thursday. day two: teh_mall
today was the day we decided to be the west edmonton mall day. meghan was going to be meeting up with us, too, so we were really looking forward to that, of course.
this is the morning when housekeeping decided to annoy us to death. i was asleep the first time they came, i think, but burg said they came really early in the morning (seven?). the next time they came by i heard it...their little knock-knock, "housekeeping?" we told them to go away. i then got up and put the "do not disturb" sign on the outside of our door. except...i accidentally put it on the wrong side. it said "please clean room" or whatever. how smart am i? but i was, like, barely awake, so it's not totally my fault, of course. so they came back again while we were still trying to sleep. i think we finally decided to get up at this point (or shortly after, at least). dumb housekeeping. for every single night after that we remembered to put the "do not disturb" sign (on the right side) before we went to bed. they never bothered us again.
we ordered room service, i think, while i played with our room options and stuff...and accidentally ordered a playstation game by accident. some spiderman game. seriously, it was an accident...
so i have an hour to play this game. our food comes and burg eats while i play. i think burg played a little bit of the spiderman game too, then she switched over to some skateboard game to finish off the hour while i ate. i sent some text messages (thinking my phone would charge me long distance if i tried calling edmonton numbers with a phone that has a lethbridge number) and we got ready to go. i remember how i kept correcting myself whenever i called meghan "venuswillow", too...
we thought we had lots of time to spare. really, we did. we took the bus (actually, we took three buses). i forgot how...fun...taking the bus in edmonton was. it took foreverrrrrrr. but we got there.
we worried poor meghan so much she text messaged my phone (just as we arrived at west ed, too). but we finally met up at our pre-designated place (the bench by the carousel in galaxyland...yes, we just had to get that specific).
we wanted to get a car so we could get around town. seriously, the bus is really annoying. plus, meghan needed to get back home all the way in fort saskatchewan (which is north of edmonton quite a ways [but not that far, actually]). so we decide to make some phone calls and pretty much every single place in the entire city wouldn't rent out to anyone under twenty-one. this is very strange...i've never heard of anything being restricted to anyone over eighteen in canada. burg was twenty; close but no cigar. but we did find out a place that rented out cars to "underage" people. so we call them and make some sort of reservation. burg was talking to the guy on the other end and apparently he had a really bad accent and he was really messed up in the head and burg had to repeat everything she said. apparently it's not based out of canada, either, because burg wanted to know about car rentals in edmonton, alberta and the guy is like "...is that in canada?". well, after that painful experience (meghan and i were just giggling on the sidelines), we go to their nearest office, or whatever, in downtown edmonton. on the bus. yay! and we hit a traffic jam on the way there, too. we were joking around how it would be faster if we got out and walked. seriously, it would have been faster. it was because the klondike days parade was just ending, and that happens downtown (just happened to be on that day...just our luck) and everyone was leaving downtown. or trying to. anyway, we finally made it downtown to the place we need to be...
...and we couldn't find the place!! we looked and looked and practically circled a big city block looking for it. and we saw this one truck that belonged to this company. that one truck was, like, taunting us. we knew it was nearby, but we couldn't find it!! but we finally did...it was this tiny little place that anyone would miss when looking for it for the first time. so we get there and, first, they couldn't confirm any type of reservation. typical. i guess that stupid non-canadian accent man isn't so dependable. :P so i guess the lady was going to give us a car anyway, and we were pretty happy. until. turns out the person who was going to drive the car needed to have a credit card. see, burg had the driver's license, i had the credit card. they wouldn't accept that. burg had to have the credit card or i had to have the license. and i don't even have one. yay for me...i don't drive! so we left there. what a fun day so far...
we decide to from downtown to millwoods (the most southeastern part of the city) to see burg's cousins and see if they want to go to west ed with us. burg's little cousin ashley came along with us and her older sister drove us to west edmonton mall (i think we'd all had enough of buses at this point).
i call simon and tell him we're not going to come to millwoods to pick him up in our lovely rental car like we had arranged. he suggests we get a u-haul (you know, those moving trucks) instead because they don't care how old you are, and stuff. we all had a good laugh. he said he'd make it to the mall on his own anyway.
we decide to eat something. i had some japanese food of some kind (chicken teriyaki? too bad they didn't have tempura, or something), most of which got thrown into the garbage. i don't remember what everyone else had. i remember what ashley had. nothing. we should have forced her to eat yummy, greasy chicken from kfc...
we decided not to go to galaxyland, because we were going to go to klondike days the next day, so we wandered around the mall and looked at stuff. i think i was the only one that didn't spend lots of money, too. meghan spent lots on manga at comic king (i would have bought some x manga, but they didn't have volume one, and i wanted that one...and they didn't have utena manga either). i actually walked out of there without buying anything. that's shocking. i think meghan was upset that they weren't carrying mars, though. hehe. and then we went to hmv where it was burg's turn to spend lots of money. i bought the clay aiken american idol single (fear my coolness) and björk's hyperballad single. i spent less than twenty dollars, as opposed to burg's hundred-and-something.
after wandering around the mall and hmv, we realized it was time to meet up with simon so we went to do so. it's too bad we just came from hmv because that's where simon wanted to go. oh well. we went to silvercity instead, though, and bought tickets for pirates of the caribbean. although i wanted to see the matrix reloaded on imax, i wanted to see pirates of the caribbean anyway, so i compromised willingly. i don't know if i could take the sex scene(s) on imax anyway...
we all enjoyed pirates of the caribbean, and i'm very happy i actually saw it in a proper theatre for a change.
i can't remember if we did this before or after the movie; it happened irregardless, so it doesn't matter. we took pictures in a photobooth just like we planned. i had an plan, though. i wanted an emoticons set in which we'd all be making different emoticons in each picture. how smart am i? so we did that. and meghan, simon, and i took another set of pictures. we look so great in the pictures, and, yes, they're available to view in the pictures section.
the last place we went to in the mall was playdium. we played lots of games, most of which we really sucked at. burg and i mostly played the guitar game that's like ddr. i don't know why we like that game so much. we were getting pretty good at it after a while, though. we didn't get around to playing the real ddr.
burg and i totally lost the rowboat game we got a highscore on last time we were there. i just don't know what happened.
simon had to leave earlier than the rest of us, but that was fine. we didn't stay for too much longer after that anyway.
i felt kind of bad because meghan didn't really have a ride home now and she lives really far away, and not even within the city, either. so it's not like she could just take a bus to get home. so she had to phone her parents and stuff and i felt kind of bad about that. she took a bus (and the train?) to the north side so her parents could pick her up, i guess.
as for burg, ashley, and i? burg wanted to get a taxi...so we did. the driver was surprised that we wanted to go all the way from millwoods from the west side. i don't blame him. by the time we dropped ashley off at her house (it was getting pretty late at night, by the way) and back to our hotel, the driver was thinking we were made out of gold, i'm sure. i've never seen such an expensive taxi ride in my life, and i knew it was going to be that expensive. oh well.
i think we watched a movie that night in our hotel room. we watched view from the top which burg totally fell asleep during. i managed to stay awake for that horrible, horrible movie. seriously...i hadn't seen a movie with a plot so lacking in conflict in a very long time. very disappointing, especially for a movie with so many big-name stars.
and then it was bedtime.
day three >
