Day 12
Life Without Peking Duck
No, we didn't go to the Beijing for dinner. Just thought you'd want to know that right up front.
I stayed up most of the night reading, no, not another Len Deighton novel, but P. J. O'Rourke's "Holidays in Hell", which is further evidence to support my theory that it's a lot easier to write an interesting account of a really bad vacation than it is to write about a good one.
Our day started with Robert going out to do the laundry, and me staying behind in the motel room reading more of "Holidays in Hell". Robert, being sort of obsessive, first sorted the laundry according to the type of garment, by color, size, number of black bean sauce stains (from our previous night's dinner), and number of holes. He neatly folded and stacked the dirty laundry with more care than I'd afford clean laundry, neatly packed it away in our small suitcase, and disappeared for the next half hour.
I got to read some. I can see that my vacation experiences are strictly lightweight.
By the time Robert returned, the day was shaping up, or the weather was at least. I wasn't feeling sick, and I hadn't gnawed any other parts of my mouth out. On the other hand, the rash on the back of my hands (the one I get whenever I get too much sun) was starting to trouble me (my hands looked sort of like cacti), and the cortisone cream (the stuff they don't sell in Canada) didn't seem to be doing a whole lot of good for it.
Anyway, Robert decided that it'd be a good day to catch up on the other domestic tasks we'd been saving up for the last few days. We'd start with a quick lunch at the cafe that adjoined the hotel, since I had a couple day old hankerin' for a good ol' grease burger. The place next door seemed to have something like that on their menu (as posted in the elevator).
We got a table, sat down, and I ordered my burger. A regular burger. The waitron just sort of looked at me with a confused look on her face, which slowly changed to one of realization, then one of being stunned.
"A regular burger?"
"Sure."
"Are you sure? I mean, all it is is a piece of meat and a bun."
Well, that sounded like a regular hamburger to me, but just in case, I checked the menu to make sure that what I'd ordered was really offered for sale. It still was. "Yes, that's it." Judging from the look on her face, I guess no one ever ordered one before.
Either she didn't believe me, or she'd misrepresented the simplicity of the burger, because what I got was a regular hamburger covered with mayo, which I had to scrape off. It also could be that mayo is considered such an integral part of the Canadian cuisine, that most locals just can't even see it. I don't know.
I asked the waitron for some mustard, and she shot me a look that said "See, I knew you didn't really want a regular burger!" I replied with a look of "What? Does it cost extra?". It didn't, but I felt this was a significant conversation of dirty looks that just had to be recorded here.
This was a grease burger that I could really get excited about. We're not talking about "1/3 pound of 90% fat free pure lean ground sirloin, grilled to perfection and served on a lightly toasted onion roll." No, this was the good ol' fatty, grilled, gray patty pseudo beef thing with a nice layer of grease all over the bun, right out of my fondest childhood memories.
Boy, those things are great! Too bad I don't know anywhere near home to get them. Of course, nominally, they'd be served in a fake plastic basket on top of a piece of butcher paper, with some greasy, limp, gravy soaked fries eating into one side of the bun. Nah, this one was just served on a regular plate, with greasy but not limp or gravy soaked fries on the side.
Maybe not haute cuisine, but it sure hit the spot. I bet you're wishing that I'd spent that much time talking about the Chinese food.
Now, I know that all you health buffs out there are perfectly horrified to read this, and all I have to say is: "Good. I hope you suffer for it, too." I mean, you ain't going to find me living to a ripe old age of 100, found dead in the bathroom, wearing a designer jogging suit and a pair of $200 sneakers, with a perfectly maintained tan, and still in the process of flossing the alfalfa sprouts out from between my teeth. Nosiree, when I die, there'll be so little of my teeth left that you won't be able to get anything smaller than an apricot pit caught between them. This burger was dead on.
After the grease fest, we set out to the stores to pick up some more Polaroid film, some soap that wouldn't aggravate my rash even more, ribbons for the Ribbon Eating Machine, and maybe another episode in the never ending quest for Pina Colada mix.
The shopping was mostly boring, because that's just what shopping is, but the other parts weren't boring, even if they weren't fun. It started with me deciding to drive. I hadn't done much driving since we hit town, meaning that Robert had been doing the duty. Over the course of the previous day, I noticed that he was pretty frustrated over the prospect, and I was sort of irritated at his jerky driving. I figured I could put us both in a better mood if I drove.
Given that it was a nice sunny day, about half the cars in town were going topless. That didn't do much to help the traffic, though, and I got a sense for why Robert's driving had been so jerky.
It seems that the average Vancouver driver has his car's minimum stopping distance all figured out, and has decided that there's no point in using up 200 feet of road to stop when the same can be achieved in 50 feet. Therefore, they wouldn't stop accelerating until the very last second, whereupon they'd climb up onto the center pedal with both feet, and we'd all have the third near pile-up in the last block. It's beyond me why all the cars are in such good condition there.
As a matter of fact, the cars are in great condition there. All of them. It's not just that there wasn't any rust on them, it was that they were well maintained. I don't think cars ever get retired out there, because we saw cars from the entire history of autodom, and all looked to be in pretty good shape. I think Robert summed it up best on the way to the supermarket when he pointed at a car in front of us and said: "Hey, these guys are so gonzo about their cars, that this one even washes his AMC Pacer." Sure enough: Something I hadn't seen in over a decade: A clean Pacer.
Well, back to the driving. Throw in the rental car's fondness for full throttle acceleration (well, maybe it was my fondness, but I'll blame it on the car anyway), and you have some pretty jerky driving. I found that I had to keep at least three car lengths per 10 MPH between me and the traffic in front just to keep things on an even keel.
Then, there was that issue about the air conditioner not working. This was the first really warm day since we'd got into town, and I was really feeling the lack of AC. When I get hot under the collar, I also get hot under the collar, if you know what I mean.
So, between the bad traffic and the hot weather, I managed to put myself into the very same bad mood that I was trying to protect Robert from, except that I got it a lot worse. This seemed like a good time to stop by the rental car agency to see why the air conditioner didn't work.
The answer was that it didn't work because we weren't paying $5 extra per day for an air conditioner that did work, and that the button there on the dashboard labeled "Air Conditioner" was just there to remind us how cheap we were.
Ok, so we agreed pay the extra dough for a working AC: $5 per day that somehow wasn't included in what we were already going to pay them, which was a heck of a lot. They said that for the extra bucks, they'd put us into a car with a working AC. In the mood I was in, it sounded just fine by me, so I went to clean out the "old" rental car. I got back with too many armloads of our day's booty, just in time for Robert to receive the keys to the new car.
Which didn't exist. We went out to the lot, found a car generally matching the description given to us, even in the proper parking spot, but the license number didn't match and the keys didn't fit.
Robert went back inside to complain, and I stood in the middle of the lot, trying to balance the three armloads of stuff I'd cleaned out of the previous car. Unbeknownst to me, all of this junk did not include our umbrella, which had apparently fallen into the same wormhole that sucks men's socks out of clothes dryers.
Robert got caught in line behind someone returning a V-6 Corsica. The person behind the counter said she'd find us another car as soon as she was done with the other guy. Doug MacKenzie. Or at least he sounded like Doug MacKenzie. You remember the MacKenzie brothers comedy routine? This guy sounded more like them than any other Canadian we'd heard to date: "Hey, get the Corsica, eh? It goes like spit!". Ok, it didn't do anything for the story, but the accent was great. Too bad I don't know how to spell accents.
They confirmed the nonexistence of the car we'd just rented. Silly us, all we had to do is look in the parking lot and try the keys on all the cars to prove to ourselves that the car wasn't there, but that was nothing compared to what the agent had to do to her computer to arrive at the same conclusion. I'm so glad that I'm helping to make people's lives happier this way.
They rented us another car. We were able to find this one. Most importantly, the air conditioner worked, too.
Seeing as how the AC worked so well, I felt sort of compelled to go out and put our $5 worth of wear and tear on the thing. This gave Robert an opportunity to examine all the features of the car. One thing that distracted him for quite some time was measuring the slots in the coin tray. I asked him what he was doing, and he replied "Seeing if this is the US version, or if it takes metric coins."
I gotta have that boy checked sometime.
The first leg of the trip was to go back to the rental car place (after we'd stopped at the motel) to retrieve the umbrella we'd left in the old car. Couldn't find it, but on the way there, we did manage to violate all sorts of traffic signs right in front of all sorts of cops, which put me in a pretty wonderful mood. Fortunately for me, neither my transgressions or my mood bothered the cops much once they saw the "Budget" sticker on the back of the car.
After we didn't find the umbrella at the rental place, we drove through town for a while. Of all the Canadian cities we'd been to, Vancouver was definitely the most US-like. It went even farther than that, though. I said it was flamboyance, but Robert said it was just decadent. Definitely a glitzy city. Maybe it comes from lethal proximity to California, but whatever the reason, it's still overbearing.
The convertibles are one thing. The general city life and look are another thing. One thing I did notice is that the town, as we know it, probably wouldn't or couldn't exist without Motorola's help. Cellular phones were everywhere, and most of them were Motorola cellular phones. Rack one up for my home team. Confusing, though, since another major cellular manufacturer, NovaTel, was right there in the next province, but I never saw any of their equipment around Vancouver.
Cellular phones and convertibles. Cellular phones were so important there, that every day's newspaper brought you another cellular phone ad on the front page. A lot of them were attached to service types: Rental car agents, tour guides, street cleaners, etc. Still, and awful lot of them were in the hands of "civilians", and in the better neighborhoods, you might (and we did) see little kids with portables, calling their parents after being dropped off at the bus stop.
Unbelievable.
We went back to the Grouse Mountain cable car for another trip. Since the sky was so clear, we figured we might finally get some good pictures of the city from on high, but they still didn't come out too well because of all the smog and haze hanging over the city.
One thing we had been noticing was how late the sun stays out when you're so far north, and it's so close to the summer solstice.
We had a late dinner of Pizza, then returned to the room. I'd already broken my promise to myself (about no more sleepless nights spent with Len Deighton novels) in that I'd bought a couple more Len Deighton books that day at the bookstore. Looks like he's got another trilogy going, which itself is a sequel to his last trilogy "Game, Set & Match", which was a particular favorite of mine. This was going to be fun.
On to Day 13 and the Vancouver Glue Factory
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