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Calgary, Alberta

Yesterday I ran around the city a bit, trying to see as much as possible for as little as possible...
     It was hard.
     The walk from Sean's place in Renfrew was long but scenic. Cold and crisp, Calgary did turn out to be mostly suburb, with a pretty concentrated centre with all your usual tourist hangouts just south of the Bow river where a lot of money can be spent very easily. Like $14 for going up Calgary Tower, $9 for a student ticket to the Glenbow Museum, and all those malls! They're all interconnected, so you could probably walk from shop to shop most of the way across the city without having to see sunlight. This is probably the idea behind the Plus Fifteen, too- a heated walkway above the streets so the Calgarians don't have to freeze in winter.
     The Glenbow offered your normal mix of traditional art, weird modern stuff, rooms full of the extensive and glorious history of Alberta, all 150 years of it, and then some disco music and a sequin-clad Native American caught my eye... Just next to the headlining Nude in Canadian Art exhibition stood a room dedicated to Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, the cross-dressing Native-American alter-ego of the artist Kent Monkman, who appears in stilettos and bright pink feathers on stunning backdrops of soaring mountains and lake scenes, usually in the process of sticking a strong-buttocked scantily-clad mounty through with arrows.
    There was a video too. I won't go into details, but a topless Robin Hood was involved.

     I would, of course, be lost without my travel companion Boogie Bear, who has been with me since I first came to Canada with the family in 2006. Here he is checking out Calgary Tower--


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