Dawn Xiana Moon: Melodic folk pop infused with passion and honesty. From Chicago.

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Wednesday, March 05, 2003

Spring Break

For some reason I feel like I'm writing one of those "what I did during my summer vacation" papers (actually, I don't know if I ever wrote one of those... but you get the point, and hopefully a laugh out of my pathetic attempt at humor). This was the first year I'd gone anywhere for spring break--I figured it was my last chance to do so since I'm graduating in April; I'd originally planned on going to Minneapolis to visit my friends Emily and Dave, so when plans fell through I scurried to formulate new ones. I came up with a few options: going on something of a retreat, either in Northern Michigan or Canada, taking a trip to New York (yes, I know I'm obsessed), or going to Montreal. In the end, I couldn't sell the New York trip to anyone so late--break was only a week or two away at that point--because of finances, but I did convince Tait and Ryan that a retreat would be fun. Hours of planning later, I'd hit upon the idea of going to a bed and breakfast somewhere in Canada (much cheaper than Michigan); it'd be something different, something out of the ordinary. The funny part about this stage was that we didn't decide which bed and breakfast we were going to until the night before we left--with three people, finding a room was tricky and our options narrowed to one place, a place I wasn't feeling particularly fond of (any place that decorates with an inordinate amount of pink and purple loses points in my book). So I kept looking. And looking. And finally, we ended up at Niagara Falls, Canada.

Most of our time was spent talking and reading (Tait, the lone boy, ended up getting his own room after all, since our host decided to give us the extra room for free rather than make up the pull-out couch--hey, we weren't going to complain); I finished most of Rushdie's Midnight's Children, the theatrical version of which I'm going to see the Royal Shakespeare Company perform next week. You'd think that since we had to be up for breakfast every morning at 9:00am we would go to bed early and get ourselves on a "normal" sleeping schedule, but no, we were generally up until about 5 o'clock in the morning discussing everything from anime to relationships. So while we didn't get much sleep--though we did get some naps in there--the time was relaxing, spent in the company of good friends. There's something comfortable about spending entire afternoons with a couple of other people just reading and enjoying the warmth of the fireplace you wish was real instead of gas. We saw the Falls--I'll get a few pictures on here in the next day or two--and wandered around town a bit, stopping at the second-largest Buddhist temple in the world (unfortunately we didn't get to go inside since they closed for the night, but we walked around outside for a while comtemplating the bizarre mixture of gaudy colors with modern and ancient architecture) and random restaurants in a downtown area that was frighteningly similar to Las Vegas (glitzier) and Times Square (classier); picture large neon signs for the Guiness Book of World Records Musuem and a large assortment of horror/torture chambers amid a background of the Niagara Falls Casino, a restaurant named New York that served Chinese and Canadian food (you just know that it has to be terrible), Hard Rock Cafe, waterfront, Hershey store, more Italian and steak restaurants than you've ever wanted to see in one place, and Rainforest Cafe. It's a crazy image, isn't it?

Conclusions reached during the trip (and these, by the way, are only half-serious, if at all): Tait would like to be a cannibal, frequently says funny things, would be happy as a dog, and has an scary obsession with girls in kimonos; Ryan likes deformed people because they're "interesting" and writes crazy stories about anime characters; the Canadian military is comprised of "washing machines"; Buddhist monks can be seen wearing winter coats and sweeping snow; it really is possible to talk about politics when you're at breakfast, half-asleep after only three hours in bed; Canadian milk comes in plastic bags instead of cartons or jugs; and you never know when the host of a bed and breakfast could be a lesbian former NATO pilot/trainer with two grown kids and a really cute puppy.

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