It goes without saying that there are more pleasant experiences than 13 hours in a car with five people and a dog. But that's all over now. This Christmas was even more surreal than the last. Watching Grandpa drown his miseries in drink was a new experience for me.
As was driving his car back to Michigan and listening to my little brother gripe about how he was getting "an old people car" to drive. The object of his complaints? A 96 Oldsmobile with barely 30,000 miles we brought back from Connecticut as a third car for him to drive this summer and take back to school for sophomore year. In my book, this is a big upgrade over the old "shitbox": power windows, power door locks, cruise control, working wipers, not getting the shakes at 5 mph...and even a tape player and a clock. Of course it does look kinda boxy. But still, much better than the imaginary car I have at Stanford...
We had dinner at the Bamboo Club, one of those trendy postmodern restaurants that thrive in suburbia. It's one of those places where the waiters and waitresses are all wearing black, the lights are so dim you can't read the menus, and some sort of modern dance beat of definite non-Asian origin is thumping in the background. (To its credit, it did in fact have a few bunches of tall bamboo and reproductions of a few Chinese paintings on the walls.) The food was pretty good, although not too authentic--more of a "fusion" of the entire Pacific Rim. And... right across from a new Coldstone, which opened just in time for winter. Opening an ice cream place in an outdoor mall, hundreds of yards away from the nearest parking space, in Michigan in October...now that's gutsy.
A certain someone has been complaining about SoCal getting "cold". And well she should be: LA got down to a bone-chilling 44 degrees yesterday. And I thought it was cold when 19 Fahrenheit degrees greeted me as I stepped out of the airport--without winter coat, I might add...
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