Old Neighbourhoods

A little while ago I was in Guelph for a doctors appointment. Afterwards, I was going to call an uber to bring me to the train station to travel back to Kitchener, but I thought I'd walk down to the apartment building that I lived in when I used to walk to the clinic. From there I remembered that I used to walk to high school, and from the high school I would sometimes walk downtown, and from downtown I could get to the train station. It felt pretty strange, doing a walk that I'd never done before, but patched together from different familiar routes, mostly from over ten years ago. I never made a wrong turn.

I walked by my old high school. Now they've got an arch and a statue of a guy with his arms outstretched. One of my coworkers who is ten years younger than me that went to the same school said they put both of those up while she was attending.

This wasn't my only opportunity to revisit old neighbourhoods. At work, we were exploring community centres because our main building was getting painted. I wound up getting assigned to facilitate a group that was near the old shopping centre that I would go to while I was in college. It looks a lot different now. It used to be a strip mall, and now it's like a square made of mall strips.

There's an LCBO (Liquor Control Board of Ontario). I used to find it strange that the one nearest was a half-hour bus trip, and then 15 minute walk away. I heard it theorized that this was by design, and that there was some agreement to not let students have such easy access to alcohol. That is apparently not the case anymore.

The Rabid Fox, which was the local pub, relocated slightly to one of the new mall strips. There is now Shoppers Drug Mart, which is a chain pharmacy that also sells everything else. This at least offers some competition to the Zehrs, which was previously the only option for groceries. Before, if you wanted a cheaper option, you'd have to take a half hour bus ride and walk for 15 minutes to the Food Basics next to the LCBO I previously mentioned.

Zehrs is a slightly more upscale Canadian grocery store. If I were a student nowadays, worrying about my budget and without the time to leave the neighbourhood, I would probably buy the bulk of my groceries at Shoppers.

For some reason, the area around Conestoga College has never seemed marketed to students. Across the street we had Pino's Pizza, which was advertised as gourmet, and we had Mango King, which was a sit-down Thai-Vietnamese place.

Last weekend I went to the Frederick Art Walk, which is an annual art exhibition held in the Central Frederick area. After graduating college, I lived for about five months in a connected neighbourhood. I was an independent facilitator at the time, and it seemed like all my colleagues lived here.

These people are really proud of their neighbourhood, and say that the century homes and urban forest are as impressive as the local artists. I always found this attitude to be slightly pretentious, but it is a nice area. I've got a friend who had a booth there selling wood-turned items and I bought a bowl.

I was going to bus back but I checked my Pokemon Go to see if there were any new locations and I noticed the cat hospital, which I recognized. From there, I pieced my way back to downtown and then walked home.

This weekend, Lee-Anne took me on a walk up by where she used to to live when she was going to university, and she showed me where her brothers lived too. It was good because I'd only walked 15 km this week, and I have a goal of 30 km weekly The walk she took me on wound up being around 12 km, putting me in a good spot to complete my goal by tomorrow.