Our trip to Vancouver, and today at work...
Got to Kenmore a little later than expected; picked up Amber (![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
flotastic) and Ray (nemesiscw); hit the road. Trip was largely uneventful, even hitting the border. We got lost after coming across (note to self: highway 1A != highway 1), but called Matt (fuj) and he helped us get to where he was, and then we followed him to I-Gene (zqfmbg)'s house. Amber and I were staying there, and Ray was staying at Fuj's place. I guess I stayed up talking to I-Gene until like 3am, which was dumb, because waking up at 9:30 was really tough the next day. But eh, it worked out, I was ready to go pretty much exactly when Fuj showed up with Cory (Zenjin) and Ray at 10:30.
We split into cars again; I drove Ray and I-Gene, and Fuj drove Amber and Cory, and we went to Metrotown... which is pretty much where we stayed all day. First we went to Playdium, which looks kinda like the Playdium in Toronto does, but a little brighter. I got to try out the infamous Playdium stage with Fuj, and BOY DOES IT SUCK. The sensors are all broken-like and the stage is really hard to keep your balance on... see, they took apart a DDR machine, so rather than the screen being a few feet in front of you, it's about 10-15 feet in front of you, and is a huge projection screen... it's REALLY hard to figure out where the pad is without waving your arms around to the bar from time to time, even if you don't bar rape. I took some pictures, I'll post them later. Anyway, so I played some songs, it was pretty tough. They also have a DDR 1.5 mix machine upstairs on Joint Premium, so we went up and played that a bit, although one of the arrows is dead on the 1P side of that machine too. There's a Guitar Freaks US, and a HipHopMania CM2 there too. It's kinda cool I guess.
While at Playdium Ryan (bubbledragonnet?) showed up, and he came with us for lunch... lunch was of course also at Metrotown, at a Japanese restaurant where they had an all-you-can-eat lunch deal... with a kaiten sushi conveyor belt, and little portions of other japanese food. So I-Gene and I ate a ton of sushi, and I think Fuj had a little, and everyone else ate lunch stuff (well, Ray and Amber and Ryan at least... Cory basically just had california rolls and that was it). We went up to the sushi line a ton and I ate a lot of salmon sushi, and a TON of california rolls! It was very Keevon-like, I was like "OOH! CALIFORNIA ROLLS!" and I'd keep taking them as they went by. We weren't actually sitting next to the kaiten sushi though, so we'd go get a buncha plates and bring them back to the table. We watched TV, and it was wacky. They had Sailor Moon on for a while, and then Hamtaro, and whatnot. I think those of us in our group who are white were the only white people in the restaurant for the whole time we were there, too. Actually, Metrotown's population is mostly asian, which is kinda cool. They had all these stores with kanji all over the place and of course I can't really read Chinese, so I felt like a big dork. Fortunately, Ray can't read Chinese either, so we both felt like big dorks. We all went to Superstore after that, where Ray and I bought a ton of Canadian Coke and some assorted snacks, and Ketchup chips, and whatnot. After that Ryan had to leave for work, and the rest of us headed to CHQ with a stop off at my car to drop off the stuff we bought.
We met up with Mark (vivaldi_amuro) at CHQ, and some other assorted Bemani people whose names I never caught except Chris Estrella (aka "ChrisSaysScrewFlanders" or 321estrellas), who is as good at DDR as was foretold. And Beau or whoever was there for a bit but I didn't talk to him besides saying hi. And other random people but I have no idea who they were, like those two girls with the blue and purple hair who were in a big group and kept asking us for money and credits and whatnot.
Anyway, CHQ is the closest thing to a genuine Japanese arcade I have seen on this continent. It was small, cramped, had a shitload of picture-sticker-card machines and UFO catchers and Bemani and other assorted Japanese arcade games... and everything was SO close together and the lighting was weird and it was just awesome. Lessee, in terms of music games, they had DDR Extreme, Guitar Freaks 8th, Percussion Freaks 7th, PPP 2nd, KBM 3rd, Beatmania 3th (Okay, it was 6th UK, but it was TINY and had a 3rd marquee on it), Samba de Amigo 2k, and this game called Rock Fever. I played on every one of those. SdA was pretty much broken, Beatmania was ok but the scratch pads were REALLY STICKY, KBM was decent (I-Gene got a high score on it), PPP was kinda self-conscious but I did ok on it, I didn't actually play GF, ok, and Percussion Freaks had a broken hi-hat :(
I really enjoyed Rock Fever though. It's like this korean (Chinese?) game (here's the gamefaqs link), you have like, a foot pedal, and two sets of three buttons, two blue and one red, for both hand, so 6 buttons and a pedal. If the volume had been high enough to hear the songs I probly would have enjoyed it even more. It had some stuff from PIU like Com'back and Funky Tonight, and random songs with titles in Chinese that I couldn't read, and whatnot. Overall, I wouldn't mind getting to play it more. It's not as cool as Beatmania but it was still something new and different.
I also played a bunch of DDR with Cory, and I-Gene, and whoever... I got two new Heavy AA's, and full-comboed DXY for the first time ever... and after I AA'ed Highs Off U, I played "Celebrate" as my extra stage just for Mark.
After a few hours at CHQ on good DDR pads, we headed back to Playdium. We all chipped in $5 CDN for timecards and played some DDR EX, and some DDR 1.5 (it's a lot of fun to "freestyle"... haha... or to enter the Maniac code and be like "whoa, 1x flat etc"). I played some HHCM2 also.. and after a while I got kinda bored of hanging out at Playdium. There was a big group of DDR people around the EX machine with Fuj and whatnot but most of them looked really young, also there was this big group of screaming people for a while, so I didn't really know what to say to any of the people and ended up convincing I-Gene to walk around the mall with me for a bit.
First we went to Chapters. I know that I'm committing treason by shopping at Chapters while working for Amazon, but anyway... They had a billion copies of Order of the Phoenix sitting around. So after a while I decided to be a big dork and go buy the first 5 Harry Potter books in the Canadian/British editions, since I enjoyed reading the first book in British so much. Yes, incase you can't guess, my rage at Book 5 has worn off quite a bit. As Shawn Quinlan would say, "I've lowered my feelings towards it to 'I will buy HP books, but I will spit on J.K.Rowling if I ever meet her.'" So, because I bought them all (which cost like $135 CDN, whee), the Chapters cashier gave me a free Order of the Phoenix poster! Yay... except I obviously can't bring it to work :) Yeah, so while standing in line at the counter I realized I should call Eli and see if he wanted anything, but I was feeling lazy and dumb and wasn't even sure he'd answer the phone. So I suck. Anyway, after Chapters we walked over to Lush, whichmegami had raved about. It was definitely... interesting. Lots of soaps that look like weird colored cheese, really... and strange face masks and massage bars and whatnot. They also had these balls that looked like styrofoam but if you put it in hot water it'd sizzle up and release lots of perfume and whatnot. (I see while looking at the Lush website that these are called "Bath bombs".) We kept watching them "demonstrate" by throwing them in the pot of warm water. Whee. After a while I decided to buy these weird... hmm. I-Gene described them as "Otter Pop Soap Bars" which is fairly accurate. They're these plastic bags full of "shower gel" of some sort, and they are separated into little pouchy things. So the idea is that you freeze it and then when you go to take a shower, you cut off one of the pouchy things, which is roughly the size of a 1-inch oval ice soap bar... and you let it melt all over you in the hot water and it cools you off and makes you smell nice or something. I don't know. It sounded like it might be nice for after DDRing. Sadly they don't seem to have them in the online catalog or I'd link to what they look like.
We came back to Playdium and goofed off on a few more games after that... we also ducked into a few more stores. Like there was one called Gizmo's where they had some specialty stuff, and in their back room they had a DDR 8rd mix (seriously! it was an EX machine with a 3rd mix marquee on it) and another Percussion Freaks 7th. After a while it was almost 8pm. Eek. So we grabbed Ray and the three of us went to the food court and got A&W's food for dinner, which was really good! I was going to get Tim Horton's timbits in the food court but they were out of chocolate timbits. GRR.
So we went back, collected Amber, said goodbye to everyone, and left Metrotown at like 8:40pm... I-gene directed us to a Tim Horton's near his house, kinda. So I got a big thing of Timbits (which are Tim Horton's donut holes if you're Canada-illiterate) and two donuts. Amber got some dinner because she'd stayed at Playdium while we ate in the food court. And then we dropped I-Gene off at home which was all sad because who knows when we'll see him again. And then we hit the road...
The border wasn't too bad either. We had to wait like 5 cars worth of line, and we got up there and the guard was a little meaner about how we knew each other... like he asked where we worked, and I said I worked at Amazon, and Amber was in HS and Ray's in College and he's just like "How the heck do you know each other?" and we're like "Videogames..." Heh. "Do you have anything to declare?" "Some donuts and Coca-Cola?" He let us through without looking at our passports yet again.
I got back to Kenmore at about 11:45 and dropped Ray off, and then I had to decide what to do about Amber. In a fit of pique I decided it'd be just a lot easier if I drove to Tacoma, even though I was exhausted and needed to get to work early on Thursday... so we got gas at a gas station on Bothell Way somewhere (The car got past 50k miles on this trip. And it even got 300+ miles on that tank), and headed to Tacoma. I drove pretty fast the whole way and we got to Amber's around 12:40; I went in to use the bathroom and then turned around and headed back home, getting here around 1:25... and I pretty much collapsed from exhaustion a little bit later.
Today I went to work. I missed the early meeting, but it's just as well; Eli drove me in so I wouldn't get there TOO late and I was still tired as all heck all day, which kinda sucked. The Timbits were REALLY appreciated though, a ton of people came in and ate them and were all thankful... and we had this ongoing conversation all day about donuts and Canada and whatnot going on. Colin's from the town Tim Horton's was founded in and he was like "Yeah! They have them on EVERY CORNER there!" We also talked about amusement parks for some reason and I'm kinda homesick for Kennywood or Cedar Point or something. Oh! And Mark and Jon came to visit me after the intern lunch thingy and that was cool, I think that was the first time I'd seen Jon since that first night he was in Seattle. Me and Hemant and Yan had lunch outside today because it was so nice out... and later in the day I actually snuck outside and napped on the lawn for 10 minutes when I was just TOTALLY shot. I stayed at work today from like 10:30am until like 8:30pm so I don't feel too bad about it... I had to take the last shuttle to US1 and finish working from there. Came home and pretty much tried to catch up on online stuff, and played some more PPL... and Eli and I had weird pesto ravioli for dinner... I don't know where the evening went. At least Gil Meche got his 10th win tonight against the Angels. Yay.
I still haven't finished my HP rant. Maybe I never will... I keep discussing it with people anyway. Whee.
flotastic) and Ray (nemesiscw); hit the road. Trip was largely uneventful, even hitting the border. We got lost after coming across (note to self: highway 1A != highway 1), but called Matt (fuj) and he helped us get to where he was, and then we followed him to I-Gene (zqfmbg)'s house. Amber and I were staying there, and Ray was staying at Fuj's place. I guess I stayed up talking to I-Gene until like 3am, which was dumb, because waking up at 9:30 was really tough the next day. But eh, it worked out, I was ready to go pretty much exactly when Fuj showed up with Cory (Zenjin) and Ray at 10:30.We split into cars again; I drove Ray and I-Gene, and Fuj drove Amber and Cory, and we went to Metrotown... which is pretty much where we stayed all day. First we went to Playdium, which looks kinda like the Playdium in Toronto does, but a little brighter. I got to try out the infamous Playdium stage with Fuj, and BOY DOES IT SUCK. The sensors are all broken-like and the stage is really hard to keep your balance on... see, they took apart a DDR machine, so rather than the screen being a few feet in front of you, it's about 10-15 feet in front of you, and is a huge projection screen... it's REALLY hard to figure out where the pad is without waving your arms around to the bar from time to time, even if you don't bar rape. I took some pictures, I'll post them later. Anyway, so I played some songs, it was pretty tough. They also have a DDR 1.5 mix machine upstairs on Joint Premium, so we went up and played that a bit, although one of the arrows is dead on the 1P side of that machine too. There's a Guitar Freaks US, and a HipHopMania CM2 there too. It's kinda cool I guess.
While at Playdium Ryan (
bubbledragonnet?) showed up, and he came with us for lunch... lunch was of course also at Metrotown, at a Japanese restaurant where they had an all-you-can-eat lunch deal... with a kaiten sushi conveyor belt, and little portions of other japanese food. So I-Gene and I ate a ton of sushi, and I think Fuj had a little, and everyone else ate lunch stuff (well, Ray and Amber and Ryan at least... Cory basically just had california rolls and that was it). We went up to the sushi line a ton and I ate a lot of salmon sushi, and a TON of california rolls! It was very Keevon-like, I was like "OOH! CALIFORNIA ROLLS!" and I'd keep taking them as they went by. We weren't actually sitting next to the kaiten sushi though, so we'd go get a buncha plates and bring them back to the table. We watched TV, and it was wacky. They had Sailor Moon on for a while, and then Hamtaro, and whatnot. I think those of us in our group who are white were the only white people in the restaurant for the whole time we were there, too. Actually, Metrotown's population is mostly asian, which is kinda cool. They had all these stores with kanji all over the place and of course I can't really read Chinese, so I felt like a big dork. Fortunately, Ray can't read Chinese either, so we both felt like big dorks. We all went to Superstore after that, where Ray and I bought a ton of Canadian Coke and some assorted snacks, and Ketchup chips, and whatnot. After that Ryan had to leave for work, and the rest of us headed to CHQ with a stop off at my car to drop off the stuff we bought. We met up with Mark (
vivaldi_amuro) at CHQ, and some other assorted Bemani people whose names I never caught except Chris Estrella (aka "ChrisSaysScrewFlanders" or 321estrellas), who is as good at DDR as was foretold. And Beau or whoever was there for a bit but I didn't talk to him besides saying hi. And other random people but I have no idea who they were, like those two girls with the blue and purple hair who were in a big group and kept asking us for money and credits and whatnot.Anyway, CHQ is the closest thing to a genuine Japanese arcade I have seen on this continent. It was small, cramped, had a shitload of picture-sticker-card machines and UFO catchers and Bemani and other assorted Japanese arcade games... and everything was SO close together and the lighting was weird and it was just awesome. Lessee, in terms of music games, they had DDR Extreme, Guitar Freaks 8th, Percussion Freaks 7th, PPP 2nd, KBM 3rd, Beatmania 3th (Okay, it was 6th UK, but it was TINY and had a 3rd marquee on it), Samba de Amigo 2k, and this game called Rock Fever. I played on every one of those. SdA was pretty much broken, Beatmania was ok but the scratch pads were REALLY STICKY, KBM was decent (I-Gene got a high score on it), PPP was kinda self-conscious but I did ok on it, I didn't actually play GF, ok, and Percussion Freaks had a broken hi-hat :(
I really enjoyed Rock Fever though. It's like this korean (Chinese?) game (here's the gamefaqs link), you have like, a foot pedal, and two sets of three buttons, two blue and one red, for both hand, so 6 buttons and a pedal. If the volume had been high enough to hear the songs I probly would have enjoyed it even more. It had some stuff from PIU like Com'back and Funky Tonight, and random songs with titles in Chinese that I couldn't read, and whatnot. Overall, I wouldn't mind getting to play it more. It's not as cool as Beatmania but it was still something new and different.
I also played a bunch of DDR with Cory, and I-Gene, and whoever... I got two new Heavy AA's, and full-comboed DXY for the first time ever... and after I AA'ed Highs Off U, I played "Celebrate" as my extra stage just for Mark.
After a few hours at CHQ on good DDR pads, we headed back to Playdium. We all chipped in $5 CDN for timecards and played some DDR EX, and some DDR 1.5 (it's a lot of fun to "freestyle"... haha... or to enter the Maniac code and be like "whoa, 1x flat etc"). I played some HHCM2 also.. and after a while I got kinda bored of hanging out at Playdium. There was a big group of DDR people around the EX machine with Fuj and whatnot but most of them looked really young, also there was this big group of screaming people for a while, so I didn't really know what to say to any of the people and ended up convincing I-Gene to walk around the mall with me for a bit.
First we went to Chapters. I know that I'm committing treason by shopping at Chapters while working for Amazon, but anyway... They had a billion copies of Order of the Phoenix sitting around. So after a while I decided to be a big dork and go buy the first 5 Harry Potter books in the Canadian/British editions, since I enjoyed reading the first book in British so much. Yes, incase you can't guess, my rage at Book 5 has worn off quite a bit. As Shawn Quinlan would say, "I've lowered my feelings towards it to 'I will buy HP books, but I will spit on J.K.Rowling if I ever meet her.'" So, because I bought them all (which cost like $135 CDN, whee), the Chapters cashier gave me a free Order of the Phoenix poster! Yay... except I obviously can't bring it to work :) Yeah, so while standing in line at the counter I realized I should call Eli and see if he wanted anything, but I was feeling lazy and dumb and wasn't even sure he'd answer the phone. So I suck. Anyway, after Chapters we walked over to Lush, which
megami had raved about. It was definitely... interesting. Lots of soaps that look like weird colored cheese, really... and strange face masks and massage bars and whatnot. They also had these balls that looked like styrofoam but if you put it in hot water it'd sizzle up and release lots of perfume and whatnot. (I see while looking at the Lush website that these are called "Bath bombs".) We kept watching them "demonstrate" by throwing them in the pot of warm water. Whee. After a while I decided to buy these weird... hmm. I-Gene described them as "Otter Pop Soap Bars" which is fairly accurate. They're these plastic bags full of "shower gel" of some sort, and they are separated into little pouchy things. So the idea is that you freeze it and then when you go to take a shower, you cut off one of the pouchy things, which is roughly the size of a 1-inch oval ice soap bar... and you let it melt all over you in the hot water and it cools you off and makes you smell nice or something. I don't know. It sounded like it might be nice for after DDRing. Sadly they don't seem to have them in the online catalog or I'd link to what they look like.We came back to Playdium and goofed off on a few more games after that... we also ducked into a few more stores. Like there was one called Gizmo's where they had some specialty stuff, and in their back room they had a DDR 8rd mix (seriously! it was an EX machine with a 3rd mix marquee on it) and another Percussion Freaks 7th. After a while it was almost 8pm. Eek. So we grabbed Ray and the three of us went to the food court and got A&W's food for dinner, which was really good! I was going to get Tim Horton's timbits in the food court but they were out of chocolate timbits. GRR.
So we went back, collected Amber, said goodbye to everyone, and left Metrotown at like 8:40pm... I-gene directed us to a Tim Horton's near his house, kinda. So I got a big thing of Timbits (which are Tim Horton's donut holes if you're Canada-illiterate) and two donuts. Amber got some dinner because she'd stayed at Playdium while we ate in the food court. And then we dropped I-Gene off at home which was all sad because who knows when we'll see him again. And then we hit the road...
The border wasn't too bad either. We had to wait like 5 cars worth of line, and we got up there and the guard was a little meaner about how we knew each other... like he asked where we worked, and I said I worked at Amazon, and Amber was in HS and Ray's in College and he's just like "How the heck do you know each other?" and we're like "Videogames..." Heh. "Do you have anything to declare?" "Some donuts and Coca-Cola?" He let us through without looking at our passports yet again.
I got back to Kenmore at about 11:45 and dropped Ray off, and then I had to decide what to do about Amber. In a fit of pique I decided it'd be just a lot easier if I drove to Tacoma, even though I was exhausted and needed to get to work early on Thursday... so we got gas at a gas station on Bothell Way somewhere (The car got past 50k miles on this trip. And it even got 300+ miles on that tank), and headed to Tacoma. I drove pretty fast the whole way and we got to Amber's around 12:40; I went in to use the bathroom and then turned around and headed back home, getting here around 1:25... and I pretty much collapsed from exhaustion a little bit later.
Today I went to work. I missed the early meeting, but it's just as well; Eli drove me in so I wouldn't get there TOO late and I was still tired as all heck all day, which kinda sucked. The Timbits were REALLY appreciated though, a ton of people came in and ate them and were all thankful... and we had this ongoing conversation all day about donuts and Canada and whatnot going on. Colin's from the town Tim Horton's was founded in and he was like "Yeah! They have them on EVERY CORNER there!" We also talked about amusement parks for some reason and I'm kinda homesick for Kennywood or Cedar Point or something. Oh! And Mark and Jon came to visit me after the intern lunch thingy and that was cool, I think that was the first time I'd seen Jon since that first night he was in Seattle. Me and Hemant and Yan had lunch outside today because it was so nice out... and later in the day I actually snuck outside and napped on the lawn for 10 minutes when I was just TOTALLY shot. I stayed at work today from like 10:30am until like 8:30pm so I don't feel too bad about it... I had to take the last shuttle to US1 and finish working from there. Came home and pretty much tried to catch up on online stuff, and played some more PPL... and Eli and I had weird pesto ravioli for dinner... I don't know where the evening went. At least Gil Meche got his 10th win tonight against the Angels. Yay.
I still haven't finished my HP rant. Maybe I never will... I keep discussing it with people anyway. Whee.
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According to Rumi, the frozen shower gels are one of the things that can't be mail-ordered. That's probably why they're not on their website. I guess you'll have to take a picture...
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Even worse, highway 1A != highway 1, eh?
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What are your occupations?
Shoe guy.
Student.
System Admin.
...
What are you going to do in Canada?
Play video games!
...
XD
Grr... You went to Lush without me~! ;_; Ah well. That just means it's one less person I have to convert as you will convert on your own (and I'm going up there soon myself anyway). >D