#112. Canada Day (Thursday, July 1, 2021)

What was your best day…of getting back to something after a long break?

Any other year, this particular Canada Day celebration¹ likely would not have made it onto this list. But as the 2021 in the title implies, this was definitely not any other year.

In the 15 months prior, I had to completely recalibrate what I considered a baseline level of social activity. Whereas before March 2020, it was physically impossible for me to spend a Friday night after work not going out (and having some amount of alcohol)², I pretty quickly had to accept that as the norm. We were working from home the entire time, and our attempts to replicate things virtually³ were clearly not the same.

But as this date approached, things were slowly starting to open up. And while we hadn’t returned to the office yet, my brother and his (younger) crowd of fellow medical students had already had their share of parties. He had just finished his first year of medical school at the University of Ottawa, and we were living together. And today, three of his friends from McGill (where he had done his undergrad) were coming over for the Canada Day long weekend.

There was Jozsef and Derek, who were now doing their Master’s there, as well as Jerry Qing – who was closer to my age, and had worked in Seattle as an accountant for several years before doing his Master’s at McGill where he roomed with and became close friends with my brother two years prior. I had met them all briefly on previous trips to Montreal, and was excited in the lead-up. My first get-together of any form in over a year, and my brother promised it would be lit.

To start off, that Canada Day afternoon Jerry and I drove to the fancy Andaz hotel he’d booked in the downtown Byward Market for this occasion. (Jerry had started working remotely at a Swiss-based firm, and was living in Ottawa for the summer before moving to Zurich for a year.) They had a pretty sweet, high-end balcony on the 20th floor, which the front desk said had a three month waiting list. But when Jerry and I got up there, he just told the hostess that we wanted to check the place out for a few minutes, and she let us in. We ended up staying for about an hour, during which we had our first of many drinks and enjoyed the beautiful Canada Day view of the city.

Soon after, my brother arrives with Jozsef and Derek from the train station and we go to the nearby all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ place for dinner. My brother and Jozsef are veterans at this, so we get through multiple rounds with surprising efficiency, along with multiple glasses of Korean soju.⁴

From there, we go back to our hotel room, each down a few cans of Molson Coors White Claw setzler⁵ while playing cards, then head back out again. We prance the busy nighttime streets before settling on another bar where we order another two large pitchers of beer and talk the summer night away – in a way that feels completely foreign yet oddly familiar at the same time.

It’s past one when we finally return to the hotel room, where I settle in for the most satisfying sleep I’ve had in a very long time.

(N.B. Through all this and the next morning, I feel completely fine. Somehow, the 15-month effective hiatus had no effect on my ability to hold my liquor.)

Canada Day, as the name implies, is our national holiday. And it’s a big deal in the national capital Ottawa, where I lived, with masses of people coming from all over the country. Though it was very much muted in 2021, for obvious reasons.
The fallback option, and eventual choice 90% of time, was the weekly researcher Happy Hour at the nearby The Office pub, which would often include dinner and stretch surprisingly late into the night.
Including a neat virtual Happy Hour platform where we could drag our icons to different tables to join in on different conversations. Cool as that was, it didn’t last – partly because we had to supply our own beer.
All the while, there’s some kind of accident at the nearby intersection with multiple ambulances and overall chaos – adding to the surreal feeling of all this. (We never found out what the accident was.)
The best drink you can buy in bulk at a liquor store, bar none.