Beds, Baths, and Beyond!

Firstly, our sympathies go out to those affected by the Christchurch earthquake on the 22nd. We're relieved that those we know are now safe.

While anxiously awaiting news from home, we've been distracting ourselves with...

Wacky and Wonderful Items Consumers Don't Need :
1. Tie-dyed duct tape
2. A small device used to strip corn from the cob. We have these in New Zealand, too. They're called "teeth".
3. A guacamole bowl in the shape of an avocado
4. Wooden tongs to get your toast out of the toaster (we usually tip the toaster upside down so that its contents spill all over the counter. This way, the appliance gets a clean in the process)

We found these on our second mall excursion. We discovered that the mall was not one building, as we'd previously thought, but rather, three city blocks filled with stores. It's not really designed for pedestrian access, we noticed, after a fifteen-minute walk in bitterly cold wind from Bed Bath and Beyond to Target.

A fuzzy-wuzzy and a cleaning product in Bed Bath and Beyond

We pitied ourselves enthusiastically until we happended upon a homeless man tucked into a corner of the sidewalk outside Target. Our interaction with this man was haunting. Here was a man who was not ill, not insane, not addicted to anything--he simply had no money. Old Job Loss and Foreclosure had attacked, and all that remained after the dust had settled were a backpack, a little camping gear, and a Dickens novel (which the man read to himself, perhaps to distract from the cold). He thanked us for our change, and told us that it "wasn't so bad..."

It occurred to us at this point that we'd been served in all the chains we'd visited not by teenagers, but by educated, middle-aged adults. This, and the abundance of local mortgagee sales leads us to sometimes wonder if the fundamentalists around here aren't correct in their assumption that Judgment Day isn't far off (as an aside, we're not exaggerating here: today, we saw a sign which read "Judgement Day is upon us! Repent before May 21st, 2011, or burn eternally!").

Yesterday, we found where all the secondhand cars went: they're hiding on the other side of the railroad tracks, in the ghetto. Here's what we learned from our experience in da hood: we need to watch less television. Based on what we'd seen on CSI, The First 48, and Operation Repo (taking schadenfreude to a whole new level), we had formed all sorts of implicit associations about people living in poverty. Everyone was a gangster. Everyone was wanted for armed robbery. Everyone was homocidal! Normal people, living out their quotidian routines--all criminal maniacs! Where did we form these ideas? We'd never met any of these people before. And lo, we survived the experience. How about that?

Fraternising with the natives

The Quest Quotient by Nancy Howie and Steff Werman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thequestquotient2011.blogspot.com.

Third Things Third: Grounded

21/2/2011

Alright! Two days on the ground, and we're sufficiently awake to update the blog:

Table of Contents
1. Airline Travel
2. Cars
3. Food
4. Snow
5. Sign Wavers
6. Walmart


1. Airline Travel
Firstly, if you can, avoid it at all costs. Don't get us wrong, the Air New Zealand flight to Sydney was exciting and new. There were hundreds of music albums and 40-odd movies and television programmes to choose from on the personal touch screens in our seats. Of course, Air NZ had updated their software the previous night, so none of these entertainment options worked.

The novelty of long-haul travel had without question begun to wear off by the end of our five-hour stopover at Sydney International. This loss of excitement was expedited by the "random" bag checks to which we were subjected (we are pleased to report that we tested negative for traces of explosives). The second flight was discomfort like we've never had the privilege to experience.

Nancy: When I was younger, after a long flight and another rousing chorus of complaint about the lack of legroom from my adult counterparts, I would ask myself, puzzled, "What are they whingeing about? I slept fine." Ah, youth. As we discovered, the grown-ups were complaining about stiff necks, and knees contorted in odd directions, being fatigued to the brink of breakdown, but being unable to sleep, because your neighbours decided to go on a midnight wander to your seat and commence a loud conversation about their own inability to sleep. That's what. 

That said, we arrived intact, albeit exhausted, slept a meagre forteen hours, and were ready for the new day. And nary a negative word from border patrol on the way in, besides "keep outta trouble, kid".

2. Cars
In Palmdale, people don't drive cars. They ride on the back of Optimus Prime! We're talking pickups you'd need a ladder to get into. SUVs that can barely squeeze into two parking lots. Sedans that could eat Nancy's Corolla and fit Grandma's Daihatsu into their trunk. TITANS of the road!

We're surprised we didn't witness a clash of these titans while driving on the freeway out of LA, because it was bedlam.

Steff: Near the cities, the merging style is less "merge like a zip", and more of a bumper car race. We saw a man drive for fifteen minutes at 60mph (that's 100kmph for you metricheads) on a flat tyre. Probably because nobody would let him pull over. 

There is an elitism to driving here-- as we were informed by one of our American correspondents, a car is a marker of identity. That's not to say that this doesn't happen in New Zealand, but rather, while a Kiwi might take pride in keeping a good car on the road, a Californian might focus more on the newness of his or her car.  You have your eco-friendly Prius driver (of which there is an abundance), and your conservative F-150 farmers. And these cars are all toddlers at most; we've not seen a car older than a 2008, and a large portion of cars don't yet have plates.


Nancy: My Corolla is a year younger than I am, and although she stalls sporadically, she's been a trusty little jalopy. I wonder what my car says about me?

3. Food
What is high-fructose corn syrup? It appears to be a staple--it is in everything. Cereal, bread, syrups, soda, chips (that's crisps, for you British descendants), junk food, health food, you name it!

American food is synonymous with abundance. There is so much of anything you could ever imagine consuming (see more about consumption in section 6: Walmart). We saw two supermarket aisles of cereal. It's a good thing, though. You want Thai food? It's available. You want Italian? Every third block. Eritrean? There's a house of Eritrean cuisine around the corner. And with all of this anything-we-want, everywhere-we-go, what do we want? Diner food, of course!

4. Snow
Americans have invented this delightful cold substance called "snow". We don't have it in Auckland yet. Here's a photo of us with this miraculous "snow".

                                            Nancy in the "snow". Steff is hiding in Nancy's glasses!


We are freezing our butts off in this photo.

5. Sign Wavers
California's answer to the unemployment crisis is to make a legitimate job out of doing little to nothing all day. They're paying citizens to be human billboards! People (usually young people) hold signs for a living; some have perfected it to an art form, flipping the signs and twirling the signs and occasionally dropping the signs. Mum, Dad, I've figured out what I want to do with my life.

6. Walmart
How do we even open a subject of such import? This was a regular Walmart that we visited, and it was thrice the size of the Warehouse (where everyone gets a bargain, where everyone gets a bargain, where everyone gets a bargain). We were so overwhelmed by the sheer size and quantity of product in this haven of evil that it took us two hours to buy seven toiletry items.

Special thanks to our ever-so-patient hosts. We are reduced here to anecdotal evidence of the place:

A young mother and her primary-school-aged daughter are scrutinising the travel-size section (which is within the toiletries section) of Walmart. The child announces that she wants deodorant. Mom tries to reason with her, stating quite logically that the girl has no need for deodorant, as she is only 6. Child persists, mother relents, giving me a "Kids--what're you gonna do?" smile.

What are you going to do? You're going to wait until her sweat glands develop, and not spend what little money you have on useless crap in the meantime, that's what!

Anecdote 2: We saw a towel. Ordinarily, this would be a boring anecdote. But this was an extraordinary towel! As its label boasted, this was an "Energy-Saving Performance Bath Towel". Our spirits sank when we saw this. previously, we had been relatively satisfied with our lives, but realistically, what is life without an Energy-Saving Performance Bath Towel?

And this is where we leave you, to shower (with our pathetic, normal towels), then to collect more experiences to report to you, our faithful readers.

-Nancy and Steff

We found Bin Laden. In a Goodwill store.

The Quest Quotient by Nancy Howie and Steff Werman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thequestquotient2011.blogspot.com.

EXODUS

Nancy


16/2/11
And here we sit, teary-eyed, light-headed, and heavy-hearted. It seems we've survived yet another cyclone; at least, our room has. It's inundated with socks and undies and toiletries and shirts and dress shirts and sneakers and shorts...You get the idea. Torrential packing, friends. It looks like our wardrobe's vomited all over the carpet.

And what's left to do now, with two days left?

In short, everything. Because our room continues to give birth to more and more hidden junk. It crops up everywhere, demanding we find it a good home. And we need to cancel the internet plan. And dispose of the 70,000-strong army of used tissues, bunkered under the couch (which, I'm proud to announce, has left the premises). Then we have to squeeze in time to pathetically weep on each other's shoulders. And o, how grateful I am that there are two of us, not least because this exercise would prove physically difficult alone.

And we don't know how it's all crept up on us so rudely, and our applications to extend the number of hours in the day have been repeatedly rejected. And, and, and, and...

We must hurry--Saturday is the day of our EXODUS!

-Nancy Howie


The Quest Quotient by Nancy Howie and Steff Werman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thequestquotient2011.blogspot.com.