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Shopping
is so weird in the US. Though, so far I have been to places that seem to be making more of an effort to be friendly to customers, which is something I didn't experience so much last time I was back in the US. May be a suburban thing.
Mike had an early day off yesterday and got home around 3. He's wanted to take me to Fry's for a while, and I finally had a real reason to go: my laptop backpack that I've had for 8 years is DEAD. One of the shoulder straps is detaching, one zipper barely works anymore, the velcro has torn apart one of the inner liners, and parts of the bag are actually ripping apart from the way I overfill/stress them.
So we went to Fry's, where I got a laptop bag and he got a whole bunch of random stuff. We spent about 2 hours just wandering around various parts of the store looking at things. The amusing part is that clerks kept coming up to us like "Do you have any questions?" and my goal was to ask a question every time they said that, although most of my questions were kind of irrelevant/tangential. Like "Since when are hard drives so cheap?" or "What age group is this computer case intended for?" or "Can this thing do anything BESIDES look like a fish tank?" At one point I was playing with a laptop that I really disliked the touchpad on, so I wrote on the screen in Japanese, "使えない", which means "I can't use it", and an Asian storeclerk is like "OMG DID YOU WRITE CHINESE? THAT IS SO COOL?" and I'm like "actually that's Japanese for 'I can't use this', because the touchpad is really ridiculous. Should I erase it?" and he's like "No that's really cool, leave it up! I can't write any of that..."
My new laptop bag is blue and has lots of pouches, including that there's a separate zipper at the back of the big pouch so you can take out just the laptop without opening the entire section, which is kind of cool. It also has a headphone strap for your mp3 player and so on.
Afterwards we went to Crossroads and stopped by The Sports Authority so Mike could get a baseball glove so we can play catch. We played catch in the store using various gloves and some softballs and eventually picked one out. It made me all nostalgic though and now I want to play softball. Sigh.
Crossroads has a Chipotle now, so I insisted we get dinner there :) I think that 2.5 days may be my longest airport-to-Chipotle time since moving to Japan, actually...
We spent a while playing the Lego Harry Potter game on the XBox yesterday.
Today, I walked a mile over to Inglewood Hill so I could get stuff from Safeway for lunch. Ended up with chicken salad and bread, and then a few other snack-like things. I am not so impressed with this Safeway in particular in terms of selection, but the people were awfully friendly. The way clerks in the store would just kind of say hello or "can i help you?" when they passed almost reminded me of having "irrashaimase!" shouted at me from every angle in a Japanese store. Odd.
On the other hand, I'm coming to the conclusion that Deanna-from-Japan is actually fairly average-looking in the US. I'm so used to thinking I'm ugly and huge compared to Japan, since 99% of the people you see look like they belong in a magazine, even the average people pay a ton of attention to fashion and hygiene, and are all thin. Here, people look a lot more sloppy and fat than I remember. I think it must just be reverse culture shock, though.
Mike had an early day off yesterday and got home around 3. He's wanted to take me to Fry's for a while, and I finally had a real reason to go: my laptop backpack that I've had for 8 years is DEAD. One of the shoulder straps is detaching, one zipper barely works anymore, the velcro has torn apart one of the inner liners, and parts of the bag are actually ripping apart from the way I overfill/stress them.
So we went to Fry's, where I got a laptop bag and he got a whole bunch of random stuff. We spent about 2 hours just wandering around various parts of the store looking at things. The amusing part is that clerks kept coming up to us like "Do you have any questions?" and my goal was to ask a question every time they said that, although most of my questions were kind of irrelevant/tangential. Like "Since when are hard drives so cheap?" or "What age group is this computer case intended for?" or "Can this thing do anything BESIDES look like a fish tank?" At one point I was playing with a laptop that I really disliked the touchpad on, so I wrote on the screen in Japanese, "使えない", which means "I can't use it", and an Asian storeclerk is like "OMG DID YOU WRITE CHINESE? THAT IS SO COOL?" and I'm like "actually that's Japanese for 'I can't use this', because the touchpad is really ridiculous. Should I erase it?" and he's like "No that's really cool, leave it up! I can't write any of that..."
My new laptop bag is blue and has lots of pouches, including that there's a separate zipper at the back of the big pouch so you can take out just the laptop without opening the entire section, which is kind of cool. It also has a headphone strap for your mp3 player and so on.
Afterwards we went to Crossroads and stopped by The Sports Authority so Mike could get a baseball glove so we can play catch. We played catch in the store using various gloves and some softballs and eventually picked one out. It made me all nostalgic though and now I want to play softball. Sigh.
Crossroads has a Chipotle now, so I insisted we get dinner there :) I think that 2.5 days may be my longest airport-to-Chipotle time since moving to Japan, actually...
We spent a while playing the Lego Harry Potter game on the XBox yesterday.
Today, I walked a mile over to Inglewood Hill so I could get stuff from Safeway for lunch. Ended up with chicken salad and bread, and then a few other snack-like things. I am not so impressed with this Safeway in particular in terms of selection, but the people were awfully friendly. The way clerks in the store would just kind of say hello or "can i help you?" when they passed almost reminded me of having "irrashaimase!" shouted at me from every angle in a Japanese store. Odd.
On the other hand, I'm coming to the conclusion that Deanna-from-Japan is actually fairly average-looking in the US. I'm so used to thinking I'm ugly and huge compared to Japan, since 99% of the people you see look like they belong in a magazine, even the average people pay a ton of attention to fashion and hygiene, and are all thin. Here, people look a lot more sloppy and fat than I remember. I think it must just be reverse culture shock, though.