Sunday 27 May 2012

Spending money feels good

These past couple of months I have been very depressed. Walking helps me get my mind off of my problems so this is why I have been walking around so much. This month I was able to save on some extra cash because I've been a lot more quieter than usual. Last weekend I went on a little shopping spree. Besides, I needed some new clothes for this summer because the ones I have are like 10 years old and kinda washed out. So I bought a couple new western shirts from Salt Valley at Urban Outfitters with some t-shirts.

Gotta get my daily dose to stay fresh! And some chicken.

Yesterday my brother in law and I hung out and went downtown. He wanted to do upgrade on his iMac, but just as I thought, you can't upgrade an iMac. Now he can't play Diablo III. I warned him. But now he's stuck, the poor bastard. Anyway, later on he told me he saw a shoe store with some nice Vans. We went to take a look and lo and behold! I found the nicest pair of shoes to complement my recent clothing purchase!
I went and got myself a new pair of classic Chuck Taylor All Stars! Now I'm stylin'.


Looks good from my perspective.

Yep, I'm lookin' pretty fly for a white guy.

We went back to my place and walked around the fancy high-end neighborhood of HoMa. (If you're not from Montreal, read "the ghetto") and we came across a candy store called Oscar. Now, a friend of mine is a hardcore candy freak. And there's one candy in particular for which she would sell her own mother to get some. I'm talking about Cow Tales. That candy is so hard to find, you'd have better luck searching for the poop of the Pope. (That's actually translated from a local French Canadian expression, "plus rare que la merde du pape" for all you crazy anglophones out there.)

The funny thing is I recently got in touch with the good folks at Goetze who make the Cow Tales and asked them if they knew of any store that sold it on Montreal. They told me that the only store they know of was called Oscar and they were located in Plaza St-Hubert. As luck would have it, I happened to find one just a couple of blocks away from my apartment! Unfortunately they were closed when I passed by, but I made it my personal mission to go check it out the next day. And I did.

So today, I put on my new shoes and took 'em out for a test. As ghetto as HoMa is, there's a wealth of interesting things to see. Especially when it comes to street art and graffiti. My most favorite is the Back to the Future mural somewhere on Sainte-Catherine East. Here's a little cheery one that I found in my hood on my way to Oscar's.
"Merci!" says the little French doodle, smoking his cigarette.

After making a stop at the ATM to get some cash, I went to Oscar's candy store to find out if they had the famous Cow Tales. The store is this little place with a lot of bulk candy, gummies, cookies and nuts. They also had some brand name candy, chocolate bars and various candy-related accessories. (Like candy g-string underwear, yum...)

EDIT: Here's the website for the Oscar candy store and here are the addresses of the stores in Montréal:





It's a nice little place, but it seriously pales in comparison to a store I went to in New York city. That other place had shelves of candy of every freakin' kind imaginable from all over the world as high as 2 floors up! And it was just a little family store on the ground floor of an apartment building! It's too bad we can't find stores like that here. But, Oscar is still a pretty cool little store. It has this quaint little general store kind of feel to it. And guess what? They has teh Cow Talez!



Actually, they're not really Cow Tales. See, an actual Cow Tale is a long stick of soft caramel filled with an Oreo-like cream in the middle. These are just Caramel Creams but they taste the same. They had two kinds, the classic caramel and the chocolate caramel variant. So I grabbed a couple of bags of those and I looked around for some other candy that I might like, paid for the candy and went home with a mouth full of sugar. 

Hostie!! I don't know why they had those, it's not even sweet!

Teh spoils!

What you see in the picture above are a licorice pipe, some raspberry-lemonade sticks, a chocolate covered sugar fudge bar, a peanut butter pretzel Dairy Milk chocolate bar, some ChupaChups lollipops, peaches and cream hard candy, big ass Whoppers/Maltesers, Caramel Creams and Chocolate Caramel Creams. By the way, I've been dying to buy the peaches and cream sort of Campino hard candy just for this:

Cut the rope!! Omnom wants it!

I finally had to go buy a couple more things downtown, so I took advantage of my sugar super power and drove down to the Eaton Center to get some new bed sheets for the summer. On my way there I saw this crazy awesome red Porsche Cayman S, but I noticed something peculiar about it. Check out the licence plate!

Gangsta life

Now think about it for a second. If this guy has M0* DEF, that means there is someone, somwhere with a M05 DEF licence plate. That's Mos Def! My favorite rapper! Why don't I have a cool licence like that!?!? People would think a cool rapper is driving my car! Instead mine has to end with BRF. That's short of BARF! And there ain't nothin' cool about BARF.

I couldn't check if it was Mos Def in the car, but after all this excitement I finally got to the Eaton Center. I went over to Simon's and I made the most awesomest discovery evar. I was browsing the bedding section of the store when I came across this.

Afro pillow?

Yeah, that's a pillow. An afro pillow. So you can lay your head with your face in a pile of hair, because who doesn't like to have hair in their face, especially when they're trying to lie down and relax. The only cool thing about this pillow is that the underpart has a zipper and you can remove the pillow stuffing and shove that thing on your head and pretend you're Dolemite or Black Belt Jones. Too bad I didn't have any company to share this with at that time, but then on the spur of the moment I asked a nice random person if they could take my picture with that thing on my head and they did. Looking back at the picture I realized the whole afro style just wasn't meant to be. Maybe for Halloween I'll come back and by it to make a cool Afro Samurai costume. (Or Cracker Samurai?)

Finally, I was talking to a salesman in a camera store about buying a camera for an upcoming trip to San Francisco and he told me he went there himself. He told me about a Japanese neighborhood and how much the food was great there. So being a complete ramen freak, I asked him if he ever tried it. It turns out the guy actually went to Japan for almost a year for school! Lucky son of a bitch got a taste of the real authentic Japanese ramen over there. Then I told him about my favorite spot in Montreal: Ramen-Ya, he didn't know of the place but he told me about another one called Hakata Ramen on Stanley and he told me they were pretty good. So you can look forward to me writing a post about this very soon.


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