All of them!
The building where Café Bloc is built used to be a peep show, and when construction started, there were still piles of old tapes in the grimy basement. Apparently, the tapes were “lost during construction.” You probably wouldn’t want to touch those things without gloves on anyway, but allegedly some might have had some black market commercial value. “Maybe one of the workers took them home. No, I’m kidding! But they are not there anymore,” jokes Seb.
Tons! That’s the official count. I checked.
There was no one most popular problem, says head setter Dave Gagnon, but some of the boulders with more of an outdoors feel got great reviews.
“What came out the most is people enjoy the complexity, that it wasn’t only left-right climbing,” he says. Some vertically challenged people were overheard saying that what they liked was that “hard” didn’t always mean “reach-y,” and there were usually multiple ways to do a problem, so you could figure out what works for your strengths, whether you’re more flexible, powerful, technical or dynamic.
Now Dave’s challenge is to keep up with demand. “Some people are coming every other day and some even everyday. We want to make sure they have enough boulder problems to keep challenging themselves,” he says. That means setting more problems overall – essentially making the walls “denser” – over the course of the next reset. So you can expect some new problems every few days.
Did you climb and stay for lunch? How about an espresso? Turns out lots of people did. And the bestselling panini from the opening week are…the végé-pâté and the prosciutto. But the stars of the week were definitely the cortados and lattes. The poor, fancy espresso machine rarely got a break. And you can expect that to continue as more climbers discover that they can get a quality coffee at the gym and a meal (and a beer…but only after climbing).
>4.
The rooftop patio will include hamacs, a slackline, climbing walls and a garden. Eco-friendly urban ag meets cool climber hangout.
Turns out some of us (me) were a bit too weak to pull hard on the sauna door (“No, it’s not locked. Yes, you’re just an idiot,” said someone appropriately/lovingly to me). And tons of users felt a little foolish when someone had to show them how to turn on the heat by twisting the dial on the bottom of the heater inside the sauna room itself – after they’d been sitting there in the lukewarm air for a while. Embarrassing? A bit. But no less embarrassing than exiting the sauna through the wrong door (into the wrong change room)! That’s why there are now signs outside the sauna doors saying you should probably leave from the same one through which you entered. And bring a towel. And take a shower. We love dirtbag climbers, too (to be honest, we are dirtbag climbers…), but let’s keep it clean, cool?
“It’s really fun!” says Seb.
“Jee and I feel good. We’re very happy with the staff we have. And we went yesterday today to meet the architect for the terrasse design. That’s what we’re looking forward to,” he says.
