Pete's Log: Log Entry 134
Entry #134, (Travel)(posted when I was 21 years old.)
An exercise in absurdity
Today's entry is gonna be a long one... It's been an interesting day... we just recently decided that we were going to see the Suicide Machines live in detroit today. For future reference, "we" refers to arun, perk, and I.So, preparations started last night, perk shaved my hair all nice and punkish and stuff. today got ready and we left around noon-ish for detroit. arun and i had some interesting discussions on various methods of doing computer architecture, and on stuff like writing a simple language and compiler that would generate C code out of a description of a turing machine... after several hours of driving, arun found himself starting to doze off, so we pulled over at some rest area... we used the various facilities available, and perk and i met up again at the car thing. after waiting a while for arun, we decided he wasn't showing up of his own will... and then we realized that some person asleep on a bench was actually arun. so we woke him, and perk drove for a while. we got to a taco bell and picked up food and such. i believe this was in the ann arbor area. home of our enemies, the wolverines... we quickly continued on our way to detroit.
so we enter the city of detroit and find ourselves stuck in an area of very slow-moving traffic. a stretch of pavement that took perk and i about 5 minutes to walk the length of took us about 30 minutes to drive. so perk and i talked to some dude who was in a stretch limo stuck in traffic ahead of us and to some punks who were also on their way to suicide machines... they tried to sell us cd's of some local punk band, but since i'm a poor college student i had to say no...
so we finally we make it to saint andrews hall (after concluding that all parking attendants in detroit are indian and that this is probably why arun has a parking attendant obsession) and discover that the concert is sold out... DOH! so we bum around outside for a little while until perk decides he needs to find a bathroom... so we wander around detroit, carefully avoiding red wings fans (there was some sorta hockey game going on, which i believe the red wings eventually lost) until we find some sports bar, at which arun seizes the sole male bathroom and perk, being impatient, enters the women's bathroom, only to allow hilarious antics to ensue... so we head back over to saint andrews hall and enjoy watching punks milling about and listening to the concert we can kinda hear going on inside. eventually we decide we won't be getting in, so we decide to go to canada.
so as i'm writing this i discover that test.ndlug.nd.edu (the sql server) has decided to run out of memory... and www.ndlug.nd.edu is running out of disk space. luckily maintenance is scheduled for tomorrow night.
onwards. after spending more time enjoying wonderful detroit traffic, we make it to the tunnel to canada. there was a definite mass exodus going on... quite amazing... canada seems to be the place to be. so we park at the windsor casino and go inside. amazing. the place is huge-ish. slot machines span into the distance. i wasted two canadian dollars on slot machines before the whole gambling thing grew boring. arun and perk did about the same. we then wandered about the casino for a little while. it was really kind of sad. there were a lot of old women sitting at slot machines, looking utterly unhappy, feeding coin after coin into these slot machines. gambling seems like a very sad addiction... and casinos look like they make a lot of money by taking advantage of people who are not good at math. granted, i am against regulation against ... well ... anything, but i just don't see how the people that run these places can live with themselves... to quote the NOFX song "Perfect Government," which although out of context is in the spirit of what i'm getting at: "How do you sleep at night?"
so next we wandered around the town of windsor, canada. it was entertaining, since i had never been in canada, and since it's been a while since i've been in any kinda city... we found a bar, and entered, and perk and i ordered beers, and once again we were carded... i look very young when i shave ... so i had to deal with a lot of disbelief in my age. oh well. anyway, we play a game of cutthroat at one of the many pool tables in this bar, then i buy a second round of beer (since perk bought the first) and we play two more games of pool. perk won the first, arun the second (by pure luck) and perk won the third.
now we wander around windsor some more, and eventually decide to have pizza at some local (proudly canadian) pizza place. perk claims the water in the toilet at this establishment spun the other way, but it didn't when i tried it. yes, i would like to remind you that we are engineers.
at this point we decide to leave, seeing how we don't want to ruin what had been an excellent time in canada. so we go through the casino one last time, find the car, and are on our way back to the tunnel (after arun nearly gets us lost in residential windsor) and back to the usa and freedom, sweet freedom. we drove pretty much straight back to ND, listening to various punk rock tapes arun had, including a tape of a radio show he did his freshman year. funny stuff.
not much more can be said about today, except perhaps that i used bathrooms in two states and a province ... in two countries ... in two timezones ...
wow.