/travel/usa/Going South
I'm going to break up my travel summaries into two entries.
On December 29th, Clare and I caught a bus from my parents' place into Toronto. We wandered around, through the Kensington Market and Chinatown. I haggled $1 off some $5 faux-Thinsulate gloves. The haggling went like this: "How much?" "Five dollars." "Four?" "Okay."
We then met Chris and his friend Cory and hung out some more. We went to a faux-Italian restaurant, and the food had a distinctive Chinese style and flavour to it. None of us were impressed..it was actually some of the worst restaurant food I've ever had.
Chris then drove us all to Niagara Falls,
which Clare was happy to see. It was dark, so the falls were lit up. The
lights are simultaneously pretty and incredibly tacky. The mist causes a big
thick layer of ice on everything, in some places three or four inches. It was
constantly cracked off certain things, so there were funny ice-molds
everywhere. One of them ended up as a helmet, which we tried on in turn.
We then took off, and crossed the border. This was my first time in the US since my family went to Florida when I was 17. With two Americans, an Irish and a Canadian in the car, we expected something interesting with the border guards, but the fellow just seemed happy to have a car that wasn't completely mundane, and only asked a few basic questions. We hit Buffalo, and crashed at Chris' place.
Buffalo is a strange place. There's still
lots of people there, but it has a sense of abandonment. We met Elizabeth at
a local mall, which had a sign (at left) indicating that minors had to be
accompanied by someone over 21 after 4pm on weekends. It lent a sense of
inner-city troubles to this outer-city mall.
We were driven around town, then we walked around the harbour, and then Elizabeth, who studies anthropology, brought us to her campus, where some of her peers were practicing making stone tools. One of the guys was very skilled, and it was fascinating to see how much trouble these people had making "simple" stone tools, sitting in a modern college room, with a big sheet of plastic under them to catch the chippings.
Chris, Clare and I then went to Dana's place in Geneva. Her family are fun to hang out with. They have very different political views from me. They play lots of board games. One was a DVD-based game, which was fun, but felt sort of strange to bring TV and technology into something (playing boardgames) that I like in part for its simplicity and lack of screens.
We (plus Dana's sister) went on a winery tour. I think I've started liking wine. The experience was neat. The first place was very generous with the servings, and didn't charge anyone anything since a few of us bought bottles. The second place was stingier and less friendly, but still nice.
One of Dana's friends has a nice party-basement, with air hockey, fussball, etc. That's where we spent New Year's eve. We were actually in the hot-tub for the roll-over, which was fun.
The next day Clare and I caught a bus to New York City.
