The Night Shift

Being a hotel receptionist on a Friday night turned out to be quiet. I was apprehensive traipsing around streets with partying tourists, a champagne bottle broken open with shards pointing upward across a pedestrian crossing and alcoholic foam along the gutter. But the hotel itself was in a calm courtyard, a wispy light rain falling, and the clientele turned out to be eminently well behaved. A room costs over €100 per night, the front desk had tall pink orchids on it, and the lounge had a grand piano, comfortable sofas, and equally pristine laminate wood walls. My supervisor came out from a back office and shook hands, a spare man somewhat older than me in a leather vest, with an open manner and direct way of speaking with people that I liked at once. In the end I handed over room keys for two groups of guests, and showed a young English-speaking pair where to write their address when checking in, but otherwise I had practically no duties except to sit and pass the time. Which was a relief because I thought I'd need to handle abstruse and diva-esque guest requests or learn elaborate check-in or security procedures.

The guests, fellow employees, and a black-suited gentleman who was briskly striding around (the supervisor revealed discreetly afterward that he was the hotel owner), greeted the supervisor and me politely as they came and went through the lobby. Two women guests (one in a sparkling black blazer, if I recall correctly) paused to give my colleague the run-down on their evening in the revue at the Friedrichstadt Palast. After 11:30 p.m. very little went on except for security personnel coming in to chat or check in or out.

My colleague intermittently watched a German TV series about the cop beat in Mainz. The dramatis personae were e.g. a 16-year-old too drunk to go home by herself and her (per my first impression, repellent-sounding) parents unwilling to take the trouble to fetch her, a car driver who performed a suspicious manoeuvre and (when stopped) turned out to have no license, and a young man who dove into the Rhine River on a dare during a bachelor party but found that the current was too strong to swim across. I was sure that part of the dialogue must have been re-recorded in a studio after the original footage was filmed, because most of the criminal 'talent' had excellent diction and the sound quality was unimpeachable. The series was surprisingly didactic, and not in the 'don't do crime' way you'd expect. It instilled the impression that police work is not at all about handing down biblical judgments about right and wrong; instead it's about figuring out which part of the rule book to exercise in which situation, staying cool-headed, and applying compassion where it seems justified. The police officers also repeated that people who have mental health problems should seek help, because law enforcement might want to but can't fix their life situations. If the series itself is entirely ethical, however, I'm skeptical.

So on the one hand I also chatted a little with the co-worker, who revealed inter alia that he'd grown up in the GDR and that there usually aren't any security problems at the hotel except sometimes with a homeless person but that this was manageable. I skimmed the headlines of the Guardian, Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg, the New York Times, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, browsed the websites of The Atlantic and The New York Review of Books, and had brought along Alphonse Daudet's Lettres de mon Moulin — and enjoyed reading all that. Lettres de mon Moulin are really wonderful, engaging to read, original, and descriptive, even if from a non-French-native-speaker's perspective they contain a lot of vocabulary that I never expect to use again in my life. (One of my favourite sentences was, 'Day is the life of beings, but night is the life of things.' — I wrote that down because I liked it so much.) ...  On the other hand, I was also very much engrossed in the police show.

After 5 a.m. a cleaning lady arrived and began to get ready for her shift, eventually wheeling out the trolley in uniform with her supplies. So did another colleague who seemed to do more security-type work. The supervisor told me I could leave 30 minutes early, so I did, delighted that it was already light out but also aware of having huge circles under my eyes. (I hadn't napped the day before, which might have been a mistake, and was woken up by noise and a headache so that I didn't sleep in until noon as I'd planned. That said, it was still delightfully refreshing to be in a position for once to tell myself: No, no, don't go to sleep yet! You need to wake up late for work!) After arriving home and being greeted sleepily by Mama and Ge., who heard me from their rooms, I slept about 5 hours and afterward gradually returned to my essay writing.

A Plum Harvest and the Footnotes of an Essay

Tomorrow evening I have another student job lined up, which will be reception work at a Berlin hotel from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.

When the acceptance notification appeared this afternoon, it was a happy surprise because I was still obsessing about budgeting ... and worrying because I had been rejected for the 4 previous mini-jobs that I'd applied to this week. It's also harder to schedule work because of the Kazantzakis essay that's still underway. (No thesis has emerged from the primordial swamp of my thoughts yet, but the body of the essay feels largely complete and now it's just a matter of inserting footnotes and verifying details.) But this afternoon it was also a relief when I double-checked the German law about mini-jobs: while it's true that there used to be a monthly limit of €538 on earnings from mini-jobs, this limit was raised as of January 2026 to €603. Which means that, as long as I can book the mini-jobs, my savings will not melt away as quickly.

Besides a student organization for Berlin's universities and trade schools offered a free online presentation by a tax accountant about how to register as a freelancer with the tax authorities, government pension fund, and health insurers. It was interesting to me because I've hoped at various times to be a freelance translator or copy-editor, tutor, or journalist. That said, at least presently, given the qualifications that I (don't) have in all of these professions, I am certain I couldn't earn enough by freelancing to cover the costs of insurance. So it's nice-to-know but perhaps not immediately applicable knowledge.

*

Inspired by the sunshine after a cloudy Wednesday, I cycled to the allotment gardens this afternoon. In a part of the gardens where free fruit is rarer, I unexpectedly spotted yellow mirabelle plums in two hanging baskets at a gate. Taking a few of them from the baskets, I saw that the gardener who rents the plot was crouching and working on her yard, so I told her thank you. To my delighted surprise, the gardener invited me in through her gate to harvest more of the plums from the ground. There was just too much, she said, so it makes sense to give the excess away — and she wished that politicians would learn that lesson too. We chatted while we gathered the fruit — she was disappointed that I didn't take more, but I felt it would be greedy, and she said that making vinegar from the plums is quite successful once one has the 'mother.' Finally she invited me back, once I find more recipes for the plums.

In a narrower lane I also came across a basket with early pear quinces that had likely been culled from the tree so that the branches wouldn't become too heavy, and two damson plums that had dropped from their tree to the side of the path.

It was especially welcome to find this much fruit, because the past few times I've gone to the gardens I've come home (nearly) empty-handed. Back at home, I ate most of the mirabelle and damson haul for dessert after lunch. Besides I turned the bruised mirabelles into a stew along with red currants, and ate it with granola and milk.

*

After the Kazantzakis essay is done, the next task is preparing for the Greek exam, then the Greek History essay that the professor said 'can be done in September.' As for the journey to Austria, I enjoyed it, and was kindly coddled by siblings, uncle, and father's cousin alike.

Four Hours of Hell: Cashiering at a Grocery Store

On Wednesday I went to the second job that I booked via the student app: four hours as a cashier in the basement of a mall in one of the tourist hotspots of Berlin. At home I'd reviewed the instructions for cashier work in general and the two or three different PDFs for this grocery chain in particular, although I felt fairly sure it was impossible to remember it all. Locking up my bicycle, I found the grocery store sooner than I feared.

The first step was to familiarize myself with the fruit and vegetable section so that it would be easier to ring up the produce later, which was a quick process. The second step was to meet my supervisor. A brisk, petite woman with her hair in a ponytail, she was communing with the dairy refrigerator section in the back when I found her. She escorted me to the employee break room. We passed through a storage area with trolleys, shelves stacked to the ceiling with disposable gloves and other supplies, and a loud machine built into the wall (pipes, toggle switches?, etc.) that I took to be a roaring air conditioner, and greeted a colleague. The narrow hallway was lined with bottles of water, which my supervisor invited me to drink from, and jackets with the store brand for the employees arranged on hooks.

The break room itself consists of a kitchenette with a wood laminate counter and a heap of grey polo shirts at the far end and a packaged Christmas tree stand stowed away at the near end, white cabinets above and below, and a sink in between. Blue storage lockers fill another wall — some of them labelled with names and roles, and others not. Papers pinned to a bulletin board explain hazard symbols, how to report inappropriate behaviour like harassment, a psychological service available for employees who are stressed by difficult encounters with customers, etc. Behind a pane of glass, a graphic of a tree rhapsodizes about the values of the grocery store chain. Taking into account the low table that fills the remaining corner of the room, I doubt that many more than 6 people can fit into the room. But it felt collegial.

Not sure if I should wait in the room until fetched, I decided to anxiously wait. After a while I took out my pens and my 'cheat sheet' of notes about cash register work, ready for duty. Finally I went out into the public area of the store again. Across the aisles, the cashier whose shift was ending made eye contact with me and waved me over.

In a little office, we started the handover. As a senior employee kept a practiced eye on a computer screen with her back turned to us, the supervisor asked me to weigh out all the coins and bills that were in the black cash box that I'd be using. Then she ushered me out of the office and over to the till, the previous cashier left with alacrity, she handed me my cashier ID card, and I sat down on the rolly chair prepared to serve the first customer — who was already hovering.

My supervisor showed me one or two procedures, told me to ring using the switch at my lefthand side if I had any problems, and then strode off. Fortunately the Francophone colleague at the bakery counter — a tall young man perhaps in his twenties who I think was called José — was able to ring up purchases that didn't require weighing, as I found out in the course of my shift. Otherwise, for all intents and purposes, I was the only cashier in the shop.

I passed the first two or three loads of items across the scanner as if I were an alien acquainting myself with earthling objects, not sure if the bar codes would be read in properly or not.

But after that the main problem was navigating all the buttons for weighing fruit and vegetables, deducting the 30% discounts, accepting forms of payment that weren't cash or mainstream credit/debit cards, scanning in coupons and loyalty cards or keying in customer reward app codes, and figuring out how to process a bottle returned for deposit that hadn't been accepted by the machine in the back of the store. Customers asked if there were disposable spoons, and I could only guess that they were at the round bar table; they asked if I had a bottle opener, but I didn't.

I wasn't able to tackle all of that properly. I usually asked for help from colleagues, explained concisely enough what was needed, and got it. Once my supervisor swooped in before I needed to signal her and helped out; another time, the shopper was in fact an employee and she helped me out. In the one case that I rang twice and nobody came, there was a brief dispute at the bakery counter afterward ('why did you leave the one employee by herself?'). But people were very forgiving to me specifically; the supervisor who'd seemed uncertain at the beginning started intermittently smiling at me.

On the bright side, my upbringing in Canadian manners became a superpower: I automatically fished up a polite greeting and smile for every customer no matter what catastrophe was going on. Counting out change was also straightforward as I was used to doing so as a shopper myself. Finally I found myself embracing the customer service side of things and liking the customers.  Figuring out if they spoke German or English or neither was like a game. But also semi-consciously noting the different shopping styles; guessing at which jobs or travels they'd come from; classifying them as health and fitness aficionados, businessmen, heads of families, young women 'adulting' by making themselves nutritious meals, partiers with wine or beer or mojitos, cheeky teenagers splurging on small treats, tourists getting themselves pots of honey or other items they couldn't get at home, etc.

On the other hand, after a while I thought that the same customers were shopping again: it felt like they were repeating in an infinite loop. I only came up for air again two hours later when finally nobody was standing at the till for a minute or two, psychologically battered and feeling like I had been swimming for hours against a current as water kept flooding into my mouth. I looked at the clock, shocked that it was only shortly after 6 p.m.

(During that quiet time, as the online training suggested, I took a spray bottle of disinfectant and cleaned the till with a cloth... which I realized later was actually only intended for the computer screens.)

Twice the line of customers grew so long that stirrings of discontent were audible. Besides I made a few mistakes with customer reward apps where I think I didn't properly give the discount because I thought that just scanning the card was enough. Once I failed to realize that a bottle was for deposit and then, long after another customer pointed it out to me and I'd finally figured it out, was unable to get away from my till to tell the customers that they could get money for it. In other words, I shorted the customers.

But the worst thing I did that day probably cost the company a large pot of money in one go. A customer who had bought food for over €70 apparently did not confirm her purchase by pressing a green button twice as she needed to (or perhaps there was a technological malfunction in the online data transfer?). After she and her groceries had disappeared from the shop, I saw that the EC debit card payment process was incomplete and running out of time. I did have the presence of mind to ask my supervisor to archive that set of purchases in the till, so that I could ring up the next customer. Unfortunately I did not have the presence of mind before that to swing around and check the screen of the card reader, pressing the green button myself if that was what was needed.

Finally at 8 p.m., my colleagues and I checked repeatedly that all the customers were out of the shop. The senior employee and José had already signed out for the day. I handed over the two bottle deposit receipts that I'd gathered over the past four hours and my supervisor hauled out my cash box. Then I awaited with fear and trembling in the office as my supervisor jotted up the totals of the electronic payments, the bottle deposit, and the cash box at the computer. She shook her head over something and redid a calculation. I was worried that I would have to pay the €74 that I'd accidentally cost the company out of my own pocket — so I'd owe the company money instead of being paid for the past four hours. But then she turned around with a broad smile and told me that I had €1 more in the cash box than expected. It didn't really make sense, because two or three customers had told me to keep the change, but it was always only 1 cent or 2 cents. Still, it was a relief.

After I'd changed back into my street clothes, the supervisor joined me looking far more relaxed and ready to go back to everyday life. She even said that I'd done great, especially considering that it was my first day, and that she expected to see me again. With the €74 metaphorically stamped across my forehead like the scarlet letter A, and my guilt over the times I'd accidentally shorted the customers out of money, I candidly said that it had felt like one catastrophe after another to me. She laughed, and led me out through a warren of corridors into the outdoors, locking up the shop behind her. And I cycled back home in a daze.

***

When I passed through the apartment door, I felt like I'd journeyed through a few circles of Dante's cosmology into something more Paradise-like. But even at home, I was so stressed (and the air was so warm and humid) that I could not properly go to sleep until past 3 a.m. The feeling of buzzing energy had passed when I'd eaten dinner that the family had prepared and when I'd done a few progressive muscle relaxation exercises. It also felt weird to complain as a grown adult with her fair share of privileges about a common job that many teenagers, and many adults who have fewer privileges to cushion the stress, do.

But I was still quite worked up. My conscience was uneasy about all of my cash register mistakes — which felt like theft — and I was stuck on a loop of being constantly afraid of doing something wrong. An additional twenty or so minutes of yoga did not change that. Once, when I did doze, customers appeared on the other side of a phantom till in my sleepy imagination again. It took what felt like a few minutes to get rid of them.

In the event, I didn't get more sleep than four hours. At 7:15 a.m. city maintenance workers started using a chainsaw to lop branches off a bush outside the apartment and I couldn't get back to sleep again. In fact, I didn't properly go to sleep again until after midnight.

In between I've done hours of research about translations of Nikos Kazantzakis's writings into English and two trips to libraries, piano playing, leisure reading, housework and grocery shopping, and sunset strolling with my sister.

Partly the past weeks have been delightful and I've hopefully conveyed that in this blog.

Yet to be whiny but open, this is not  — given the facts that I still need to earn more money this month, finish three essays, finish reading the book that my Greek professor wanted me to finish reading, and get my spoken Greek and written grammar up to snuff for the exam at the end of this month — the relaxing summer holiday that I was hoping for.

Let's see if it changes for the better tomorrow. One of my brothers and I'll take the train to Austria for a short trip, joining other family members who are traveling by car, returning on the 12th.

The Friendlier Face of Bureaucracy

On Thursday I set off into the near 30°C temperatures to the Gesundheitsamt in order to watch two instructional videos about food safety and certification, and then to receive a certificate.

It was organized on the fourth floor of an office building. The interior was cool enough that it wasn't a hardship to walk up the flights of stairs instead of taking the elevator. First we were sorted into a waiting room. Amidst the pleasant wooden furniture that reminded me of a pediatrician's waiting room in the early 1990s, I became aware that the other applicants were younger than I was (some of them likely even still in school or recently graduated). Then we went one by one to the office to pay the 30€ fee and verify that our name and birthdate were accurate.

After that, we took our seats in a room where the videos were screened. Rows of chairs, two leafy potted plants taller than I was whereof one was alive and one dead (like the comedy and tragedy masks in theatre), a desk fan that had the seal of the City of Berlin stuck to its centre (presumably to discourage us from smuggling it home under our coats and calling it our own), blinds covering the open windows and a faint hum of traffic wafting in, and a coffee table or two, completed the interior design. We were something like 20 people at the end.

The videos were painless. Admittedly some of the acting in it had a touch of ham in scenes that required agonizedly swiping at a perspiring brow and clutching the solar plexus. The first one told us which foods were the most perishable, which illnesses and health conditions are dangerous, and how to behave if we feel sick or have an open wound. The second walked us through our certificate and told us that we needed to get it sealed and signed by an employer within 3 months, in order for it to be valid for the rest of our lives.

Finally, we returned to the office to receive the certificates. The ladies in charge were warm and friendly: one of them came up close and half-touched my elbow to greet me, and another wished me success as she handed me the paper.

Delighted to be ready early, I went back home at 11:30 a.m. — long before the temperatures rose to 38°C toward the evening. At home I was even more delighted to find that the student app seems to confirm the food safety certificates on our behalf. So that essentially I have fulfilled and will fulfill a basic precondition for food and service industry jobs for the rest of my days.

Since the bicycle transport work I haven't done another job ... yet. But I have made progress on university coursework: researching the Greek-Russian literature essay and reading the Kapodistrias biography. And, relieved to have so many chances at work where people actually need and want me, I have felt quite cheeky and good-humoured.

A Tragic Pride Week, and Student Job Life

It was a strange weekend in Berlin considering the attack at the Christopher Street Day parade events on Saturday. Most of the main parade was already over when the news came late in the evening. Since I'd stopped checking local news for the day, mostly, I first spotted it on the Guardian's website. I had thought of attending CSD (albeit this time for amateur journalistic purposes), the same as last year; but I would have been long gone by the time the violence happened. It was unsettling to hear helicopters near Potsdamer Platz late into the night — between midnight and past 2 a.m. — and then for long stretches the next morning. Usually we hear them when there's a visit by a head of state who requires heightened security measures, but this time I presumed that police were using them to look for suspects.

As for the reaction in Berlin, it impresses me that the organizers of the CSD parade have repeatedly stated that they do not want the attacker's self-affiliation with Islam to lead to any stereotypes, generalizations, or hatred toward Muslims. What I just wish is that the press's coverage had focused less on the perpetrator, which from what I understand of criminology raises the probability of copy-cat attacks. It also didn't feel nice to be subjected to a livestream of predominantly Crime and Punishment updates, instead of reactions from the LGBTQ* community and, say, the flowers that were being left at the Tiergarten park where the attack happened.

*

On Friday I'd gone to a Pride Week demonstration, a smaller one, for amateur journalism purposes.

After reflecting on going to the CSD parade last year and what felt right or wrong about being there as an ally, I concluded that I'd felt out of place because I go out of my way to not express my personality when it feels socially risky. Whereas out-and-proud attendees are taking a lot of risks.

So, despite the general preferability of wearing neutral clothing when doing amateur journalism, I put on a baby-blue sweater, a flowered scarf, and lipstick this time. Besides I approached the organizers of the Pride Week demo to make doubly sure that protestors wouldn't feel uncomfortable being photographed, because I can imagine that you can begin feeling like a zoo animal if lots of strangers take snapshots of you without asking because your clothing or make-up look unusual to them. It felt like the right decision and I felt very at ease.

For comparison, a professional journalist was there alongside a camerawoman, and conducted a stand-up interview with the organizers later in front of the glass and steel Paul-Löbe-Haus where German parliamentarians work. She wore (as I seem to remember) jeans and a striped red-and-white sweater, i.e. a little colour but nothing splashy.

Besides the gay community at the protest was diverse in terms of clothing styles and cultural affiliations: some were drag queens who went for old-time glamour, others preferred slim 90s-style party gear and stiletto heels, a few into animal masks or leather, many dressed down in t-shirts and shorts or jeans, and so on and so forth. So perhaps I'd have fit in just fine with my old amateur journalism uniform of dark blue slim jeans and black long sleeve shirt.

Another reason I enjoyed the event was that — unlike many foreign-events-related protests I've been to — there was little tension of the kind that people usually emanate when protesting against totalitarian or otherwise extremist regimes.

***

This morning I went to the first student job that I've booked through the app. Waking up at 7:22 a.m. was a minor ordeal, the transit took 50 minutes but all the transfers went beautifully smoothly, and it was not too bad that I was a little geographically disorientated and not 15 minutes early at the place of employment because my supervisor hadn't arrived yet. It was out in the sticks of eastern Berlin, but well within the city limits with GDR housing blocks, a huge Höffner furniture big-box store, a smattering of plane trees if I recall correctly, and the characteristic East German tram lines. In the end the job was far easier than anticipated: with a fellow student from southwestern Germany and the supervisor, we moved a few dozen rental e-bikes in boxes from a truck into storage cells, then labelled them with the email address of the customer. After two hours we were done. What I also enjoyed were the interactions with the others at the facility.

A few burly movers were shifting household furniture for a lanky white-haired man in a logo'd jersey sweater who did some of the labour alongside them. And the truck driver who had driven the e-bikes from a factory in France, his large vehicle having a Polish license plate, didn't speak much German but mentioned that he did speak Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian (and maybe Hungarian?). He had a vein of humour, was easygoing, and patiently pushed the cartons one by one where we needed them for over half an hour. We also met a thin facility manager in a dress shirt with the professional air of a 20th-century train conductor, brisk but friendly, who took care of opening gates and checking in with my supervisor. And a receptionist at the entrance, despite being engrossed in a telephone call, waved in a cheerful way when the fellow student and I left.

None of the men were shocked or condescending because I was a woman doing manual work. It's also a sign of a good dynamic that when the fellow mini-jobber and I met up again at the nearest tram station, it wasn't remotely awkward.

We finished two hours early, so I'll probably get half the pay for the projected four hours. But I was actually happy to be let off the hook. On the way home I indulged myself by going for a walk in the sparkling sunshine between train stations. After lunch and a little internet time, I took a long nap.

Beautiful British Columbia: Our September 2024 Holiday, Part Eight

Uncle Pu retraced another journey from his past, and took us to the ghost town of Sandon. From the highway the first signs of it we saw were an elaborate system of tall white buildings and passageways at the creek's edge, constructed I think in the mid-20th century but still operational. Klondike Silver Mining Co. or a similar name was written on the side. Densely embedded in the evergreen trees, with slender railway tracks teetering along the hillsides, as this area was, I was amazed yet again that anyone had been able to navigate from Vancouver to here in the 19th century, let alone set up little or big mining outfits, before the arrival of post-war highways.

— As it was, even in 2024 road maintenance crews were working between Slocan and Sandon in conditions that did not lack adventure. Workers in high-visibility vests were scaling steep banks beside the road, chainsaw held in one hand, to clear tree saplings, as cars like ours passed beside them. Other work crews had been renewing the asphalt. —

The visitors' part of Sandon, at any rate, is upslope of the Klondike Silver Mining Co. complex. Perched beside a creek on a declivity that had already put paid to a few chapters of the town's history by collapsing it in an avalanche, the creek itself also flooding the town in the 1950s, wooden frameworks were exposed where the riverbanks had eroded underneath the buildings. Whether these frames were mining apparatus, like supports for a flume, or slope stabilization attempts, I was too ignorant of engineering to know.

Riverbank fortification beneath Sandon, B.C.
September 14, 2024. All rights reserved.

Sandon's visitor's site started with a modestly sized veranda'd house and then a string of Canada Rail train wagons behind a locomotive, which accompanied the road up to a parking lot. Behind the tourists' cars, which had US as well as Canadian license plates, there was a gift shop. It was in a building that looked very much like a drug store emporium or general store out of a Laura Ingalls Wilder book. Two stories high, impressively towering above the river like a lookout post, it had a certain flat rough-and-readiness to it that did suggest quick construction to accommodate a mining boom, as well as mysterious windows with uncomplicated plate glass panes that would give ghosts a fine view. My youngest brother popped into the gift shop and emerged with a black-and-white postcard, after chatting with the owner.

In the parking lot area, a collection of trolleybuses had been parked that traced the history of British Columbia's public transit during the mid-1900s: pastel beige shells, drivers' seats where one could imagine a uniformed conductor politely speaking in a British accent with his passengers, empty rows, an accordion door, displays on the fore of each vehicle revealing whether the bus had been in service in — for example — Stanley Park (Vancouver) or some other neighbourhood or town.

Old mining(?) structures at Sandon, B.C.
September 14, 2024. All rights reserved.

Odds and ends of old, rust-tinged equipment were scattered around. Above the gift shop and the buses, one or two business buildings that predated the First World War had been lovingly rebuilt. Their façades, like the shop, hinted at the first decades of Sandon, when it had been thriving with hotels, sports venues, brothels, telephone office, post office, an Opera House, and men on the hunt for mineral ore. Specifically these men were extracting galena, which — so an online encyclopedia informs me — is an ore that yields lead but also silver. But Sandon was also an internment site of Japanese-Canadians during World War II.

Information sign above river at Atherton Block, Sandon, B.C.
September 14, 2024. All rights reserved.

Further up, two or three historical houses that had belonged to engineers or other staff (and were inaccessible to prying eyes as they are still in use, if only for storage) sat below a very old hydropower house from the reign of Queen Victoria. Still operational over 125 years later, thunderously loud to the point that I could not hear the guide explaining the history of the site to my brothers from where I was standing, it still feeds electricity into the BC Hydro network. Below where I stepped out of the station again, frothing water went crashing out below the turbine's screw, to rejoin the river. Piles of dark grey rubble nearby looked like fertile terrain for archaeological foraging, but I realized soon enough that I didn't have the necessary knowledge of materials to 'read' the spoil heaps.

The guide told my brothers that old mine shafts and tunnels hidden in the hills around the ghost town are often searched out by prowling visitors. A few of these tunnels are accessible and safe enough; others are less accessible and hardly intact. Needless to say that my imagination could hardly have been fuelled more. I'd have happily poked around — if amongst other doubts I weren't afraid of creeping someone out by trespassing on their private property.

View of Sandon, B.C. from the power house
September 14, 2024. All rights reserved.

I was in a stinker of a mood, however. (Which is also why I took only about 12 notes on the site and may have made a lot of mistakes in the past few paragraphs.) So it was a relief to drive back toward New Denver, by way of Kaslo. We passed many faintly haunted corners, like Zincton, a ghost town established in 1892 that was tenanted by miners of zinc ore, just like the name suggests. What we saw of it was a hushed, marshy green pond steeped in trees. We passed a sign warning of danger — explosives — avalanche control ... a wooden boat in antique shape ... a Mudslide Area ... and a cross-country skiing sign.

***

Church in or near Kaslo, B.C.
September 14, 2024. All rights reserved.

STEAMSHIPS, like gold miners in 19th century garb standing ankle-deep in the pebbles of a British Columbia river or a Victorian housewife wearing a crinoline while boiling hard candies for a party over a coal stove — as well as largely unchallenged racism and colonialist brutality — seemed like a figment of Canadian history that I could read about but never see.

That said, Kaslo brought brighter facets of this lost world back to life. Tourist destination via steamship a hundred years ago, it is still a tourist destination via car now. Dominating its lakeside fringes is a well-kept paddlewheeler, a National Historical Site of Canada, with historical exhibits like vintage automobiles in and around it. We arrived on a thriving but not overly crowded day, where rainbow-coloured Pride flags were flying around the false fronts of the old buildings. I ate a few cherries left over from the Okanagan region orchards before we strolled toward the ship. A few of the siblings went down to explore, while I remained on the street above.

Uncle Pu ventured into an antiques shop and I came along. It offered an eclectic mixture of war medals, historical currencies of many different countries e.g. from the 1920s, tobacco pipes arranged on top of furniture, candlesticks, vintage clothing like furs, vinyl records, Dickens volumes and the Bobbsey Twins, 20th century toys for children, perfume diffusers, and even a painted red memento box for the coronation (if I recall correctly; it could even have been the coronation of George V, in this style) of George VI. Other people were browsing, too, like a U.S. couple from Idaho. If I'd had more luggage space and hadn't quit my job a year earlier and thus been on a budget, I would have been tempted to buy at least the royal memorabilia for a British friend. A kayak shop was nearby, although I've forgotten how the negotiations went there and just jotted down that it was too late in the day for rentals — and a realty office and a Drill Hall.

The paddle steamer sternwheeler S.S. Moyie in Kaslo.
It looks taller in person, when not looking from the far side of the street.
September 14, 2024. All rights reserved.

Then we ambled into a café that offered ice cream — tiger and rainbow sherbet was my choice — and muffins (apple & bacon, blueberry) as well as the coffee. The two snug tables could barely fit us, and I felt mildly guilty as other customers came and left without finding a seat. Through the window we could easily see, without leaving our chairs, the comings and goings on the main street. Feeling well fed and relaxed after that — even I, despite my earlier grumpiness — we happily took our leave from Kaslo and returned to New Denver for the evening.