Winnipeg to Churchill

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Imagine the length of that list by Vancouver! All true though. Well, Satan is arguable. 😊 So, I've got a travel buddy since Winnipeg (to be referred to as 'The 'Peg' forthwith!)! The awesome Ms. Charmaine Hyatt. So glad to have company. Just the fact that she set out to do this trip (across the country, alone, for a month) makes me like her already. Last night was lots of fun, just drinking cans of horrendous Danish 8% beer in our dorm, starting as we mean to go on, being HARDCORE.
The 'Peg is a dismal, unsettling city, the murder capital of Canada and conversely the artistic and cultural capital of Manitoba. So many sad cases here, just people everywhere who have fallen on the thorns of life. The HI hostel is populated by a tiny minority of backpackers, the bulk of its patrons literally have nowhere else to go. Families, old people, the whole works. All refugees. Plenty of drunks on the streets, and some folk who'd gut you for twenty bucks. It's like Canada just swept all its problems into the middle of the country. There's a big dark cloud over Winnipeg. That said, it's nothing I can't handle, by some international standards it's a perfectly upmarket town. They've done a lot of cosmetic work to it- the Forks market down at the waterfront is respectably pretty in a vacant, catalogue model type of way- but it just doesn't sit right.
So Saskatchewan/Manitoba so far has been really not much to write home about. Some boreal forest, arable land, yellowbrown, flat, samey. The prairies just go on and ooooon and ooooooon. Breathtaking in scale but not in substance.
Y'know what's really difficult. Self discipline. Honestly. Constantly having to restrain myself and be practical, like take my food situation: I'm hungry. I own a bag of apples (already had three today) 2 packs of noodles, 4 bread rolls, some raw veg which I have to make last four days because I'm told fruit and veg is a rip-off in Churchill (because everything organic is brought in on the train, it's above the tree line meaning nothing grows, that's why the Inuit were carnivores...).

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