#120. Canada Day (Thursday, July 1, 2021)
What was your best day…of getting back to something after a long break?
In any other year, this Canada Day wouldn’t have this list. But 2021 was 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)1, I pretty quickly had to accept that as the norm. We were working from home the entire time, and our attempts to replicate things virtually—including a neat virtual Happy Hour platform where we could drag our icons to different tables to join in on different conversations—weren’t 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 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. (Jerry had just started working remotely at a Swiss-based firm.) 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.
To start off, that Canada Day afternoon Jerry and I drive to the fancy Andaz hotel he booked in the downtown Byward Market for this occasion. They have a pretty sweet, high-end balcony on the 20th floor, which the front desk says has a three month waiting list. But when Jerry and I get up there, he tells the hostess that we just want to check the place out for a few minutes, and she lets us in. We end up staying for about an hour, have our first of many drinks, and enjoy 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 and multiple glasses of Korean soju until we can all barely walk.
From there, we go back to our hotel room, each down a few cans of Molson Coors White Claw seltzer2 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 foreign yet oddly familiar.
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 long time.
(N.B. Through all this and the next morning, I feel completely fine. Somehow, the 15-month hiatus had no effect on my ability to hold liquor.)