in years, and despite the fact I’m a bit of a pussy when it comes to the ocean due to my mom showing me Jaws at about age 8, I’m happy to be one of the first ones in there.
Water is a little bit murky, but it’s a very gradual drop-off, and feels good to be splashing around in the sun. We kill a few hours and more than a few drinks, and decide it’s nearly time to wrap things up.
Swing by this fancy hotel / restaurant in Durres for dinner. Actually insane what a ghost town it is today; there are maybe 20 staff, and zero other customers, so all of them are waiting on the five of us. The boys are celebrating and not afraid to go all-out; we end up ordering a nice Italian bottle of white, few appetizers and mains to split, and one of every dessert on the menu. I’m not even a dessert guy, but this is the definition of eating well; every dish looks beautiful, tasted great, and we’re having a nice time getting to know each other. We also receive some fancy shots post-dinner on the house, as a little digestif.
What’s less expected is Davinci telling me I need to come to the wedding in Ciro Marina. Wedding is happening in exactly 2 weeks. I’m a little flattered, and laugh it off a bit; but at the same time, I tell him that if he’s actually serious, as long as he clears it with the future wifey, you better believe I’ll be there. He says he’s dead serious, and I tell him he has ’til the end of their trip here to change his mind.
We all rip back to Tirana with the same cab drivers, with plans to send it out for one last big night on their bachelors. And send it we do. We link up at a fancy bar/club in Blloku, speakers blasting electronic music, with standing tables only, and just start hammering drinks down.
The setup here is good; it’s fancy, and I’m equipped with my one dress shirt, and there are handfuls of people at each table, with more than a few pretty girls.
I end up meeting one British dude (Lil-Bro) shooting the shit in the bathroom, breaking the classic piss-talk code; his group is also only here for the weekend, and they are looking to send hard.
So we merge tables with his gang, which consists of his tall, lanky older brother (Lank), Lank’s gf, and a couple of other British ladies. We’re all having a good time putting some drinks down, dancing, and taking shots.
Shots are fucking dangerous though, they catch up to me reallll quick, especially after a long day of drinking. At some point, we’re all eyeballing these Russian ladies the next table over, and Lank gives me some ludicrous line to drop on them. I’m fairly buckled, and don’t mind being silly… I head over to them, fumble the line, and we all sort of laugh it off.
I head back to the table ready to joke around about it, but Lank rolls in next, and it turns out I’ve been the sacrificial lamb all along; he uses the fact I dropped a terrible line as the conversation starter, and apologizes for me. When I cut back to joke around about it with him, he’s fairly rude and dismissive… I mean fuck, maybe it was the booze, but I was a little bit heated. No one’s gonna be putting me on their hook as bait.
So while he’s occupied with the Russians, I put my arm around his girlfriend and start chatting her up. Tell her that since he’s hitting on girls in front of her, he clearly doesn’t deserve her and she could use a real man. Haha I wish I was making this up, I’m definitely 100% in troublemaking mode at this point, and we’re all more than a little smashed. But for real, fuck that guy haha. His little brother was mad chill though, we also shoot the shit a bit and are getting along just fine.
Anyways, Lank doesn’t really notice at first, it’s already fairly late and there are some ideas of shutting er down. At some point I’m hacking a dart outside with a couple of the Italians, figuring out if it’s time to bounce, and Lank comes out the door all pissed off. Starts yelling at me and saying his gf told him what I said. I could have apologized, but at this point I’m fucking sauced and not really feeling like it. We obviously have to double down here.
I tell him he’s a skinny lil bitch who’s obv trash if he’s hitting on girls in front of his girlfriend, and that I’m more than happy to settle it hockey style right there. Buddy better have a knife London style if he wants to come out on top of this one. For the record, fighting is stupid, you should really only break it out if you have to, and this is definitely not the case here, but I do fuckin’ love running my mouth, especially when I know the kid is soft and not going to do shit.
He steps in and gives me a halfhearted shove, and I tell him his girlfriend could probably put up a better showing. The boys are all in the middle breaking us up before anything starts anyways, no one is looking to get arrested in Albania. I flip him off, tell his girlfriend to call me, say goodnight to the boys, hop in a cab, and manage to get myself home in one piece. Wouldn’t have really wanted to scrap him anyways, his little brother would have obviously had to get involved, and the kid was chill / sweet the whole night.
Wake up the next day hungover as fuck, and am a little sad the Italian boys are rolling out of town. I’m also hoping the little spectacle hasn’t resulted in my wedding invite being retracted. Shoot a few texts out to the lads, and I guess they enjoyed the show, because my wedding invite is more locked in than ever. The boys fuckin’ love me, and I love them. Best part of travelling.
Over the next couple of weeks, I start to find my footing a bit in terms of establishing a routine. This was always the long-term plan in ejector-seating out of Montreal; get away from some of the bad habits, throw myself into a challenging situation, and dial in on making a living streaming, a creative outlet in my writing, a viable future in my start-up plans, and splash in a little adventure and romance along the way.
The Greek and I are on decent terms, but still taking a little time to cool off. I think Drizzy and The Prof are a little upset that they might be in hot water at their favorite strip joint, and it makes sense to both of us that we don’t have to spend every second together; that’s sorta how you end up driving each other crazy.
I’ll try to split up the following stories a bit here; if a topic doesn’t interest you, you can just skip past it:
FISHOP (restaurant):
K-dawg is pretty busy wrapping up buyouts for his late fathers company, and travelling all over the place. We’ve talked a lot about some big sends together, but in the short term, we’re content to link up for some short drinks / some dinners. One such dinner deserves a shoutout; the god tier restaurant, Fishop.
It’s kinda a stupid name, in English at least, for a restaurant, but holy fuck is it my favorite restaurant here of all time. We go together and go absolutely ham. Towering platter of Mediterranean seafood, shrimp, a couple of raw fish dishes, fish soup, salad, bottle of white wine, and for some reason frog legs. Frog legs are a little creepy, they look like miniature little human skeleton legs, with remarkably defined feet and individual toe bones, but taste pretty much like chicken wings. The whole thing runs us a grand total of 70 Euros. Absolute insanity. The seafood is market fresh and mind-blowing, but of all the dishes, what gets me the most, is the simple green salad.
It’s literally just some kind of lettuce, a couple of olives sprinkled in there, and a couple of lemon wedges. Very lightly dressed, some combination of olive oil and lemon juice, but they must marinate it or something, because the flavor just pops in your mouth. It’s so light, so refreshing, almost like a glass of water, tiniest hint of tanginess, and it’s just hands down one of the best salads I’ve ever had in my entire life. I swear to god I’m going to ask them the next time how to make it, I don’t think I can live without that recipe. It makes no sense how fucking amazing it is.
Yeah, will definitely be going back to this restaurant a lot; service is impeccable, waiter has a regal, deep voice with an almost British accent, hitting you with a “so what will we be doing today, Gentleman?”, and it’s just an awesome experience through and through. Market fresh, palette cleansing, fine dining, where you end up full, and you don’t walk out of the restaurant feeling like you got pegged and had your wallet stolen. Fishop! ———————————————
The Poker Files:
I’ve made the controversial decision to take another stab at reinvigorating my non-existent poker career. The problem is that at least 2/3 of the major casinos don’t have a poker room. I did in fact make my way back to the first one with a passport at some point, and picked up a couple hundred Euros at the blackjack tables (was card-counting for fun, but realistically, in such a short session, the win is almost entirely luck based). This emboldens me to try and find a good spot to play some cards.
After drinks with K-dawg ends early on my first Friday in Albania out in Blloku, I pull up google maps and search for a poker room. A particular poker club pops right up, and it’s also in Blloku, only a few streets away. Walk around where the entrance is supposed to be, and can’t find it for a minute or two. Finally I notice this grey steel door leading down into a basement, and realize that if I want to play cards, this is where I have to go.
I haven’t fully educated myself on how poker operates in Albania; I think it’s a bit of a legal grey zone. Probably the casinos need a special license to operate it, but it’s a bit weird that both the ones I’ve been to just don’t have proper poker tables. This spot is a bit of a vibe, almost like Teddy KGB’s set up in Rounders.
I enter through the street-level steel gate and descend some stairs until I arrive at a second, closed, locked door. There’s a camera outside the door where they note my arrival, and I wait no more than a couple of seconds before it swings open and a big, burly, Albanian bouncer opens the door and beckons me to come inside.
Now, I have about 300 Euros on me. It might seem like absolute madness to some of you that I feel almost zero danger here, but the fact is, the danger is baked into the experience a bit. It’s thrill-seeking, but not done in complete ignorance. I’ve played in plenty of underground games of poker before, and for the most part, as long as you’re respectful and play by the rules, nothing bad is going to happen to you. At worst, they cheat and you lose what you came with, or maybe, you win too much, and you risk getting robbed.
But at the end of the day, the organizers of these games have a lot at stake to run a clean, safe game. They’re on the map, they’ve invested into the setup, and they can rake it for tremendous profit without doing anything nefarious. This revenue stream relies on them providing an environment where players can gamble fairly and safely, an environment of trust.
Of course there will be exceptions to the rule, or cases where some people decide to act completely irrationally, but as long as there’s a much higher incentive for the parties involved to engage in fair behavior than there is to fuck you over, there’s much less danger than there would appear to be to a common observer. At least, that’s my rationale for ripping in through the doors ready to play some cards. The eight or nine beers I’ve had also provide some liquid courage, and you know I fuckin’ love the rush.
It’s a pretty cool setup. Once you walk through the second door, there’s a lounge area with some tables and flat screens, where people can watch sports. There’s a bar, a section in the back with what appear to be computers (potentially allowing customers to place sports bets play online slots), and then the main floor, where they have 4 casino-quality poker tables fully felted up in red and full of players.
The host of the room is a relatively young dude, full of swag and energy, and The Host just strikes me as a chill beauty who enjoys being here. He’s friendly, speaks a decent amount of English, and we chat a bit. Have joked with him several times about hitting the town together for drinks to drop some wheels, but he hasn’t bitten yet. To be fair I still don’t remember his fuckin’ name.
Pretty decent setup in general. Apparently, they have a tournament freeroll every day around 6pm, the only games they spread are 1-2 No-Limit Holdem, and you can buy in for 50 Euros+. Didn’t ask what the max is, because I won’t ever be carrying in more than 300, or loading more than 200, but they are operating on a super chill 5% rake (house takes 5% from every pot. Compared to say, Montreal taking 10%, this is a fucking steal). The rake itself is most likely uncapped, but that really only comes into play when stacks start to get deep, and like I mentioned earlier, I never intend to stick around here for long with a deep stack.
The rules are to my liking. House also spots every player one free drink per visit. So I grab my free beer, rack up 200 in chips, and take a seat at one of the tables. Some of the players look a little bit intimidating, burly dudes right off the set of Taken, but there are plenty of nerdier poker types as well. If these boys can survive a game here, so can I.
I kick off the game pretty chill and play tight. One of the things I notice is that a TON of players are short-stacking. 200 is a standard 100 Big Blind buy-in for a 1-2 Blind No limit game (the 2 forced bets that the first 2 players have to put in); a lot of people are chilling here on the min-buy, which is 50. This is often super unprofitable, but in a 5% rake game, with enough bad players, it’s possible to find the right spots to be plus EV.
I adopt the rather boring strategy I’ll be using for this and most of my future sessions while short stacks are in play; limping in for blinds with speculative hands in late position, limping my monsters in early position hoping for a raise so I can 3-bet jam after some awful calls and punish the limpers, raising my monsters in late position, and forcing myself to fold everything else… which is surprisingly hard to do given how many drinks I’ve had.
But, the strategy is working pretty well. I’m trading some pots here and there, but slowly climbing up. Force some folds, pick up a dudes 50 with a limp – raise – ship with pocket Jacks, and life is pretty good. Unfortunately my luck doesn’t hold forever. I drop 80 in a pot where I’m outkicked with trip 10’s, and I drop another 70 with my limp-raise-ship with my Ace King against an Ace Jack preflop… sad days.
On the bright side, I’ve had another six beers and paid with chips. We’re also all chain-smoking cigarettes like this is the world’s greatest home game. Sitting at around 140, I end up flopping the nut straight with my 4-6s on a 3-5-7 board. Put in a small flop bet and pick up one call (small-ball is printing for me, lots of these guys will commit to 15 bucks with bottom pair, it’s pure value town). Turn is a King, with 2 diamonds on the board, and I get about half of my starting stack in on the turn, picking up a remaining call. River’s a black 9. I throw a small 35 river bet out there, and buddy instantly jams on me for my remaining 35. Fuck.
Don’t have to be a prophet to know what he’s holding. But for a nearly 300 pot I can’t really fold for 35 with what is now the second nuts. Call, exasperated, and he turns over 6-8 for the nut straight. Ouchie. RIP 200. Fuckin bad beat making it all feel just like Poker Stars.
At this point, I’ve been playing for several hours without any real issues. One dude has been pretty salty with me, complaining to me, “you’re so lucky, we aren’t all rich like you”, which was a little concerning, but very funny, as I assured him that I was probably the most broke person in the room. The term “Chino” was being thrown around a fair bit as well, but I don’t think it had anything to do with me being Chinese. There was also a general lack of English at the table, although I was occasionally swapping small talk in English with a few of the lads.
I was more or less ready to pick up and go, but, they were breaking 2 of the tables and needed a few brave souls to head to the main game with a 100 min-buy. As a currently losing player, and now about 12 beers deep, plus an obvious Asian tourist in the room amidst a group of mostly regs, the host offered to spot me 50 if I’d buy in another 50 for 100 total at the main game. Fuck, who am I to turn down free money? The beats in the side game were a little bit sus, but I had my eye on the dealer pretty closely, and had little reason so far to figure anything shady was going on.
Head over to the main game and I’m properly trashed. Make a few more friends at the table, I’m playing a bit looser and more aggressive now, kind of just content to mix it up a bit with the beers flowing freely and the house money that I’m expected to be a bit of a donkey with. A few of the players enjoy my banter, and we get along well, but I’m reprimanded a few times by the dealer not “to talk too much”; poker is a game they prefer to play mostly in silence here, apparently, or maybe this many beers deep I’m running my mouth too much and fuckin’ annoying.
I run up to about 250, fade back to 80 or 90, and then eventually get bored and try to rip pocket 4-s in as a 3-bet into an early small open and try to punish multiple limpers who’ve called with trash for 10. Initial raiser tanks, and then calls me with 7-7 (probably assuming he’s often flipping against 2 over cards most of the time, and dead some of the time vs an overpair), while the rest of the table folds. Unfortunately he’s the one with the overpair here and has my 4’s crushed, and my first session ends down 250. Ouchie, that’s a lot of streaming hours.
With that said, I did put away about 12 beers there, had a great time for a few hours, and got the lay of the land. I didn’t get stabbed, robbed, or lynched either; gotta chalk that part up in the win column. I would go back several times over the next couple of weeks, and am currently sitting on a nice little profit of 3 or 4 hundred euros. For the most part, I’ve just been rolling in, min buying for 50, waiting for good spots to jam, playing a bit more normally if I win the flip, and then making sure to get out before my stack reaches 500 Euros.
One other funny aside. In my second session, I was chilling at the main game, and our table hit the bad beat! Now, before you get too excited, bad beat here consists of 2 cards playing for both players, with one player losing with Queens Full or better (In comparison, in Montreal, you need to lose with Aces full of Jacks, or better). Since there are far less tables and it’s much easier to hit the Bad Beat Jackpot, the jackpot was only up to about 1200 (in Montreal or Vegas some bad beats can often exceed 1M).
But that would still be a really decent score here considering the general short stack buy-ins. Never hit a bad beat in all my years of playing poker. Unfortunately, the rules are different here. On most poker sites / in casinos, the loser of the hand takes 50%, the winner takes 25%, and the rest of the table splits 25%. Probably would have been 70 or 80 Euros for me, which is at least a min buy-in and a half. Plus I’d get to say I won a bad beat live for the rest of my life.
Unfortunately, because the pots are so much smaller here, and because the rules to hit one are much easier, there’s literally no split. Loser takes 100%. I was really excited to have finally hit a bad beat live, but I guess I’m going to have to wait a while longer.
If there’s a lot of interest in poker stories, feel free to let me know in the comments; I can go into some more details after. For now though, just know this is a really cool spot to have in the rotation. There are some strong players, some weak players, and far less danger than I thought there could be. Just a bunch of dudes hacking darts and playing cards, probably hiding from their wives.
There WAS one night with a bunch of super loud Israeli’s, just absolutely shitfaced and donking their chips off, which I thought was a bit crazy considering current geopolitical climate, and the large population of Muslims that inhabit Albania, but tbh there was zero drama. Probably a combination of the people here being super chill, and then the fact the Israeli’s were just giving their money away; hard to get mad at drunk idiots at the table when they are handing freebies out to everyone. Poker culture trumps geopolitics, confirmed! ———————————————————————-
Romantic Forays:
C and I have been officially friends through the first week. Her decision, not mine. Issues with my drinking, issues with long distance, etc, etc. We have no idea if she’s going to visit or not, though there are obviously some hopes that there are. She was waffling on a potential visit in week 1 or 2, but had warned me not to bank on it, and I had full permission to take a gander at some of the local talent. Queue me firing up the ole dating apps one last time.
Spike a bunch of matches actually, maybe it’s that I’m exotic here as just about the only Asian in town, and the inexorable creep of Japanese and Korean subculture into Europe is giving the yellow boys a boost, or maybe it’s the draw of a Canadian passport (holy fuck, what a passport it is though).
Either way, the apps are actually fun again. I’m chatting to a few matches pretty casually. My intentions are a mixed bag, I’m still thinking about C a lot and hoping she’ll make it out, and I’m not in a huge rush to complicate things, but I’m on my adventure arc, and it can’t hurt to at the very least, have an excuse to check out some of the cheap restaurants with a fun dinner date or two.
By the end of the first week, with no plans with C forthcoming, I pull the trigger and set up a casual Sunday dinner date. I would never commit to a first app dinner-date back in Montreal, simply because it feels a bit fucking stupid to drop 100 bucks on a crappy dinner or 150 bucks on a nice one for someone you might never see again. I’m much more of a drinks and activities guy; I know that if I’m running some mini golf or bowling, then no matter what happens on the date, I’m going to have fun. And really that’s how it should be; fun should be the priority. Love will happen when it happens, let’s make dating fuckin fun again.
But here, I actually want to go to some of these restaurants. I’m super interested in sampling the local cuisine, and even though I don’t mind sending to a resto solo, and I do have a few friends to hit up as needed, I find the idea of spending a night over some wine and food with an attractive local and some conversation pretty appealing. I’ve always been interested in people with different backgrounds, perspectives, and stories to tell, and this just feels like a fun way to do it with a huge potential upside.
So, I steer clear of some of the obvious Russian gold-diggers. “I don’t believe in 50-50”. I mean fuck, neither do I for a first date, but when you combo that with “generosity” as their first preferred trait in a man… shit, at least they’re clear about what they want. To be honest some of them are probably hot enough to warrant it, and maybe even hot enough for me to consider it… but let’s be real, it’s not a super attractive trait, and realistically, I don’t have a lot of gold to dig right now. Maybe one of these days I’ll have to set up a honey-pot, rent a really nice place for one night, and ask K-dawg to lend me the Range Rover. Scam the scammers baby!
I’ve been having a really nice chat on Bumble with this one Albanian lady, Techie. She’s 30, works as a dev tester at a tech company, dark brown hair, dark eyes, great smile, and just seems like one of the most calm, stable people in the world. She’s also easy to talk to, chats flowing easily, and it’s a pretty obvious decision to start with her.
After a bit of waffling over the venue, we settle on a seafood restaurant I haven’t been to before. I’m notoriously ten minutes late for these kinds of things, which is something I definitely need to work on, but she ends up being ten later to my ten. Works for me, haven’t committed any social faux pas’, and gives me a chance to warm up with a beerski and peruse the menu a bit. She pulls up, looks great, warm smile, and we settle into a very relaxed dinner.
Conversation is all over the place, but flowing super well. I’m a bit too honest, and do mentioned the whole C situation, but she doesn’t seem overly perturbed; she’s looking for something long term, and wants to take things reallllly slow; it’s more of an icebreaker / meet n greet than the breakneck speed of Montreal dating, and the change of pace is refreshing.
Wrap dinner with a conversation about religion, the origin of life and the universe, and some other high brow stuff; her English is great, the food is decent (and cheap! I’m always down to pay first date, and entire meal + glasses of wine only runs me 30 Euros), and it’s just been a massively pleasant experience.
We exchange a friendly hug at the end, with some intentions of perhaps linking up again if the whole C situation falls through. I do feel a little bit of guilt, but at the same time, C + I have both been above board with each other and I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong. I think my playboy days are well behind me; I’m definitely looking to date with intention, and will almost certainly be a “one woman at a time” kinda guy for the rest of my life. I mean fuck, one can be exhausting enough; not sure how some of the Arab / Indian lads manage multiple wives, pretty much guaranteed to have a couple of them pissed off at you at any one time… sounds like a real fucking headache.
C does actually manage to find some time Wednesday of week 3 to come visit. I had informed her about the date prior to the visit, and she took it super maturely, definitely impressive. Was a blast to have her out here and introduce her to some of my friends (The Greek, K-Dawg, N-Kelly, etc.).
Couple of decent anecdotes from that visit. I was originally going to pick her up from the airport, but her flight somehow arrives early, and she ends up just hopping in a cab to my apartment. Feel a little bad about that since I want to make her feel special like she did for me in Paris, but it’s an early-morning flight, and all things considered, I count myself lucky to be up at all by the time she lands.
It takes her all of five minutes to decide that The Greek + I’s apartment is uninhabitable by her standards. By my standards the place is quite clean, but the smell is a little unpleasant (Greek’s athlete’s foot plus the fact some of our toilet paper is ending up in a bin in the bathroom as opposed to being flushed), and she is reallly not a fan of the toilet + shower wombo combo.
She ends up booking a place nearby for 3 nights at 30 Euros a night, and I help her carry her suitcase up the stairs to get her settled in. She has gotten in on a Wednesday and will be bouncing Saturday to make a friend’s bday party back in Paris. Crazy how much jet-setting you can do in Europe with flights being cheap as hell.
I end up staying over at her place the next 3 nights, which is fairly cozy and romantic, and we do a combination of some cooking (well, I do the cooking, and she eats; way more fun cooking for more than 1, and she loves what I throw together, so it works out great) and eating out at a few resto’s.
Couple of small excursions. She does a walking tour that I skip, because I’m obviously an expert on the city already after being here a week and a half, and we end up visiting an underground nuclear bunker (Bunkart) which has been converted into an exhibit detailing the early military history, communist era, and subsequent dictatorship. I enjoy it a lot more than I thought I would (fuck, I really am getting old and cultured) and am grateful to have a lady around to drag me out to some of the stuff I might not actually go do by myself.
All in all we have a blast, with only a few hiccups. We meet up for some early drinks one night with K-dawg, Bo-bo, and N-Kelly (burly buddy of K-dawg, pure Albanian legend who apparently works for the UN or something). Night is going great, but at some point, C’s mood completely shifts; she goes from being full of energy to super tired and a little down. It’s not entirely unexpected though, or the first time it’s happened so far, and we have gotten pretty decent at handling it. She offers to head back to the apt solo and let me spend some time with my friends, but she’s only here for 3 days and she’s obviously my main priority for the night. So I walk her back and we end up having a lovely evening.
C is also expressing a lot of interest in picking up chess, which I absolutely fucking love. We spend a nice afternoon in the sun at a cafe, chess board out, and play a few slow games. She’s insistent that I don’t take it easy on her, so I oblige her and kick her ass a few times, but we go over each game and she shows a noticeable improvement. Love to see where this is heading. Queen’s Gambit arc? Definitely a smartie-pants, though I can foresee some issues due to her lack of pattern / spacial awareness (not unlike my mom, who cannot for the life of her figure out how to make a tile in Blokus fit onto the board, despite being quite intelligent herself), some occasional memory issues, and a fierce stubbornness in refusing to take my advice as infallible. Look forward to reporting more on the C chess arc.
For our last night, I make a bit of a blunder. Take her out to a seafood restaurant, but she’s stated she isn’t that hungry, and when she says that, she fuckin’ means it. On top of that, I order a bottle of white wine right at the restaurant counter, forgetting that she doesn’t really drink wine at all (a French woman, that doesn’t drink wine, what a fuckin’ world we live in!).
I’ve already paid up front and everything (it’s a combo market / restaurant, so I made my selections in advance), and even though I let them know she doesn’t eat a lot of seafood (I order a small seafood platter with mostly fish dishes, which she does eat), I don’t think she enjoys any of the food that comes out at all (other than the bread or salad).
I also have to scramble to downgrade the bottle of wine I paid for to a 500ml carafe and a bottle of water for C. C is pretty insistent that I only have a single glass, but I let her know that I’m grabbing dinner for both of us and I’ll be having 2/4 glasses of wine that I’ve already paid for, with my seafood, thank ya very much. I’m pretty matter of fact about it, and not overly blunt, but she has this idea in her head that I’m an alcoholic and is worried about me… I notice a couple of tears trickling out of her eyes, and end up popping around to her side of the table to console her. I agree not to drink the whole thing, and we take the remaining wine in a to-go bottle. Fackin eh boys.
Restaurant fiasco aside, it’s our last night, and it doesn’t take long for her mood to bounce back. We amble back to the apartment pretty amicably, have a fantastic last night together… and then we’re up in the morning bright and early Saturday. I What’s App my favorite cab driver, William, and I drop her off at the airport. Hack a dart with William on the drive back (he appears in another story shortly) and take the moment to reflect on the trip.
It was super nice, and we have some plans to potentially link up in Italy the following week for a wedding… but as always, we’ll have to see how it pans out.
Side Note: I’m going to lean a bit more on random nicknames. Particularly the women, and then some of the professional dudes I suspect I may get up to some shenanigans with. Pretty easy to figure out if ya know ’em, but figure adding a touch of privacy can’t hurt.
Side Note 2: I’ll take some time in this post to lay down the scenery and characters for adventures. Next few posts will be a bit more sped up pace-wise, for the impatient readers out there.
Plane touches down in Tirana, Albania, and all of a sudden I can just feel the excitement bubbling up inside me. Paris was nice enough, and it was fantastic catching up with old friends (+C!), but it didn’t feel particularly foreign. Baguette croissant steak frites, merci beaucoup, one Frenchieland to another. Really enjoyed the chess scene, but it was not much of an adventure, really.
In contrast, even disembarking the plane in Tirana is an adventure. Should be thankful the plane even made it, fuckin’ Wiz Air. Never again. Staircase wheeled in next to the plane, feet touching the tarmac, I’m instantly met with a magnificent view of some of the mountains opposite the terminal. They aren’t the Rocky Mountains, but they’re impressive enough, especially when you’re coming from Montreal and “Mont” Tremblant (note to the Frenchies: it’s a fucking hill). Mist shrouds the lush green mountaintops, and it imparts an instant feeling of awe. It’s nature, it’s rugged, it’s foreign, and most importantly, it’s something new.
From the tarmac we form two groups to take busses across the tarmac to the terminal. Canadian passport is clutch yet again; at this point I’m pretty sure I could just hop around Europe indefinitely, with a smile on my face, and no country would really care. They don’t seem particularly tight on border security in Europe so far.
Collect my baggage (which I had to check due to Wiz’s obnoxious size requirements), stroll out of the terminal and arrive in a beat up looking parking lot. Taxis are rolling in and out attempting to fish in passengers, and I’m sure I would make for a good tourist target, but yet again, old friendships are coming in huge; K-dawg is at work, but his wife Bobo swings by the airport and picks me up.
It’s been 10 or 12 years since I’ve seen either of the Albanian couple. K-dawg is a good Albanian buddy of mine from back in the McGill days, and was a big part of the friend group I had with S and Vidy. Vidy, K-dawg and I shared a few comp sci classes, and the three of us would often procrastinate and then work on assignments on the last day “together”. Together in quotations, cause more often than not, I’d end up figuring shit out and the boys would copy me, feeding me beers and poutine to keep me going, but it was a lot more fun than suffering solo in the Trottier lab, and we’d often break up the work to fire up a game of FIFA or two.
Bobo pulls up in their humble van (I’m pretty sure it was a Range Rover), accompanied by her friend Iris. Both just have big beaming smiles on their faces, and it’s actually crazy to me how happy Bobo is to see me. It’s literally been 14 years, and once again it feels like it was just yesterday we were playing beer pong and cramming for finals together.
Funnily enough, it was only a few days ago that the thought occurred to me that Bobo might not actually have gone to McGill with the rest of us. She was a fairly permanent fixture at K-dawg’s place, K-dawg’s mysterious model-esque / fashionista gf from Albania, and I never even thought to question it… but it turns out she was just visiting so often she was part of the crew.
Bobo’s English certainly hasn’t improved that much since we’ve last seen each other, but it hasn’t gotten much worse either, and we have a pleasant conversation catching up while stuck in some awful traffic. K-dawg’s father has sadly passed away recently, which I can empathize a lot with, and he’s been busy as hell putting in the work required to shore things up at the company that’s been passed down to him, and preserve his father’s legacy. Not a lot of time to grieve properly after such a tremendous loss, but not only has he stepped up to take care of business, he’s also managed to find the time and resources to welcome me properly, even though it was completely unnecessary. Lot of respect due for that, the man’s an absolute stud.
Bobo hasn’t really aged a day since I’ve last seen her, and she’s pretty easy on the eyes. Iris isn’t exactly tough to look at either, dark hair, big, expressive eyes, and 100% happily married with a kid… but there are smiles all around as the MILF Mobile (couldn’t resist, sorry K!) slowly crawls down roads that were clearly built a century or two ago for carts and horses, and haven’t been adapted properly since. My understanding is that cars in Tirana are a bit of a status symbol; they sure as fuck aren’t useful in the downtown core, where you can get around just as fast by walking and twice as fast via bike.
Bobo’s working some sort of government job, while Iris is putting in hours at her mom’s dental clinic. We swap some info for me to get a cheap teeth clean at a later date, and we finally roll up to the apartment building where I’ll be staying with yet another uni buddy, The Greek.
The Greek’s a smarty-pants ML developer, and a long time poker buddy from back in the McGill days. Always has something interesting to say, always has a smug grin on his face, possibly slightly touched by the ’tism, but in a fun, energetic, borderline sociopathic way; definitely a character, and happens to be the main catalyst of this whole trip. He’d originally jokingly invited me to help him weed an olive garden out at his place in Greece, and amidst the Behaviour layoffs / L breakup and in full life tilt, I told him I’d 100% come as a full yolo. Greece was the original plan, but he decided last minute it’d be too boring, and that we should pivot to Albania. Was all for it since I’d get to catch up with K + B as well, and the rest is history.
Anyways, MILF-Mobile pulls up to the apartment where The Greek + his buddy Drizzy are waiting for us. I drop my bags off quickly, and they pile into the van with us to go grab a bite for lunch. More traffic ensures, so we get a scenic tour through city center, towards Blokku.
I don’t know fuck all about Tirana yet, but we pass by the residence of the last dictator, across the bridge to the south, and land in fancy-pants land. Blokku is the happening district where the more affluent locals and tourists go to wine, dine, and 69. Clubs, bars, and the pricier restaurants. Not sure how much time I’ll be spending here as a starving streamer, but it’s nice enough.
Sit down at one resto while Bobo parks the car. Iris bails, she has a few things to wrap up at work, but I get a chance to catch up with The Greek + D a bit while we wait for Bobo to get back. We order a couple beers on the terrace and shoot the shit; Drizzy is an Albania software dev who’s been here quite some time now, and The Greek is in the middle of winding down his role in an ML startup he got into a few years past the seed funding stage. Both are looking forward to tearing up Albania with me, even though it’s going to be a working trip for both The Greek and I.
Bobo returns, her + Drizzy order several dishes (as the Albanian hosts) tapas style for the group, and we get our munch on. Couple of surprise visitors in K’s (B’s?) mom with K+B’s son, M, stroller bound but full of energy, and K-dawg himself manages to peel away from the office long enough to drop by for a quick bite + a hello.
Man it’s good to see the guy. Fourteen years, almost half a lifetime ago, it’s been way too fuckin’ long. Vidy and I haven’t aged quite as much visibly, but perhaps it’s cause we’ve just refused to grow up. K has taken a lot more responsibility onto himself, and it shows. He’s dressed sharp and professionally; I suspect Bobo may have played a role in his current attire. All functional degenerates need a good woman in their lives, myself included. His hair’s starting to gray just the slightest at the edges; will definitely tease him about this in the future.
But for now it’s a warm embrace, some chit-chat. I fill him in on the Paris saga, we bounce some ideas for plans back and forth, and he sends me a list of 40 locations to visit in Tirana that I will probably not consult (it’s just a debilitating number of dots, on a map in a city, that inexplicably doesn’t have door numbers. Seriously. No fucking door numbers in Albania, no real addresses, finding anything is impossible in this city. That’s one way to shut Uber out of a city, chalk one up for the cabbies!). The chat is short, but solid, interrupted only by the inexplicably large amount of extremely attractive women passing by our table on the terrace.
I need to drive this point home; pretty much 50% of the women walking past us are legitimate head turners. I thought we were spoiled for choice in Montreal, but Tirana is looking like a step above so far. I’d say there must be something in the water, but most people don’t drink the tap-water here, so who knows what it is. My thoughts are still a little bit on C, but given that she’s currently opting for a friendship of sorts, I figure I’m not hurting anyone by taking a gander or two at the local talent.
K has to bounce back to work, and B strolls M home, while Drizzy also parts ways with us. The Greek + I opt to stretch our legs and walk back to our apartment (on the north side of the main city square) from Blokku. By SHEEER COINCIDENCE, our path takes us past the Grand Casino, one of 3 large casinos in the Tirana downtown core. The Greek and I have an extensive poker history, and that goes hand in hand with an affinity for gambling. There’s a zero percent chance we pass this opportunity by, so we decide to make a little pitstop.
Exterior of the casino isn’t as flashy as some of the five-stars you can find on the Vegas strip, but it’s glitzy enough. Someone in marketing somewhere a long time ago decided that all casino’s should look the same. Bright neon lights on the outside to attract all the moths to the flame, clean and yet greasy interior, amplified by the character flaws of all the patrons. Excitement, greed, desperation, and sweat, despite the perfectly functioning air conditioning.
We walk through the metal detector at the bottom of the stairs without issue, but there’s a hiccup. Despite the fact I’m old as fuck, they still require ID for every player, and they aren’t willing to accept any of my foreign IDs; my passport is about a fifteen minute walk away back in the apartment. I’m willing to make the trip back, but The Greek is thirsty for some action, and we end up getting me a guest pass, which means I can accompany him, but am not actually allowed to gamble myself. Pretty fuckin’ gay.
I negotiate a deal with The Greek to chop up his win/loss, and we make our way to the roulette table, his game of choice. It’s daytime and most of the seats are occupied by patrons similar to what you’d find in NA… bunch of crusty old bastards chilling and gambling the day away. Only noticeable difference is you can hack darts at the table, gotta love Europe for that.
The Greek is only punting around 10 Euro’s a spin but he hits a decent win-streak, both on the inside, and on the outside. It’s here that I learn my first Albanian words; action is closed with the ball spinning as the dealer declares, “Scama Basta!”. The English equivalent is “No More Bets”, which I’ve heard plenty of times over my casino forays in the past. Figures I’d learn my first Albanian words in a fuckin’ casino.
I’m chilling sipping a drink content that my money’s in good hands. After about twenty mins with no further progress on the ole bankroll, I ask The Greek when we should pull out / if we should play some blackjack, and a kind of blank look comes over his face; “us”? Ah ok, greasy bastard. Apparently we’re only chopping if we’re losing.
It’s been a long journey so far with an early wakeup, and I’m a little bit cranky at this point; it’s not a significant sum of money, buddy is up maybe 100 Euros… but I’m not going to hang out in a casino if I’m not in on the action. Make this point / say that I’m going to head back to the apartment, and The Greek decides that we can play a little blackjack. He’ll play 2 hands, and play 1 hand for me based on my decisions.
We pop over to the blackjack table, and I’m in for a very chill 50 Euros. Min Bet is 10. As usual, my luck’s fucking terrible. I literally lose all five hands in a row (something like a 1/30 chance) and with the Greek up another 10 or 20, that’s fuckin it for me. Classic. We head to the cage, cash him out, and pop back to the apartment. SCAMA BASTA! What a fuckin’ scam indeed. Fuck the casino, and fuck The Greek.
The apartment itself is a pretty decent setup. We ended up paying about 700 CAD each for the month, which isn’t really a discount compared to my Montreal crib. Shopping around in the month afterwards, I realize we probably could have done better, but I have no real complaints.
We have 2 bedrooms, each with their own private balcony, a full kitchen, washing machine, and most importantly, fast wifi. The one thing I notice is a fairly unpleasant odor; ok, a fucking rank odor. Turns out The Greek is currently treating Athlete’s foot, and it stinks to holy hell. Window’s are going to be open for the majority of this month. Probably doesn’t help that The Greek also informs me that protocol here is to bin, rather than flush toilet paper. Kinda fucking disgusting; I’d find out later that this is not simply not the case unless explicitly stated.
The only other quirk of the place, is that a lot of the apartments in Tirana combine the shower with the rest of the bathroom. The shower is literally just a shower-head in the bathroom, and there’s a drain on the floor right in the middle of it. A little bit weird, but until this point in my life I’ve never been able to take a shit and a shower at the same time… you better believe that at some point, I gave it a shot. Aqua-dump for the boys! Ok, but it was really a bucket list thing that had to be crossed off.
Next day or so is fairly uneventful. I’m grinding away at the stream dream, catch a dinner and drinks with Kristi, while The Greek hits up board games with Drizzy’s expat friend group, and things are fairly amicable around the apartment. The Greek + I do enjoy small chirps and taking pot shots at each other, and he has a bit of a habit similar to my latest Montreal roomie, of buying absolutely nothing for the house, and then asking to “borrow” beers, which is a bit annoying considering one of us is making 200k a year and one of us doesn’t have a fuckin’ job, but we set up plans together for a proper Wednesday night.
There’s an expat bar, Juliette, in the Blloku neighborhood, where the they are hosting a weekly Karaoke night. Bunch of Drizzy’s group will be there, including another character, The Professor. Will have to fill on more details about him as I learn them, the night quickly turns into a blur.
A lot of American songs being cranked out on the Karaoke stage. Drizzy and The Greek sing out Thank You America (no idea if that’s actually the name), trolling the bar a bit; song is a thank you to American’s from Albania for helping to end communism. I get up there and sing a random country banger with an American expat. Make friends with a larger German girl, who’s down to fire up some chess in the park one of these days, and I shoot my shot at a couple of Russian looking blondes and airball completely. Fuck, 0/1 boys.
Minor kerfuffle over drinks; I’ve ordered and paid for a round of mix drinks, which are ridiculously overpriced compared to everything I’ve ever seen, and The Greek is hemming and hawing about reciprocating. I guess one way to accumulate wealth is by being a cheap fuck. Haha I’ll reiterate that he really is a good buddy of mine, just comes with some personality quirks at times, and we can get under each other’s skin with our little jabs.
Night goes on, with some shots (DANGER! DANGER! I really don’t handle them well, and generally abstain, but it was our first big night out) and more drinks added to the mix. We’re properly buckled now, and other than the Russian’s I whiffed on, there really isn’t any Blloku talent for us to flirt with kicking around.
The Greek is really fiending a jaunt to the local strip club, and since C hasn’t really found any sort of commitment to a visit in Tirana yet, I’m not that difficult to convince. We’re joined by Professor + Drizzy, and make our way over to Maria Bonita, right on the main Tirana strip.
Conversation between the 4 of us is flowing pretty well as we walk in, and continue to put away more drinks. Nothing particularly special about the strip club itself, classic stage setup with chairs right up front for the real perverts, and plush booths ringed around the stage in the back for the more normal degens. Seedy customers scattered throughout, and a halfhearted dance going on on the main stage; place seems a bit dead, but it is a Wednesday after all.
The Greek is the first to fall to the talent, accepting a couple of table dances from one of the local entrepreneurs, a ridiculously good looking blonde with a body that just pops and eyes that almost make you forget what she does for a living. Table dances aren’t so much dances, but the girl basically just sitting in your lap and engaging in conversation with you. Ten minutes runs you fifteen Euros, which is a pretty damn good deal and comes with a drink for her.
The rest of us have a bit of a chuckle and keep chatting and drinking while The Greek wraps up his dance refusing to pay for a second. Blondie has absolutely no loyalty, and the second the meter is no longer running she’s off to another table.
A few more drinks and shots later, I get accosted by a dangerously good looking brunette. I decide there’s not much of a point in being at a strip club if you’re not going to engage in a dance or two, and start chatting the Russian up a bit over more drinks. In the back of my head I joke that maybe this can be the start of my Andrew Tate arc; I already have a stream going, all that’s missing are the Eastern European performers.
At some point there’s an interesting duo performance happening on the main stage, and as a group we decide to investigate it a little closer. Russian girl is still on my lap, and it seems like there’s some potential for a Kick Stream collab. I pull her what’s app number, and after another drink, I finally shut off the meter; probably ended up being about 4 dances altogether.
But before she can saunter off to another table, The Greek decides to troll me, and pulls her in for a dance himself. Strippers and Greeks, no loyalty! He does so with a few more chirps and a smirk, and we’re all absolutely tittered at this point. I figure I’m pretty much done for the night, and get up to bounce, but with his parting chirp and something about how all the girls are whores, as I’m walking past him to the door I throw a half assed slap his way, in full sight of the bouncers.
We’re talking a very light cuff, fueled by tiredness, annoyance, and more than a few shots, but pandemonium immediately ensues. There are two bouncers, a short one and a big burly one, and they immediately run over towards me as I’m still continuing to walk to the door. Fuck.
Unbeknownst to me (and completely unintentionally), it turns out I not only got a piece of The Greek, but also the Russian girl on his lap with my parting shot. The burly bouncer is fairly chill, but the short one is screaming at me in Albanian and shoving me from behind towards the door I was walking to anyways. He also gives me a light cuff from behind on the cheek, which I barely feel in my inebriated state, and I say that he hits like a girl, which he luckily does not hear.
The four of us end up on the street in front of the strip club, and while I count myself lucky I didn’t get my ass kicked by the bouncers, The Greek + I are still pretty heated with each other. He’s uttering threats about kicking me out of the apartment and I’m calling him a cheap piece of shit. We say a few more things to each other we don’t mean, and I walk off back to the apartment while he sticks around for a bit with the rest of the guys to decompress a bit.
The stripper texts me a few minutes later to see if I’m ok, and is the first one to mention to me that I actually got a piece of her too. I figure I couldn’t have gotten much of her if she was checking up on me (and to reiterate; it was a really light, open handed cuff, while walking away, at the back/side of The Greek’s head. With her sitting frontside in his lap, I’m really not sure how I could have gotten any of her).
Not a ton of fallout from the whole shitshow, in the end, The Greek came home and crashed. We’d talk things out the next day, I’ve never been one to hold a grudge. Biggest loss of the event was that there’s no way in hell I’d be able to go back to Maria Bonita. Pretty much the only Asian guy in Tirana that I’d seen so far, so it wasn’t exactly going to be hard to recognize me… I had some hopes with the stripper checking up on me that my reputation might escape unscathed, but when I tried to follow up for drinks to discuss the stream, she declined and said she “didn’t want to get hit again”.
Fuck. Great start, 3 days in and the only Asian dude in town is going to be known as a deranged wife beater. You fucking KNOW she’s going to be going around telling the story, and that it’ll get worse with every retelling. Even in the expat group, I heard that a few days later, The Professor was saying I got lifted up, carried out, and thrown on the ground by the bouncers, like a cartoon character. These types of urban legends have a habit of growing out of proportion, and this is quite possibly the worst type of tale to be a part of. Definitely going to have to lay low for a while.
But to be completely honest. As awful as I feel that the Russian woman was collateral damage (I want to reiterate I 0% condone any violence towards the fairer sex), sometimes you have to set the tone a bit. The drinks were flowing, which are not an excuse, but The Greek was getting way out of line, the whole fuckin’ night (and doing so gleefully, in full belief there would be no repercussions). Put me in that same spot, and I’d do it again… shit, if I could do it again, I’d probably try to slap him harder, just make sure to aim better.
Haha shit, the kid really has a talent for getting under my skin. There’s a certain point when you’re shithoused and someone is running their mouth at you where the time for words is over. I think fighting is stupid, but maybe it’s a hockey culture thing, sometimes feels like simplest way to handle things is to take it outside, chuck a few bombs at each other, and then go out for some beers afterwards as friends again. Just maybe not the wisest to do so in a foreign country.
Ok we’re finally starting to catch up. No spoilers but has been a pretty busy week, with some big wins, and a couple of annoying things to handle. Much more momentum moving forward now that I don’t have to go back and get all the Mexico stuff in order or pop off about corporate culture, but we’ll wrap up Paris in wholesome fashion and I look forward to publishing some insane Albania material shortly.
(editor’s note: gonna force myself to stop editing so much, and just shit out some words like Steven King; dragging this out like I’m writing Game of Thrones. Welcome to my stream of consciousness)
Paris (Day 2):
So we’re officially the Blitz Society champ. Which is basically France champ in my head, come at me MVL, I’ll be waiting for you. We also are trying to figure out the C situation, and to top it off, some very fun, close, McGill dudes are coming into town over the next couple days. Vidy arrives today from Berlin, and he’s made a reference to our friend Imge also being around. We also have loose cannon Shaon, who I dicked around with well into the twilight of my McGill days, hopping in a couple days later.
But eyes on the prize! Pour yourself a glass of wine and sip with me as I regale ya with tales of lost love and romance. I don’t want to get into details that are too personal out of respect, but C and I have some stuff to talk about at this point in the story. What I can say, is that when we kicked off our relationship, she was the sweetest thing to ever exist, and definitely saved me from the worst heartbreak of my life in L.
In addition to being sweet as hell, C’s also sharp as nails, funny, and really fun to be around most of the time. The breakup in Montreal, with her headed back to Paris was amicable, a bit tragic, but planned for by both parties and foreseeable. Less foreseeable was that it would be almost two years before we’d be in contact again (through no fault of my own), but to keep things short, it weighed on me a lot. I’ve reflected many times on whether or not I could have done things differently or been a more perceptive boyfriend, and had an overwhelming urge to just follow up and make sure she was doing well. Spoiler: she is, and I couldn’t be happier about it. I had had a decent amount of excitement at the prospect of spending some time in Paris with her and getting to catch up, and that’s kind of where we kick this off.
So here I am in Paris, day two of a day six layover before the “true” midlife crisis journey to Tirana begins, and I’m the Paris Chess France Chess Champ of the Chess World. Let’s go! Dot those ‘i’s and cross those ‘t’s, we’re going to figure it all out.
Hostel bar is still dead in the late morning. Vidy has arrived late last night, but after learning from my first Mexico trip about how ya should let buddies figure out things on their own pace (BIG DEEZY taught me that), I leave Vidy alone for a bit to settle in, and Camille and I coordinate plans to cross the stupid Eiffel Tower off my Paris list.
We meet halfway, around the Seine via metro. Jesus, just call it the St. Laurent and Paris can be a Montreal clone. Link at a coffeeshop, grab a pastry, I figure out the stupid Velib app finally (theres a button at the TOP LEFT for any potential Paris visitors, that lets you input profile information, and it’s just that easy, maybe I was drunk the previous night. I did pregame for a chess tourney, sue me!), and we go for a really enjoyable bike ride.
I think that’s how I know I’m old as fuck. My parents used to love going for family bike rides back in Calgary. Chinatown dimsum, PEI park, etc, def the stuff you enjoy more as an adult, and now I guess I’m one of them, fuck. Paris bike ride was great, breeze flowing through your hair, some cool monuments to look at, watching the occasionally mega-hippy Paris lad with dreadlocks try to roller skate down the not-so-smooth Paris bike paths and secretly hoping he’d eat shit.
Now I’m out here admiring the architecture. Some of the statues are pretty cool, and I’m in serious danger of becoming cultured. But we have a mission in mind; skip all the garbage and get to that iron monstrosity that is the Eiffel tower. And we do.
Make decent time, prob about a fifteen to twenty minute bike ride. Notable about Paris: compared to Montreal Island the actual cityscape is massive. I’d loosely guess close to twice the size. I’m guessing through drunk Bixi minutes compared to sober Velib one’s, but I can’t be that far off.
We park the bikes and amble off, small detour where C points out her grandma’s house, and here we are. Well, I mean, I guess it’s a tower. Hundreds, or thousands, of tourists, just fucking everywhere, queued up in this insane line for the tower. This would be a recurring theme for the major Paris tourist attractions; call it French Tulum, it’s overrun by idiots, and nobody’s got time for this.
We check at the ticket booth, and it turns out due to the capacity, we can each pay 20 EUROs for a ticket, to walk the stairs, to go halfway up the tower. Fuck that. If C works out we’ll go when I’m back in Paris, and we’ll go early; I’m not a halfway kinda guy. All-in to the top, or fuck off.
So we opt out of the tourist cesspool, and I get a hold of Vidy, who’s staying at Imge’s nearby. Sit down at a nearby cafe to wait for him, but because C doesn’t want to order a drink (I’m keen for some 1pm cocktails), the stuck up waiter in his stupid summer tuxedo jorts (I have no idea how to describe his outfit, but it’s dumb, like him) clears us off. Like for fuck’s sake bud, I’d order 2 drinks and she can have a sparkling mineral water. But C is a bit wary (cheap) when it comes to tourist traps and probably saves me 30 Euros.
Vidy walks in a bit late while we are sitting on a bench, rolling up with a girl who definitely does NOT look like the Imge that I remembered from school. It’s been like 12 years (though I’m reminded that I saw them once, briefly, for a couple hours in the interim, while smashed), but the girl definitely does not look dark skinned like a Turkish woman. Embrace Vidy warmly, he’s put in the effort to catch me and fam over the years, beautiful brown-skinned bastard who just floats effortlessly through social circles. Probably has more friends than Deanna and I combined, which is insane, he’s just an absolute legend who it’s impossible not to fall in love with the second you catch his easy-going vibe.
“Imge” is a bit more problematic. But in my head, that’s who he’s with. So I greet her with a hug and a “hello Imge”. Gamble does not pay off; it turns out its his gf V who I’ve apparently met once three years ago or something. I was probably smashed because I have zero recollection, but to be fair, I’m pretty shit with names in general. Oops.
Anyways, Vidy and V are here on a little couples getaway that coincides with my trip perfectly. Almost too perfectly. Vidy’s a stalker, ya heard it here first. But to be fair, hopping around Europe is way too easy and cheap. I’d be travelling all the time if we weren’t getting pegged by carrier oligopolies across Canada.
We agree to take a double-date (HOPEFUL) stroll down the Seine. Stop for some pastries, and C refuses to buy water at the pastry shop, but literally holds up a line for 30s guzzling water out of a public fountain, making me laugh my ass off. The day is glorious. It really evokes memories of simpler times back in Montreal, years and years ago.
V+V inform us that they’ve booked a burlesque show for the next day, and C + I are super down. I’m all about entertainment; I’ll chat your ear off, but after a few hours I need that sweet sweet mental stimulus or something to do; activities for life!
Walk is good, Vidy and I catching up, the ladies bonding fairly quickly, and I’m not too perturbed by the fact we are walking past all the same stuff we just biked past. C points out landmarks and gives us some details while doing her best tour guide impression. Couple years ago, I’d say, “some statues, some buildings, fuckin’ who cares, things built by man are boring for the most part”.
I mean I think I’d lose my mind at The Great Pyramids, and The Coliseum in Rome (watched Gladiator too many times drunk with Jeff over the years), but other than that, I kinda just always saw buildings as a testament to a bunch of pretentious architects going full Roark, who never understood how physics works or basic efficiency. But I think I’m starting to come around and understand that of course they get the rules; it’s only once you have them mastered that you can get away with breaking them. It’s art, duh. I’d still prefer to watch a lion chase a gazelle, but the appreciation for culture is inexorably starting to creep in on me. Gross.
So we walk through, admire the scenery. Vidy and I crack immature jokes like we are 18 year old’s back in McGill and it’s fabulous. Pass by the “boats” docked on the Seine where the burlesque show will take place the next day, joke about how bad we all need to take a piss, cut up through the city center. It’s a national holiday for France (one of their fifteen labor day equivalents, where it’s illegal to work, might have to move here but I’d prob die of lung cancer), and we pass by a perfume shop that’s having a small party.
Oh, I forgot to mention, we tried to take a pee at a very fancy hotel and got declined based on dress code, we stopped for a drink or two on the way, and we scooped my Uni / poker buddy Aniel, who’s Albanian but lives in Paris now. Really nice guy, we didn’t get to catch up as long as I’d like, but he was very game to be part of the crew and catch up with me, he’d departed Mtl maybe a year prior and is just an all around good dude.
So the perfume shop has free lemonade and water. C’s fucking all over it, first into the shop, just swigging away like she owns the place. I’m a bit more hesitant; we’re thirsty, but I’m not taking free shit unless I’m buying something in the store, and I’m not buying perfume. I mean no one is, but the scents are nice and the people are friendly. Feels to me like we’re crashing a family gathering, but my sentiment’s not entirely shared by the group. Live DJ set playing some electronic chill music, nice vibe, but we mosey on, stop by a by-the-roll dim-sum shop, and then try to plan our night.
We decide to hit the top of the mountain for a drink and a view of the city, and then send some dinner plans, but hiccup; C again wants to bail and shower after a long day. Fuckin’ hell. I’m not overly disturbed but I do have a lot I wanna say to her, and after last night, not sure if I’ll get the chance tonight either if she’s tired after the shower . But it’s sunny, I’m in Paris, I’m with really good friends I haven’t seen in forever, and we’re gonna make a night outta it.
We take a million stairs and climb a thousand hills, and the 4 of us (Vidy, V, Ani, myself) make it to the top. Just fucking packed with tourists too, but we find a patch of grass to sip some beers, and take in the incredible view. Fuck I’m old.
I mean but what a view. You can see the entire city. Makes sense there’s infinite tourists clogging the place, you get an idea of just how vast and deep Paris is. You don’t get that in NA, there’s something about the richness of the history here, grandparents grandparents grandparents ancient ancestors just duking it out on the soil for this patch of land. Cities rising in abundance, stone piled onto stone, and it just laying here, and growing, for about a dozen centuries. My favorite building is the ugly pristine black one that stands out like a sore thumb, an iconic New York hedge fund looking building amidst the caveman polished stone, a big fuck you to the rest of the cityscape… but I’ve always been a bit of a contrarian, probably my mom’s genes. If everyone hates a building, I will love it.
Sun is setting, on a day that’s been pretty much perfect, I talk a bit more with V + V + A about the C situation, about how much I love them, about how I should have come to Europe years ago to see some of my best friends in the world. Something I’m starting to realize, that’s so obvious… the ones who reciprocate the effort, the one’s where it’s effortless because it’s just so natural and obvious that you should be hanging… are really the ones who mean everything. Fuckin’ love these guys.
Our dinner plans are scuffed due to an extremely long line, A takes his departure, but the rest of us find a suitable replacement and C manages to link back up with us for some asparagus and ice cream. She fuckin’ loves ice cream, to the point where it just makes me happy watching her munch away at it. Big sweet tooth. To be fair, she’s not wrong, at this resto, it was probably the best ice cream I’ve ever had in my life.
What I’m less impressed with is the “Filet Mignon”. I’ve had an idea floating around in my head, of sitting in a cafe, smoking, drinking a wine, and munching some Steak Frites since I got here… and I kinda just skimmed the menu before pulling the trigger on a suspiciously cheap filet mignon thinking I could fulfill the dream. It’s fucking pork. Come on now, these guys make a killing scamming NA tourists. No juicy thick steak wrapped in bacon, it’s a bunch of pieces of pork cut into medallions, some tourist trap bullshit. I should have heard alarm bells ringing when I asked for medium-rare and he said I couldn’t choose how they cook it (I figured it was a proud French chef sort of deal), but what a fucking scam.
But fuck it. C is loving life with the ice cream, the rest of us are just having one of those close friend chats where you realize you’ve spent half your life away from the people that really matter, and the evening is incredible. We’re outside, the bill is fine, and life is good. We lock in evening plans for the show the next night, and I offer to walk C home; part ways with V+V and then it’s just C and I.
She’s not much of a drinker, and it really could have just been a walk home. But the best thing about getting older is how you start learning how to prioritize your own feelings and stop tippy toeing around bullshit; live through mistakes, not regret. I tell her I want to have a chat and we make a pitstop halfway on a terrace towards her home. Order a mojito and she grabs a water; this is going to be thematic of the trip.
I think from my side, I sorta just numbed myself a bit with regards to our whole prior dating experience. Still a little heart broken, you find a nice one, but you know it’s going to end at a set date, and it’s hard not to automatically check out, at least a little. But then in spite of the walls you’ve thrown up, she starts to creep in… and then as it’s building up, boom, just like that, she’s gone. Maybe forever. A bit jarring really. Kinda ironic that in life it’s often a lot easier to appreciate a good thing once it’s gone (not to say that I didn’t while it was happening). Maybe should work on appreciating the present more, but I think I’ve been getting better at that. Though I do have a habit of looking back at all my memories, particularly of people, with rose tinted goggles.
We run through it all, my thoughts, my feelings.. we catch up properly, and there are some emotions, but it’s nice. Interrupted for about fifteen mins by an old classmate of hers who pops by, and half the conversation swaps to French in the middle of the deepest part (fuck sakes haha), but I’m ok with it. Really nice dude, just funny timing.
Anyways, I don’t wanna exaggerate or underrepresent the situation with goofy jokes. I think a core point is that, she has some feelings, but doesn’t consider me particularly reliable, and has a bitttt of a problem with my drinking. L did as well. Well, fuck right off! Haha ok I don’t mean that. I mean they have a point, but at the same time, I’ve grown a bunch since dating both of ’em; think I actually have a pretty good handle on it these days.
She’s in good shape, I’m on what could be my last dumb trip of a lifetime, we’re in a good place and are planning to hang out the rest of my Paris jaunt. She’s come out of a breakup a few months prior, and leaning much more towards just being friends. Of course I have some dreams of this being a Paris love story (I really am a bloody romantic), but I’m honestly ok with friends too; it’s just really nice to see a person I care about a lot doing well, and getting to spend a few days catching up.
Anyways, I walk her back to her parents flat in Paris. An absolutely gorgeous flat. Gorgeous enough that I start to jokingly tease her a bit about how she let me cover rent for both of us for the year ish that we lived together (just tease though; have sort of been raised from the old school mentality that the man should provide, and I was working while she was in school. She did cover groceries). Fuck, maybe we should get married!
She gives me the tour, and we chat a bit more. She’s in her bed, and I’m sitting respectfully in a chair away from the bed. We’re chatting a bit more, about the past, about the days we spent apart, about the future. No more pouring the heart out, it’s just a fond, cozy, chat. A look comes into her eyes, a certain kind of look, and she asks me to come sit on the bed with her. Ask if she’s sure given our whole conversation at the bar prior. She’s sure, and I make my way over. We kiss and it’s magical, whole thing just dripping in nostalgia. Passion, regret, reconciliation… just holding and kissing someone you care about deeply. I missed her, a lot, and probably more than I realized; in life, sometimes you have to stuff those feelings deep down in a box to keep putting one forward in front of the other.
Funnily enough, those feelings really did start to resurface about a week before the trip. Just swapping texts, getting excited to see each other again… I remember when I got to the airport a day ahead of my flight, I wasn’t upset about the fact I was a dumbass and didn’t check my ticket properly. I was upset that I was going to get to spend one less day with her.
Additional aside: I didn’t end up meeting her parents the whole trip. Which felt a bit wrong, I definitely would have liked to, but they were out of town for a few days and timing just didn’t work out. Initially I was invited to stay at their place (which I definitely should have accepted), but it felt a little bit weird (improper?) for me to accept in advance, since we were exes and not dating.
Which means that I have to make my way back to the hostel. C’s parents flat was fairly far central / North, and my hostel is all the way back on the southern outskirts of Paris (Gentille). I started walking back, but after about twenty mins, I got a little bit tired of walking and decided to hop on the metro. Should be easy right?
I was only two stops away from my station, and we stop by the first one without a hitch. But instead of stopping at my station, the train proceeds to skip the next three stations. I have no idea what’s happening, and then finally, I figure out that the faded lights on the display for the middle three stops mean, “TRAIN DOESNT STOP HERE”. Cool.
So I get out at the first stop I can. It’s about 2am and now I’m way the fuck south of Paris. Middle of buttfuck nowhere, and to make matters worse, I have about 3% battery on my phone. Getting stuck out on the streets overnight is a serious risk, but luckily, there’s at least one last train headed north, in about twenty mins. So I ride the train all the way back, and get out one stop closer to the one I initially boarded the first one (the 3 stops are skipped overnight or something). My phone dies partway through the walk back, but luckily I have my wits about me and manage to navigate my way back to the hostel. Buy some smokes from a cornerstore (would later find out these are sold illegally), and crash out exhausted after one of the best days I’ve had in recent memory.
Paris (Day 3.)
More kebabs for lunchski. C is busy during the day but we have plans to see the burlesque show later, and I want to give V+V some space to have their own Paris romantic adventure. I’m also fiending for some chess. So after I eat, I head out towards Park Luxembourg.
I also shoot messages to Axel, Sahit, and Mikhail; they’re all around my rating and would def give me some good games. Sahit and Mikhail are busy, and Axel has some lessons to teach, but he will be free later on, and we make plans to link up at Blitz Society around 4 or 5.
I pull up to the park around 2pm, and start sweating a few different boards, trying to figure out if there are any decent players, and if I can weasel my way into the rotation. I initially have these old guys picked out, but then I notice that one player has hung a rook. When his opponent doesn’t take the rook on his next turn, I turn away in high-ELO disgust, and look for stiffer competition.
I do in fact manage to find some. A group of three guys around my age, maybe younger, are rotating in and out. Moves are coming out fast and crisp, the positions and ideas make sense… it’s easy to spot strong players fairly quickly. I strike up a convo with them from the sidelines, and ask if any of them are strong; the Asian lad who is clapping his buddies asks if I have a title. I have to say that I do not; I really need to get back to playing some classical at some point. Maybe I’ll add Kosovo onto my tour; it’s next door to Albania, cheap as hell, and they run some big international chess tourneys. But I do drop my 2500 chess.com rating on the park bros, and it’s enough for them to let me into the rotation.
Asian smacks the dude with a British accent around, and then I’m up against him. He’s also around 2500 on chess.com and is providing some stuff resistance, but he inexplicably hangs a piece early, and I convert fairly easily. Plenty of banter with the boys throughout, and I work my way through the rotation of the other two players without much trouble to come back to Asian lad.
At this point we have a nice group of maybe 5 or 6 voyeurs, checking out the best blitz in the park. But it’s park blitz, not overly serious, and after I drop my next game to the Asian when my attack fizzles, I ask the lads if they want a beer. I get a few yesses, and spend my time in the rotation running out to the store to grab a six pack.
Closest store is about two blocks away, but unfortunately it’s more of a wine store, and only has craft beers. Six pack runs me 24 Euros. With the Canadian dollar in the shitter, this is a big ouch. But it’s all they have and I’m not gonna run around, so I grab em and bring them back to my new friends. We spend an hour or two swapping stories and putting some games of varying skill up on the board, and it’s a great time.
I invite them to Blitz Society, but they all have plans that night. British lad is playing a tournament in the south somewhere, and thanks us all for the warmup before departing. We wish him luck against the army of underrated kids he’s going to have to take on (RIP his ELO), and I part ways from the group myself to meet Axel at the chess club.
We play a few games, I buy him a beer on my gift card (no idea how I’m going to spend it all), and we shoot the shit while swapping games back and forth. He’s a chess coach, super passionate about chess, and just a really cool guy in general. I invite him out to the show, but he has plans to hit the club later on; under normal circumstances I’d probably join him, but I’ve got a burgeoning romance with C to explore, and this will be the calm leg of my trip.
Meet up with C near the Seine, we grab ice cream, and then mosey our way over riverside. The burlesque show opens at 9pm, and it’s taking place on a boat. We are expecting to see V+V roll up any minute, but they are on European time and running late, so we pile into the boat with all the other viewers.
There’s a stage in the bottom deck of the boat. A lot of the middle rows are full, but the front row is very suspiciously sparse / empty. C grabs my hand and drags me right up front and center; I’m pretty convinced there’s a reason why they are empty and protest a bit, but in the end we sit down. Suspect C may have a bit of voyeur in her haha.
The boat is rocking a little in the weather, it’s dark, and it’s a little hot and humid inside. I’m sure at least a couple people got seasick. But my sea-legs aren’t bad for a ‘Berta boy, and soon enough the red curtains open up and we have our first act.
There are 8 acts total, with each performed going twice. Starts with some very classical cabaret with ferns type shit, we hit actress #2 who is rocking some insane assets (C said she’d never seen breasts that big before), and then for act 3, we have an amazing gay male sailor performance, pipe and all. Mime meets Popeye?
Lots of laughs, raucous applause, plenty of amusement and spectacle throughout. The coolest act of the night is insane though, definitely cirque du soleil quality. The stage is pitch black, and a woman comes out in almost no clothing, but she’s nothing more than a silhouette in the darkness.
In sync with the music, she twists around, the faintest outline of human form. Opens a couple of cans on the floor in front of her, and a bright, white, glow in the dark paint shines from both. Dips two paintbrushes into the paint, which you can only see once the paint starts coating them, and begins to apply the paint to her body.
Gasps in the crowd and more applause follow, she’s painting slowly, with both hands, symmetrically. Dramatic splotches followed by long, slow, thin strokes, it’s a testament to art and the human form. An outline around her body soon appears, and soon after she’s started on the contours on the interior of her body; breasts, thighs, belly. The music has been soothing, melodic, and peaceful as she finishes the first phase.
The calm is shattered as the music takes a more violent, dark turn. Now instead of an appreciation of her body, it’s an artistic rejection of it. Insecurity, loathing of the self, in the face of society’s unrealistic expectations for the female form. She’s angrily splattering wads of paint over herself, crossing out the lines she’s drawn, her once smooth and precise movements giving way to spastic fits of rage and chaos.
I can’t precisely say why it spoke to me so much, but it was insanely powerful, and beautiful. She ends the performance on her knees, head bowed, destroyed by her insecurities, paint fuckin’ everywhere, and the small room is filled with deafening applause. Extremely emotional performance, I think V+V were both in tears. I was close. Best 20 Euro’s I’ve ever spent on a show. Cultured Brando indeed.
We hang out with V + V and their one friend they brought along for a quick drink afterwards, but everyone is pretty bagged. C has seen my sad hostel setup, and probably at least partially out of pity, has said that I can crash at her place for the next two nights. It’s an offer that I’m happy to accept, and we hang out a bit more before calling it a night.
Ok, now I’m caught up on the first round of COVID Mexico, and I can finally start weaving the words together on my current adventures. I’m excited to share and a little bit wine drunk, so buckle in.
Paris. How did I end up there? To be completely honest, I’m doing this whole Europe thing on a shoestring budget. Call it a midlife crisis, after I quit Ubisoft (after working fucking seven years there), I got a job as a video game dev at Behaviour Interactive.
(If you wanna skip to Paris, hop down this post to the Paris – Day 1 Section; this turned into a bit of a ramble about work).
I did a year and a half there on a new IP. As a senior game dev, in Unreal (game engine), that they promised they’d train me in. Hired as a gameplay programmer, and they chucked me into a role as the UI senior dev. So take away all my gameplay experience, put me into a boring fucking job I didn’t apply for making buttons and menus, in an engine I don’t know, and ask the world of me.
But I was on a bit of a high. I had finally said fuck you to Ubisoft, escaped the monotony of five years on Rainbow Six Siege post-launch… I studied for a month for interviews, and got three offers to make about 35% more. You should all quit your jobs, they’re fucking you. They will bleed the years of your life dry, and give you the least they can. Welcome to capitalism.
I worked my ass off at Behaviour to catch up. I worked my ass off like I never have before. I actually fucking tried. And it wasn’t enough. Behaviour is known for exactly one IP, Dead by Daylight. It’s kind of a trash game to be honest, probably could have been cobbled together by four dipshits in their mom’s basement, but it found a niche amongst horror lovers and funded the whole studio.
So not knowing any of this, I took the job there. 7 weeks of vacation, staff kitchen cooking free lunches every day, and a flexible remote schedule, not to mention it was about three blocks from my apartment. Cushy as hell. I had a friend working there in the marketing department, and I was counting on him to introduce me to the cute ladies at the first 5a7. That’s a CINQ A SEPT, or happy hour, for you non Frenchies.
They fired him first. Before our first 5a7 sadly, so no introductions for me. I don’t think the dude is a genius, but he’s not dumb, and to boot, he’s super lovable, friendly, and works his ass off.
At Ubisoft, it was basically impossible to get fired; the only person I ever saw get laid of was a dev tester buddy, and he would regularly show up to work at 11am. Then Pokemon Go came out, and we’d go out on lunch break catching Pokemon… I’d come back to the office, but buddy would sometimes stay out the rest of the work day. Catching Pokemon! I guess he got addicted or something, wouldn’t surprise me if he actually caught them all. It took Ubi about six months of this to finally lay him off.
So my buddy gets shitcanned at my new company without a ton of justification, and that’s the first sign of trouble to me. Because the dude can obv crush a marketing job, it’s Dead by Daylight, everyone already knows the fucking game. Marketing, what marketing? They do collabs with famous horror movies / novels and rake in the cash. MTX, grind those microtransactions baby (oh how far the game dev industry has fallen into corporate bullshit since the glory days of early Blizzard, Westwood Studios, etc…)! Robo-pilot that shit and collect cheques, some corpo politics involved maybe, who fucking knows.
Anyways, I get to the first 5a7 a month in and have made friends already with a few of the devs. I convince half the programming team to come out to a local bar nearby afterwards, and we just get shitfaced. Including the team lead T. Fuck, I was going to tell the Paris story and this whole thing is a preface to it. Sorry not sorry.
So we get really fucking drunk at this local bar I love, Melrose, I get half the dev team wasted. We get some discounts, and everyone loves me for it. Putting the team in teambuilding baby! BUT, I miss the prog Teams call in the morning. I admit it was because I was hungover on death’s door (like a fucking idiot; I’m way too honest sometimes. though to be fair, T was at the bar with us so it’s pretty obvious what happened).
T has it out for me at that point. I mean, it doesn’t help that I’m frantically playing catchup with Unreal; my “training” was an online course they threw at me that I got fucking 2 days to look at before they chucked me in the deep end of the pool. “Please architect an entire feasible UI framework with zero Unreal knowledge, here’s a ten day course we will give you 2 to look at, GO”! I do like a challenge though.
Actually, funny story, my first day at BI was on the entirely wrong project; they didn’t even know what team I was supposed to be on. Instant chemistry with the lead for that project, he seemed like an absolute beauty, but sadly it was not to be.
Long story short BI busted on a game called “Meet Your Maker”. They met their maker, the game completely flopped, and BI missed annual revenue projections across the board by about 70%. Welcome to game dev. Except as a large, non-publicly traded Indie company, that tends to have some consequences.
So they’re just firing people left right and center… in the middle of an acquisition of 3 UK studios, that go through because the paperwork is signed. I’m training some of the UK juniors, and honestly, at least 2 or 3 of them probably deserved to get shit canned. I have no idea how they got hired in the first place; without being an asshole, objectively, reviewing their code had me thinking they should be flipping burgers at McD’s. We’re talking code that barely compiles, makes no sense, and doesn’t even come remotely close to closing the JIRAs. Those were the first to go, but the rest of the juniors soon followed… really makes me wonder why management wasted my time training them.
Game dev is saturated by kids with a glow in their eyes, happy to think they’ll be making their favorite game of all time, and ok getting paid jack shit for it. My intermediate and junior on the UI team were fucking rock solid programmers with plenty of Unreal experience, absolutely loving it, and making like 60-70% of my salary. Loved working with those guys; they definitely should have been Senior / Intermediate. At a certain point it becomes tough to compete value wise though, when it’s a race to the bottom. The guys could easily be making close to double what they are if they were valued properly; if I was running a company on a slippery slope, I’d be cutting myself first too.
Company struggling, cuts made, and in the end, I got snipped. Third broad round of layoffs, but at least I survived the first 2. T had said that she would have shitcanned me by Xmas (they actually fired my original team lead, who had spent the whole year telling me I was doing great, right before yearly evals), but she saw me working my ass off and decided to keep me around a while longer because of it. Very morale boosting, thanks T! Production schedule for an important milestone was a mess, and I pulled some long hours to make sure that we got everything on the in-game HUD running crispy clean; we pulled off the milestone UI side without a hitch, and I can honestly say I was proud of that.
I’ll say this one thing; all the nights that I was working overtime, T was right fuckin there in the office plugging away with me. Last two at the office every night, for about a month and a half straight. 8pm, 9pm, etc. I have no idea what she was doing; not sure who you can be emailing to make the work done better/harder/faster/stronger while producing nothing (don’t get me started on the management class in general), but she was putting in the hours as well, not asking anyone to do something she wasn’t willing to do, and I respect the fuck out of her for that.
So finally, laid off, as part of a cohort, with a very healthy severance. Might have been the final straw for me with the corporate world / management bloat. I had just tried my ass off at a new job, and failed. With me putting in 100% effort, which is rarer than it should be. Took about a month after that for L to break up with me, and we’ll unpack that nuclear bomb another time, but all together, I’d just had enough, and desperately needed an excuse to shake things up a bit. (I’ll fill in more on the interim period between then and Europe another time.
My friend from Uni / poker buddy D had invited me to come to Greece, but he changed his mind last minute and wanted to send Albania instead. I was initially skeptical, but I have a couple of really good uni friends here, cost of living looked promisingly low, and so I said fucki it, we booked an AirBnb for May, some flights, and my midlife crisis officially began.
Never been to Europe as an adult, but it turns out that with all the Frenchies flying back and forth, the cheapest ticket into Europe from Montreal is through Paris. Had at least one person I wanted to see there, so I decided to fly through Paris and see the Eiffel Tower. Which is how this story actually begins, holy fuck that was a big dump, but in the end we got there.
Paris Day 0:
You guys are going to ask how Day 0 can be a thing. I fucked up big time. I booked a flight, I booked a hostel, I told my Paris ex, C, that I was coming today. I get to the airport, try to enter my flight reservation, and can’t find it in the terminal. I’m trying to figure out what the fuck is going on, I’ve already subletted my place… and it turns out that my flight isn’t until the next day.
Cab back home, drive of shame, down eighty bucks, and remind myself not to be completely retarded.
Paris Day 1:
Ok. So holy shit, after all the hassle, I get on the fucking plane. It takes off, we fly in the air for a few hours, and all of a sudden I’m on the other side of the world.
Well maybe not all of a sudden. It’s an overnight flight, and I was planning to catch some sleep. But there’s a baby on the plane that cries for the first half of the flight, and then in the second half, an old dude two aisles over hits the deck.
Flight attendants chuck all the lights on paging for a doctor; they have oxygen out and a defibrillator on standby. Pretty lucky they didn’t have to use the defib, because I have some serious doubts that the EMT and Doc who answered the call actually knew how this model worked, based on the parts of the convo I could catch. Everyone in the section watching intently like it was a live theater version of Grey’s Anatomy. I’d call em sick fucks, but I have some dark, grumpy, sleep deprived thoughts of my own. If you’re going to die, you could at least die in silence and quickly, so the rest of us can get some fucking shut eye (yep, I’m burnin’ in Hell boys). Obviously didn’t really mean it though.
A little sleep deprived, we reach the other side of the world; except it kinda feels like we never left Montreal. It smells like Oldport. It sounds like the Oldport. It looks like Oldport. I went from a land of Frenchies to another land of Frenchies with proper grammar. Actually, funny aside; I realized that I can in fact speak French through pure osmosis, after living in mtl for 12 years. It’s the Montrealer’s who can’t speak French, tabernac esti, they cram four words at a time into one and make a beautiful language make zero sense. I spoke French in Paris about 80% of the trip and I fucking killed it.
C is at the airport waiting for me. She joked that she couldn’t make it last minute via text, which got lost in translation and made for a confusing arrival, but holy fucking shit, she showed up to play. We’d talked the week leading up, and she said she’d grab me from the airport… and she just looks stunning. Glowing skin, beautiful dress and heels, petite with pretty brown eyes. Oof. She did preface this trip by saying we would be “just friends”. But shows up dressed like that; to be honest, not sure she ever wore makeup or heels around me the entire time we dated. But now that we’re friends… Fackin’ women eh boys?
Brief history, we dated about a year total while she was studying abroad, but it was always with the knowledge she’d return to Paris after, so even though she lived with me, we always knew it’d have an end. Amicable breakup, and it’s the first time we’ve seen each other in over five years.
When you’re landing in a foreign country, the people who welcome you are everything. I didn’t understand that until I felt it myself; she certainly didn’t have to scoop me at the airport, but it was one of the sweetest things I’ve experienced in a long time. She also has an ice coffee and pastry for me for breakfast, which was fantastic; delicate, a little crumbly, touch of chocolate… Frenchies don’t fuck around when it comes to baking.
We figure out train tickets to get back into the city, and we catch up a bit; it’s been five or six years and we can’t possibly get through it all. She has to bail for a bit for a family event, and gets off halfway, but just the fact that she came all the way out to grab me speaks volumes about her. And I suppose us I guess. Fingers crossed!
Anyways, I get to my metro stop. I booked a hostel with a private room thinking it would be like Mexico. It was not, at all. Front desk and the public area is fine, but the rooms are trash. Right on the southside of Paris, Jo and Joe, Gentilly… nothing is gentle about the actual living space.
My “room” consists of a hallway door on the fifth floor, that leads into 4 separate doors to “rooms”. Rooms is in quotes because they are a 2×4 entrance with a bed. It’s a bunkbed, and I have a top bunk, with the lower bunk in the other “room”, and some person crashing directly underneath me, separated in the middle by the build of the bed. No aircon, one light, a very very tiny area to walk into, and a ladder up to the bed. Obviously the bathrooms / showers are communal as well. Still don’t know how nobody walked in on me ass naked, should have brought a soap bar just to complete the prison experience. Might be over hostels for a while.
I don’t have any super concrete plans in Paris. C won’t be free until later that night, and another extremely good friend of mine from McGill, Vidy, isn’t in town until tomorrow (super lucky that our trips overlapped). Obviously I have some ideas about checking out the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, etc, but I’m actually more interested in visiting a chess bar I’ve seen some of the famous streamers frequent, Blitz Society. I’m hoping to be able to play in at least one speed chess tourney and throw down.
The day is nice enough, so I decide to walk it up. Grab a quick bite at one of four shawarma joints just outside the hostel, and kick off what will be a forty or fifty minute walk. I do spend about ten minutes trying to figure out Velib, which is the Paris equivalent of Bixi (public bike rental service), but the app is designed poorly and the actually kiosks with the bikes are extremely confusing. Fuck the bikes, we’re walking boys.
It’s probably about 1pm, and my walk takes me through Luxembourg Park, where I’ve heard there are sometimes blitz games being played. Pass a couple of cool statues, and get a chance to try using one of the public urinals (they are very strange looking, extremely tight spaces where you piss into a waterfall; splash risk seems extreme, but I guess they get the job done).
The park is gigantic, with a couple sets of tennis courts, and I’m not spotting any chess, though there are a very large amount of people of working age that seem to just be loafing around, at 1pm on a Wednesday. I would chirp the work ethic of the French, but maybe they have it figured out better than us NA dogs, and it’s not like I’m working a “real job” right now either.
I do eventually spot a couple of chess games going. But it’s literally only a couple, there are a few old dudes slugging it out at one board, and about twelve youngers guys crowded around a second board. Tempted to ask them for a game, but it’s just way too many people and not enough boards. I watch for a few minutes and ballpark their Elo’s as being a complete waste of time for me anyways, and continue moving on towards Blitz Society.
It doesn’t open up until three, so I end up killing a bit of time drinking a beer on a terrace and smoking a cigarette. I was planning on quitting while out in Europe, but it’s going to be hard; they let you smoke everywhere, and terrace smokes feel damn good.
Blitz Society’s location is a little bit weird, it’s almost this hole in the wall in an alleyway off of one of the main roads, but the interior is quite nice. It sort of has a classy cocktail lounge feel to it, except that every single table has a board and clock set up. There aren’t too many people there yet, since I walk in about ten minutes after it opens, but a few games are going. I check them out briefly but the games don’t look that serious, and I turn my attention to the hostess / waitress. Fairly attractive blonde woman in her early thirties, slender with a warm smile, probably Ukranian or something.
Order a beer (obviously), and ask her what the tournament schedule is this week. It turns out that the only proper blitz tournament is actually happening later tonight (5+2 time control). She asks if I was interested in the Under-1400 tourney on Saturday (just a littleeeee below my level) or am interested in taking lessons, which are a requirement for the Sunday 10+5 tourney. I’m certainly not interested in lessons, I’m here to kick some ass, but I don’t give away my hand just yet.
I had really wanted to spend the first night catching up more with C, but the tournament runs from 7 to 9 this evening, and it’s going to be a bit of a stretch. I’m not crazy, if it was the last night chess would be taking a backseat, but it’s the ONLY tournament I can play in and I’ve got close to a week. I call her and check in with her, and she says that I should definitely play, and we can try to work something in after, maybe. Definitely keeping me guessing. So I obviously take her at face value and a green light, and let the hostess know that I’ll be back before the tourney starts; I’m exhausted and want to nap an hour or two so I can perform properly. At chess, obviously.
I end up cabbing back to the hostel, crash an hour as best as I can in the awful bed, and then make the return trip. Total damage is forty Euros; really need to figure out the metro and bike systems or this is going to be a short facking trip.
When I return to the club around 6:15pm, there’s a ton of action. About forty or fifty chess players are all milling around, running some skittles games, or making conversation and sipping wine. And honestly, it seems like a cool crowd; chess might still have a bit of a stigma attached, but I think there’s been a big improvement over the last ten years in terms of social skills and basic hygiene. This ain’t no basement D&D gathering.
I manage to get registered for the tourney without too much hassle (costs 22, 25 Euros maybe), and float around a bit. Make a few friends with some of the guys outside and chat with them hacking darts together. Some sort of Indian dude Sahit, and an eastern Euro type, Mikhail. Love meeting a Mikhail, Mikhail Tal is my favorite chess player of all time, and I take it as a good omen for the tourney. Both are good lads and we swap some short stories. Pretty sure both are in tech (what are the chancessss, at a chess tournament?).
Pairings are up. I have checked in with the tournament director already, they have everyone signed up with their official FIDE rating. I haven’t actually played a FIDE rated tournament since I was about 10 years old at the North American Chess Challenge (U-12), so my FIDE rating clocks in at about 1880 or something. Definitely some sandbagger energy; I’m pushing 2400, 2500 online. But other player’s ratings are similarly inaccurate, so I’m not going to sleep on anyone.
Prizes are a bit stingy; 1st is 100, 2nd is 50, and they have 2 class prizes for 50, but all 200 Euro’s of prizes are for gift cards to the resto bar we are playing in. There are about 35 runners in the tournament (over 700 Euros in entries), so these guys are just making a killing hosting these events. But I’m not here for the money, I’m here to bring Paris some Canadian justice.
I play some extremely good chess. I chop down my first 2 opponents with blistering attacks, straight out of my sketchy gambit opening repertoire. Some very nice games, it’s a shame I don’t have any of them recorded. But the games are a slaughter, just a barrage of pieces flying down the board at the opposing king and no quarter given; I’m feeling myself and that vacation energy.
I’m still chatting to Mikhail and Sahit in the breaks between rounds, and they are starting to realize that I might actually be good at chess. My opponents are also starting to take a bit more notice as well, though it doesn’t help them; I put down my 3th round opponent with relative ease.
Pairings go up for the 4th round in the seven round event, and at 3-0 I’m feeling like a million bucks. Starting to wish I wore my Chessbrah hat to represent the boys, but in the end I had opted not to. Sahit and Mikhail let me know that my next opponent, Axel, is the real deal; he’s got his name at the top of their classical tournament leaderboard, and is somewhere around 2100 FIDE, which isn’t particularly scary on it’s own; but he’s also apparently somewhere around 2600 on Lichess Blitz. Ok, we all know Lichess isn’t a real chess website, but 2600 is not an Elo to be slept on, and he’s also 3-0. We’re potentially playing for the tournament here on board 1.
I end up with the white pieces, and still manage to stumble and drop a pawn out of the opening. Fuck, one day I’ll put some work into my “real” openings. Some very light initiative as comp, but 5+2 plays a little like rapid, where these types of edges can actually be converted with enough precision. So I abandon my plans of playing a stable game and throw another pawn away to muddy the waters; minor pieces are dancing all over on both sides, but the action is taking place close to his king where I thrive.
Some more pieces come off, but finally he stumbles in the complications as we near a time-scramble type situation. My king is a bit loose, and I end up missing a killer, decisive blow, and am close to losing, but I find enough comp that we end up in a king-rook-1 pawn, vs king-bishop-2 pawns, and though we shuffle around a bit, the increment is enough for us to avoid serious blunders, and the game ends in a draw. I wasn’t happy to have missed the killing blow, but was lucky to save the game, my tiebreakers are looking good, and we have another 3 rounds vs the field to put some pressure on each other.
The next 3 rounds are all extremely messy for me. Solid play gives way to some loose pawns and blunders on both sides, but I’m finding a way to navigate the complications. I manage to flag a dude in the 6th round in a pretty drawn position despite the 2 second increment, and in the 7th round I flip a losing endgame with some precise moves to finish with a near-perfect 6.5/7.
Axel is still playing his 7th round game, after winning the last 2 for 5.5/6, and he’ll need to win to take it to tiebreakers. Any other result and I win the tourney. There’s not enough time to calculate who’s going to end up ahead if he succeeds, but I notice almost right away while sweating his game that he’s down 2 minors pieces for a rook, and his opponent has a very stable position with a nice edge on the clock. Their moves come in faster and faster, clock making that sweet “thwack” sound as each of them bangs it in rapid succession, big crowd of players who’ve finished their game watching intently to see if the local champ will manage to save his own game and the pride of their club.
And then it happens; in the time scramble, he manages to hang an exchange to a sneaky knight fork that just seemed like it was inevitable given the dynamics of the position, and just like that, the game is over. His opponent finishes 3rd on 6/7, and Axel is forced to settle out of the money on 5.5/7. Canadian justice is served, and we are 1-0 at taking down tournaments at the growingly prestigious Blitz Society. Next time I play there I hope to collect some properly titled scalps.
Plenty of the players congratulate me, I’m presented with my gift card, and I order a celebratory beer and panini on the house. The Ukranian hostess seems a little bit surprised that I’ve won, and dare I say it, a little impressed. Fuckin try to put me in an under-1400 section again, why don’t ya! Maybe I should have asked for her number (chess wheels!), but my mind is in other places.
The only dampener on the night is that after a long day out, C is feeling pretty wiped out. I had definitely set out for Blitz Society with a warrior’s intention to knock out the opposition across the board, and then ride the high into a conversation with Camille to sort out exactly where we stand.
But not in the cards. No biggie, I’m in Paris for six days. So we end up making plans to meet up the next day instead, and I stick around the club to hang out with some of the new friends I’ve made. I play a few 3+0 games with Axel, Sahit, and Mikhail. Much more casual now, I do drop a couple to Axel, and even the tournament director pops in for a couple games against me. I think it’s always fun to meet some new blood at the chess board; these guys have probably all been playing against each other for years. Exchange some numbers with the boys, and then decide that I might as well walk all the way home and get a good night’s sleep; Vidy is arriving tomorrow, and we have plans to all link up at some point.
Make the trek all the way home, sore feet be damned, and call it a night.
Ok, we’re fucking do this. There’s a really good reason Mexico part 4 wasn’t released, and it rhymes with Fanny. All my friends know anyways, I had to get it off my chest, and I decided that I needed to get this shit out of the way so I can write about my Euro adventures. Also, there’s a Mexico series the following year which has some sick stories, but fuck it, let’s start with this one.
Huatulco. West coast best coast bud. Jeff and I have parted ways with the girls, and we fly in from Cancun after a painfully long drive back from Tulum. Beyond hungover, standard shit at this point.
What’s less standard is that Jeff has lost his sense of smell and taste. I lose mine a day later. Let’s get real, it’s COVID and we’re fucked. To be honest, this is the point where we regret the trip. We thought we were all high and mighty, absolute freedom fighters, seeking glory amidst the cowards.
A lot of my old McGill friends had been judging the shit out of me for planning this trip. Happily married / coupled up, happily at home with no change to their robotic routines, blaming everyone else for trying to survive… fuck off ya media-cock-gobbling liberal arts cucks. Still wonder how long it would have taken for 8pm lockdown before people actually stood up and fought back (but note, I’m a strong believe in vaccines; took all 3 shots, I’m not retarded. Science bro.). Not gonna bring it back to Canada, not going to irresponsibly spread it around foreign countries, and probably can help boost a much needed tourism industry amidst a global crisis, fuckin’ use some critical thinking… Love them anyways though, we’re definitely overdue for a reunion of sorts. Anyways these thoughts of superiority vanish the moment smell goes kaput.
We’re fucking idiots. What the actual fuck were we thinking? It’s not that hard to trace where we acquired it. I was chugging random stranger’s beers in the packed Sport’s Bar club, we were dancing body to body with a bunch of drugged out degenerates, I mean fuck, we WERE the drugged out degenerates, of course we caught the rona.
The drive in from the airport to Jeff’s parents place is magical though. Huatulco is some sort of snowbird early retirement home, the road through is all magnificent bright orange/red cliffs, a stark contrast to the breathtaking seaside. Aquamarine blue waters just glistening sparks reflecting off the waves in the sunlight.
We make it through the curves and edges, get to his parents place. It’s basically a condo at the top of a cliff in an apartment complex, overlooking the ocean and one of the beaches. Simply magnificent view, mountain meets ocean, very Zen. Security guard at the gate, it all sorta comes together and justifies his parents working their 9 to 5’s like champions their whole lives (back when you could do such a thing and get ahead).
We realize Jeff has the RONA and I’m a day behind him, definitely dampens the spirits a bit. We don’t want to spread it. As much as some of the old McGill friends think I’m a total degenerate, we’re very respectful. We mask up, and hit the grocery store quickly to load up for the week we’d be contagious. Make a few visits throughout the week to some isolated beaches where we can keep to ourselves, snorkel, and not spread our 2020 version of the plague. Some satisfaction in knowing if a shark took a piece outta me maybe it would drop dead. Fuck you Jaws!
In case you guys don’t know, I’m a beast in the kitchen. I’d hop onto Hell’s Kitchen, or at least an amateur home cook edition, but I’d prob get kicked off for clapping back The Gordon instead of glazing him like all the other contestants. But right now it’s it’s all a waste.
I’m making burgers on night three in Huatulco, we’re shitfaced on Modello’s, and these are incredible looking burgers. Double stacked, grease dripping down the sides, 3 layers of cheese, all the fixings, Caesar salad with my mom’s secret dressing recipe, plus homecooked fries, double fried… and we can’t taste a fucking thing.
The regret level is through the roof. I knew of friends back in Calgary who literally never got their sense of smell or taste back… and I’m really asking myself if it was worth it. We had to be trailblazers, we had to do something stupid, and all of a sudden karma is kicking us in the fucking ass. Can you imagine never smelling or tasting ever again? Food is just one of those simple pleasures in life that we take for granted… take it away and it’s basically just intellectual/athletic/sexual pursuits left to live for. And we’re at the point in our lives where it’s doubtful we are going to contribute anything meaningful to any of the above.
Jeff is so drunk and upset that at one point he’s trying to sniff a bottle of bleach. Literally has his face in it, screaming “I can’t smell fucking anything!”. I take a whiff too, ditto. But I also realize that if you sniff bleach you’re probably killing braincells , we’re fucking traumatized, but I keep it to one whiff.
Most beautiful burgers I’ve made to this day, and we end up just force feeding ourselves for sustenance, because all the joy has been stripped from the world. But ok. We make the best of it. We go to some remote beaches with no people during the week, snorkel, pray for a swift death via shark attack, and just keep to ourselves.
Five days in the sense of smell returns. For both of us. Thank god. We aren’t dying yet, that would have been too easy, God put us on the planet to suffer. In fact, not thank god, thank us! BOLD DECISION BOYS. WE’RE FREEDOM FIGHTERS, NOT A CARE IN THE WORLD! HUZZAH! Fuck COVID.
Huatulco is on the west coast of Mexico, a sleepy tourist town that’s realistically frequented by the rich of the Boomer generation. No crazy partiers, no douchebag Insta influencers, just a bunch of old retirees stretching their USD far, and the locals who subsist off of them as almost a servant class. It feels shitty describing it like that, and it doesn’t feel right, but it’s basically what the situation is.
Anyways, we have to find some diversions. Jeff and I decide to pick up tennis; I haven’t played since I was a child in the park with my dad one or two times randomly, and he’s apparently played his whole life. I say apparently, because he beats me handily the first two days, and then I start consistently kicking his ass. Pay attention ladies, some real athletic talent floating around in this gene pool. And I’m doing it while talking shit, while drunk, just being the biggest douchebag possible and loving every second of it. Jeff is not happy.
He’s so unhappy that he hires a fucking tennis coach. I’m dying typing this, we’re somewhat competitive, but hiring a Mexican tennis coach because your friend starts kicking your ass is next level. To be fair I was giving it to him, but any improvements he made never kicked in in time; I didn’t drop a set to him the rest of the trip.
It’s also been a week or so since there were any women in our lives. There’s not really much nightlife to speak of, but I have my Tinder rolling hard, and out of the blue I spike a really attractive local. We make plans to meet up for drinks, but I feel really bad cause Jeff is just gonna end up sitting at home, so for some reason (I’ve been friends with him for five+ years at this point; the reason is, I’m retarded) I bring him out with me.
Oh, just remembering, we did spend a night going to A Knight’s Tale. Or something like that. One of the medieval Europe style bars that have sword fights and shit for entertainment, while you get massive steins of beers and ginormous drumsticks; it was fantastic. In the middle of Mexico no less.
Cutting back to the present, I take Jeff out with me on this date. The downtown area is a very small village square type deal. The girl is really attractive, we’re in a second floor bar with about 8 people, and the bartender is a total catch as well. This is where it gets interesting.
I’m all good vibes and trying to get Jeff to flirt with the bartender. Never leave a man behind, I’m not going to let my homie be a sad third-wheeler. We’re staying in 2 rooms in his parents house, least I can do is help the kid get laid. The bartender seems keen and ready to rumble, her shift ends at one and she recommends a place close by we can all go to that doesn’t close til 3 or 4.
But instead of appreciating my wing-manning, Jeff starts using the fact that I’m trying to help him pickup against me, to my Tinder date, and starts flirting with her. To be honest at that point I don’t really care, her or the bartender are both fine for me, both are easy on the eyes… but it gets ridiculous. We are headed to the next spot at bar close and supposed to wait for the bartender to close her cash, and Jeff and Tinder date are gung ho about just ripping out and ditching her. Jeff cause he’s looking for an in, and dateski is probably happy that she has two wallets instead of one to pay for her night out.
Seriously though, I’m typing this out and I’m still pissed off about this night. We have two beautiful girls, two dudes who are trying to hack it in a foreign country, Canadian linemates, and the selfish bastard is not only trying to steal my date, but actively cockblocking me from the bartender I was trying to pick up for him. Who needs enemies when you have friends like that?
We end up ditching the barmaid because I don’t want to lose face in front of the Tinder date, but I’m really fucking pissed off, and within a couple of drinks at the next spot where Jeff is trying to mack on my date, I lose my pleasantry and tell him we can step outside to settle it like good ole Canadian boys. Calgary hockey experience appearing outta nowhere, or maybe the 6 shots of tequila were finally saying hello.
No proper scrap ensues; he’s not game to get his ass kicked, but I make a big enough deal out of it that the Tinder date gets scared and bounces. At this point I was happy about it, kid’s been sabotaging me all night and he’s sure as fuck not getting laid if I have a say in it. Cold war mentality, we’re all dying revirginized.
This leads into us having our first proper disagreement of the trip. To be fair, we’ve been travelling together and in close proximity for about 3-4 weeks now, and since we aren’t a couple and fucking, we need a break. So I decide to go off on a solo adventure and visit Puerto Escondido for a few days.
PE is north of Huatulco, a couple hours drive, and I find a taxi to take me up for a reasonable rate. I book an Airbnb for a couple of days, and the city is a serious vibe. It’s west coast, surfer town, basically like Mexican California.
Hippies, surfers, boats, Instagram bitches, overpriced. Five words to describe a whole city, but that’s what it is. There’s a beautiful hostel called Selina that I book a reservation at but don’t take (still can’t remember why). I’d make fun of the people doing their “remote work” as “digital nomads” (BLECH) but I just realized I’m becoming one of these fucking losers. Spoiler: I end up giving Jeff my reservation there when I have to leave Mexico as an additional peace offering / a thank you for putting me up at his parents place. Sounds like he put it to good use, he now has at least a few travel friends that I’ve seen in Montreal once or twice.
Anyways, my Airbnb is shit, but compared to Huatulco this place is bumping. I end up with two solid Tinder matches, an attractive lady from Vancouver, and a local girl who’s legitimately super model esque. To the local girl who’s still friends with me on Facebook that I never got to meet, come find me, I’m in Albania right now! Her pictures, holy fuck, just an absolute cannon, and we chatted a bit, but I’m pretty sure she met a rich German dude about a month later and married him or something. Never did end up getting to meet her.
The Van girl is great, we grab a bite to eat and have a good chat. Honestly, all Vancouver girls I’ve met are sick, West Coast is best coast, gotta love the Deezy and Ashley, plus a very fun blonde friend of theirs (LOL – story there but for another time, but I’m digressing).
Van girl in Mexico works as a professional sailor. Her job is literally to take rich people’s boats from port to port across the world for them, BECAUSE THEY’RE TOO FUCKING LAZY TO BOAT THEIR OWN BOATS. The fuck is wrong is wrong with this world? I’d love to read her travel blog one day, she must have the best stories. Wish I remembered her name.
We have dinner and there aren’t any crazy sparks. I ordered some sort of raw fish dish, and there was a LOT of raw fish. Scarfed it all down and pretended was delicious to save some face, and act like I actually knew what I’d ordered in Spanish. I’m also a bit worn out from travelling, she’s shipping off in another day or two, so there’s no time to make anything happen, and as much as I wish we had a whirlwind romance, we didn’t. Ok yeah, totally would have slept with her but it wasn’t reciprocated. YOU GOT ME.
There’s also a chess dude in PE. He has 4 boards set up with clocks outside of a local bar, and to be fair, he’s the strongest player in this part of Mexico. Or at least, he was until I showed up.
He’s doing a combination of renting the boards / hustling tourists for money. I clap him the first two games, make about 10 USD worth of pesos, and then he realizes he’s not top dog anymore and won’t play for money. Ten more minutes of me just dumpstering the guy and he packs up all 4 boards and goes home. LOL I’m dying remembering this, he literally packed his shit and just took off. Fucking ruined his day. Good. COLD WAR MENTALITY BABY.
I saw him the next day and we played a few friendly games, he’s prob about a 2100 online or something. Solid, but he could not withstand the pure bullshit aggression I was delivering over the board. No Ubitzya mercy, I spanked him every game without dropping one.
The excursion was great. I really wish I could have slept with sailor girl, or you know, married her and had some kids together and lived happily ever after. She was cool AF, but sometimes it doesn’t line up. I get back to Huatulco, Jeff and I embrace like long lost family, and now’s the part of the story that had me not writing this for the longest time. Here’s the part you’ve all been waiting for, and that half of you probably know already. Fuck off!
A couple of nights in, we hit up a club. There’s this beautiful girl with a couple of friends at the table next to us, and Jeff bets me that I’m too much of a pussy to talk to her. So I saunter over, engage in conversation like a normal human being, and pull her number. Lovely black dress, deep brown expressive eyes, I mean, fuck, I was already drunk but I was half in love.
They send to some sort of beach party she tells me that I might not want to go to, so I don’t. Ominous right? Little warning bells going off in my head, but I’m living it up in Mexico and I ignore them.
Jeff and I pound another six drinks, fail to find any additional company, and head back to his parents crib. I’m still texting her though, and she’s still replying. She ends up coming over at about four in the morning. Bring her in past the security guard, through Jeff’s place, to the scenic clifftop poolside view.
We talk. We kiss. Some stuff starts happening that’s not exactly PG… or to be more precise, it’s in the middle of happening. Ok, we’re on fucking third base, jesus christ. She’s in a bright blue bikini looking fantastic and I’m living the dream, skyrise hotel on the cliffs next to a pool at 4am with no one else around and feeling like a god.
And then I see it. Right there in the darkness. There’s a notable bulge in her bikini bottom. Noticeable. Prominent. Fucking might be bigger than mine. “Her”. Seriously, fucking kill me. It’s a dude, you can take your liberal pansy shit and fuck right off. Imagine for a second, that you’re on top of the world living your best life and nothing can go wrong. And then that fucking happens.
I swear to god if I could run it all back, I wish I never saw a fucking thing. Just never found out, lived my best life in blissful ignorance, and got to brag about it to all the homies. But it’s the type of thing you can’t unsee. Imagine if you will, the entire way that it played out until that point.
You hit on a beautiful woman at the club that your friend said you couldn’t pick up. Against all odds, you picked her up. You’re in a foreign country, beautiful scenery, drunk and just absolutely living the dream. And then it all comes crashing down in two seconds.
There are really only two choices at that point. Pretend you didn’t see a fucking thing, live in the moment and pretend you hooked up with a supermodel, and just let it lie. Or kick him out, tell all your friends, and get chirped into oblivion.
I obviously picked the latter. It was kind of tragic honestly, pushed the gal off and she was crying. Jesus Christ pronouns are confusing here, you all know what I mean though. I actually consoled buddy for a second, just made the very obvious point that especially if you’re pre-op, you should probably let the person know before… doing stuff. Fucking very messy. No, I’m not gonna fuck you in the ass now. Offers very kind though bro.
I booked buddy a cab to wherever the fuck, far far away from me, and walked her out to the door. Past the security guard, the Mexican security guard, who had seen the whole fucking thing on cameras poolside, obviously. Soon as buddy gets in the cab, the security guard is almost falling out of his chair laughing, he’s chirping me in Spanish which I don’t speak a lick of, but I can 100% understand his sentiment as he points to his Adam’s apple. Sign language is universal. Fuck you bud! Holy fucking shit, maybe some stories should stay buried.
But I obviously told Jeff the instant I got back in, he was just dying of laughter too, over time I’d tell most of my close friends, and for fuck sakes, it just happened. It’s not gay if you don’t finish boys! At least that’s what I tell myself, curled up in fetal position every night since then. Fucking traumatic honestly, upvote for therapy.
Not much to say to wrap up the Mexican adventure honestly. I did originally take one month of paid vacation off, and the plan was to work remote for Ubisoft out of there. My boss Jan, who is just a gem of a guy, had an unofficial deal with me to let me do it, but it turns out the West Coast internet in Mexico, in 2020 at least, was absolute dog shit.
I tried remoting in a few times from various places, but it just wasn’t happening. We had over 200 people working on an already shipped Rainbow Six Siege, but I was on the event cell with one other programmer, and the project lead was losing his mind trying to figure out if I would be “back” after my one month vacation. The pressure bled into Jan. Again, excellent man, older German fella that I’ve played poker with a few times and had some fun with getting drunk and shooting the shit, but he’d recently graduated into management and didn’t really have a choice other than to rope me back into the fold.
I was hoping to take a month of unpaid vacation to stick around Mexico, I really wanted to meet the girl who ended up with the German dude in the end. But with some top pressure, Jan was pretty straight up; either come back and work, or there would be “severe consequences to my career”. I got a bit pissed off, I don’t really like being told what to do, and almost quit on the spot… but after a phonecall with my mom, who fucking cried and begged me not to leave without other options, I ended up doing the “responsible” thing and coming back. WHA-TCHHHHH, back to to the cottonfields BOY!
Quit about 6 months later anyways, probably should have just stayed in Mexico. Maybe I would have married the girl. Holy fuck she was beautiful. But she never would have taken me as funemployed Brando anyways. Vanessa? Valeska? One day I’ll remember her name.
Here’s a pic of the infinity pool at Jeffy’s parents, I’ll come back and try to add a few more if I have them later. Just picture yourself looking out at that, having the best time of your life… and fuckin’ pour one out for me.
Brando's Rambles 