(no subject)

As I have promised: subservient is in the shower, and so I update.

Bussed up to Bangor on Saturday without incident, other than the being half an hour behind part. Met Amanda and her mom, Janet, at the Greyhound terminal. I hadn't seen their home since the moved (like, three years ago; whenever I see Amanda, it's because she's down in my area visiting family), and was surprised to learn that I knew someone who lived in a trailer park. Was forced to revise snobby ideas about trailer parks. Some of the trailers were really quite nice-looking, and inside Amanda's looked like a house. A small house, but a house.

So we hung out for a while, I met Amanda's friend Kelly after years of each of us hearing ALL about the other, and the three of us went to see PotC. Yay!

Meanwhile, Amanda had persuaded her mom's girlfriend to buy us alcohol (Janet, by the way, was sitting right there; she doesn't mind if Amanda gets trashed as long as she's safely at home), so we came home from the movie to find two six-packs of Smirnoff Ice waiting for us. I promptly dubbed the Green Apple flavoured ones "Barbossas," and we three proceeded to get cheerfully hammered. I drank tons of water along with and knew better than to go to sleep while still drunk, so I did not get hungover. Go me. =)

Next day, I sat for a while and listened to Janet talk about her job while I had breakfast. This was not boring, because Janet works with mentally ill adults. It reminded me a little of Human Behaviour class and I found it all fascinating.

Then Janet drove me to the station. And then another station. And then to the first station. There, the woman who wrote out my ticket proceeded to fuck it up completely, which I didn't know until it was too late. She had me stopping in Moncton, New Brunswick, on the way to Fredericton. Problem is, Moncton is a good two hours out of the way, and a totally unnecessary detour. Happily, the bus driver at the place where I might have ended up on my blithe way to Moncton was understanding and let me get on the Fredericton bus instead. When we arrived (and I walked right past Carolyn because I didn't recognize her; good thing she recognized me), he took the ticket right to the ticket agent and explained the problem. Then the guy fixed it. I only had to wait a few minutes while the driver wrapped up whatever details need wrapping up after a bus journey, plus I didn't have to explain a single thing myself, which is good because by then I'd been on a damn bus for six hours, existing on vending machine food, and could never in a million years have been coherent enough to explain the whole thing in less than three tries. The ticket agent even exchanged my money for me. Naturally, there were no customer comment cards to fill out, so in lieu of that I will publicly declare my love for Acadian Lines/SMT. All the employees I dealt with were wonderful and helpful, and I wish I had caught those two men's names so I could call up and praise the hell out of them. I had to settle for thanking the ticket agent profusely instead.

So that whole thing happened alongside my nerves over my first solo journey and crossing the border. Which by the way? Thank the gods I had my high school photo ID; I don't know if they would have let me out of the US without it. I went to get a state one on Wednesday, but it turn sout that you don't get them on the spot like last time I got one. Now they mail them in a couple weeks' time, like, that does me a fat lot of good. Fortunately, the high school ID paired with my learner's permit was good enough to get me out of the US, and then my birth certificate and adoption papers (because now my legal name is different from the one on the birth certificate) got me into Canada. We were detained for like an hour on the border because of this one guy. I found it interesting, incidentally, that the only people that were really given any trouble were also the only minorities on the bus. I don't like to read anything into that, but - dude, come on.

Anyway. I got to Carolyn's, where they had so kindly delayed dinner so I could eat with them. I was starving, as vending machine food for six hours is even less substantial than it sounds.

It turned out that yesterday was a holiday - New Brunswick Day - so practically everything was closed. We wandered around downtown for a while and had lunch at an okay Mexican place called Mexi's (I ordered a real sangria, for in Canada I am of legal drinking age! Yay!), then we walked about seventy-four miles to the local Asian market. Then we got a cab back home and it looked for a while as though Caro was getting sick. She says she feels better today, though, andf we plan to go out to the mall, near which there is a liquor store where I shall seek Barbossas and rum, and then to downtown now that stuff will actually be open.

And her shower ended quite some time ago and she is sitting patiently on the couch flipping through TV channels while I type, so I better go.